He has hemmed me in so that I cannot escape;

he has weighed me down with fetters.

Even when I cry out and plead for help

he rejects my prayer.

He has barred my road with blocks of stone and

entangled my way.

The Oxford Study Bible

It seems perfectly appropriate to quote Lamentations in my comment on Ross Douthat's essay of April 7, 2012 titled Divided by God. Here are some of the ideas, catch phrases that hold together this essay taken from the first paragraphs:

many of America’s established churches 

affluent and sexually permissive America

religiously fluid,

We’re neither traditionally Christian nor straightforwardly secular

a nation of heretics

old Christian establishment

the existence of a Christian center also helped bind a vast and teeming nation together

It was the hierarchy, discipline and institutional continuity

the inescapability of religious polarization

a sign of what happens to a deeply religious country when its theological center cannot hold

Mr. Douthat freely borrows and adapts from Schlesinger, Yeats and extemporizes within the moralizing rhetoric of Modern Conservatism, post Reagan. Although I have quoted piecemeal from his essay, I believe that what follows these assertions is simply a defense of this set of ideas elaborated historically and politically, given the frame of a defense of the Conservative Worldview: a rationalization, an apologia for patriarchal power. Christianity is invested in male power, male authority and the free exercise of that power over others. Conservatism shares those imperatives. Also, I will say that I treat Mr Douthat's essay as propaganda: a set of arguments made for purely political ends. In this case to establish the primacy of institutional authority and also of the waning power of institutional Christian moralists over the lives of Americans, as leading to crisis both moral and political. Mr. Douthat looks backward to a past he has rhetorically created, that sketches, in very proscribed form, a description of an American actuality, in service to a backhanded Christian apologetics. America in the age of the internet and other social media is a time of fracture of the old patriarchal systems of social control and moral censure, and the rise of an unprecedented personal freedom, that renders the old system of moral/political sanctions against nonconformist thought and behavior moot. The erosion of that ability to sanction effectively the behavior of others, has led to the notion of crisis that Mr. Douthat argues as the crisis of Christian institutional authority and a concomitant American decline. American decadence is the perennial theme of American Conservatism.

Queer Atheist