In some measure this is true. But if we're talking about "tradition" in the church, especially pre-enlightenment, the odds are that that tradition is closer to the scriptural pattern. It was embedded in Western culture itself, and was also one of the sparks of the Reformation...a return to the scriptural tradition. And look at the explosion of good it produced. The birth of the USA it self is a product of that tradition and thinking. We are living on the tail-end of the momentum created from that "good." And we are a generation that is instrumental in tearing down the very foundations that gave us the blessings that we enjoy.

A recent survey shows that the United States, unlike Europe, continues to hold steady as a nominally Christian country, with over 80 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Christians. Given the drastic decline in public and private morals since 1960, the obvious question is: How can this be? Imagine a 1950s American mother waking up in 2005 and turning on the television or the radio, or picking up a popular magazine. She would probably suffer a fainting spell, if not cardiac arrest, from the assault of deeply immoral attitudes toward marriage, family, and sexuality.

The reason this can happen in a nominally Christian country is that the definition of "Christianity" in America has changed. The great culture clashes that divide our country presently are at their root theological: They pit those who acknowledge religious authority (either biblical or exercised by a divinely guided inspired church) against those who ground their principles on the unencumbered moral right of each person to create his own personal religion, regardless of objective morality and doctrinal belief.

Americans are purveyors of self-centered worship. You may get people to come to such a church, and you may have church growth. But you will not have church impact. The reason is that church becomes increasingly like the culture. People go in, see a skit, listen to some music, hear a soothing sermon, and think they have done their Christian duty.

Unless there is a thorough-going reformation in the Church in America -- liturgical, doctrinal, practical, and narratival -- we are sunk.

We are called to worship, meaning that we are called to see God seated on a throne, high and lifted up.

If we do not see God high and lifted up, then we shall shortly conceive of ourselves, together with all our opinions, to be high and lifted up. And whenever we do this, especially when we do it in the context of the ruins and rubble of Christian liturgy, we are inviting the living God to slap us down and bring us low. God says repeatedly that He opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

We cannot be humble unless our service of worship approaches the Lamb on the throne in order to worship Him there. The contemporary demand for a breezy and casual "worship," with worship in quotation marks, is really a demand to see our God seated on a chair, as though He were one of us. We want Him to sit as though He were tired, and not to sit on a throne because He rules and reigns over every created thing, displaying His glory to that creation in this fashion, and through this figure.

We must prepare our hearts for true worship. Prepare ourselves to abandon every false notion of worship. And make no mistake--every form of false worship, whether it is will-worship on the one hand, or a truncated over-scrupulousness on the other, is a sin at just this point--a sin against the sovereignty of God, and a democratic resistance of a divine throne.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9820