a peculiar moral urgency

While reading an article recently I came across a remark by Lionel Trilling, noting "the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals" and I thought: bingo! Only not so much intellectuals or simply intellectuals as much as American Christians informed by the ambient
religious culture.. It may be hard for some Americans to understand, but that moral urgency and sense of crisis and absolute priority for personal salvation are not the only ways in which Christians can and have lived out their faith. These particular American themes are the roots of the religious and spiritual intrusiveness, of evangelical boosterism, of denominationalism as team sport, of the perverse commodification of faith and its transmogrification through advertising and marketing and the application of sales techniques into the tchotchke of this religious market-place.