During the 1960s there came a shift in American thinking. While individualism that had always been a part of the American mindset, morals and ethics had previously been subject to a higher authority than the individual himself. Now, self became the authority and source of all values. Self realization became the ultimate purpose in life.

That a new cultural direction was in the making was becoming evident in many ways. By the 1980s, for example, a large majority had begun to think that what was worthwhile in life had nothing to do with its normal routines such as getting up each day and going to work. Nor with the tradition responsibilities of marriage and the raising of children. Rather, life is about its more exotic moments. It is not about what happens on Monday through Friday, but what happens on the weekends. Its real meaning, and its real rewards, are found when the self, unencumbered by routine and responsibility, can be found, nurtured, and satisfied. Two-thirds of Americans began to think a lot about their selves. A great majority, 80 percent, forsook the older traditional ways of looking at life, certainly the older ethical norms, and began to search for new rules by which to live. About half wanted new experiences. They also wanted new freedoms, even trivial ones, like being able to dress the way they wished, unrestrained by convention. They also were looking for more excitement and new sensations.
   Thus it was that the individualism in which you should think for yourself, decide for yourself, provide for yourself, and work to serve others in personal of civic ways had ended up as something rather different. This older individualism has turned inward. Now it is about finding the self for yourself, discovering you inner potential for you own benefit, esteeming your self, and developing now ethical rules that serve the discovery of the self.
   It is not unreasonable to think that this turn in our culture would have found resistance among the religious. And it did at the more liberal end of Protestantism, ironically enough, but evangelicals fell head long into this new way of seeing life.
   It could be heard, in the 1980s and 1990s, every time Robert Schuller’s cherubic countenance appeared on television. He was moving in a new direction, even though he also claimed to be traditionally Protestant. He announced that his new self-focused preoccupation was no less than a new Reformation. He went on to construct the whole of Christian faith around the self and its discovery.
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   And so it came into our pulpits. In sermon after sermon over the last two or three decades, preachers of an evangelical kind have latched onto this cultural way of thinking. Self-talk, it seemed, would be a natural springboard into salvation talk. Even if it never actually got to salvation, there was enormous benefit to be had along the way. So, why not venture along this path? Imagining themselves to be speaking the language of their congregations, and being quite au courant, these preachers actually ended up buying into a worldview that is deeply hostile to Christian faith. They seemed not to notice that feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as actually being good. In fact, people often feel good about themselves in moments when they should not. Some feel good about themselves in moments of great self indulgence, of revenge, and certainly in moments of inebriation. Is this not the warning that we should have heeded? Should we not have notices this?
   When evangelical churches entered this new universe of the self, they left the moral world behind. The evangelical church, which takes seriously its responsibility to steward the gospel, should have been the first to seen this because the gospel makes sense only in a morale world. Sin, after all, is not simply feeling bad about ourselves. It is violating what is right in God’s law and character. Those who inhabit this self-word look only for therapy, not for forgiveness and regeneration. Recovery, in fact, is their was of speaking about regeneration. It is all about human technique and not about miraculous intervention. All of this was apparently lost on evangelicals who stumbled after one another in their earnest pursuit to recast their faith in this new language from the culture.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 136–138.

We now live in a world in which self is the purpose and goal of all endeavors, and the arbiter of morals and ethics. The church at large has bought into this same mindset, albeit with spiritualized language. The great problem of mankind is not sin, but low self-esteem, or some other self-deficiency; so the “gospel” that is preached has no power to save anyone.