OTOH, it is also a curse insofar as the absence of government restraint was not met by an adequate measure of self-control as a countervailing force. The lingering of slavery (which ended only after America's bloodiest war), child labor, air and water pollution, union busting, and Jim Crow laws are examples of greed or malice unrestrained by self-discipline. As undesirable as some of the legal remedies used to address these problems were, they were nonetheless the result of unrestrained human sinfulness.
As for what happened to the worldview of the British descended Protestant churches and believers, I do not agree that their declension was due to the fact that the churches were organized in rebellion against Rome. Protestantism was effectively crushed in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and made little headway in Italy and Spain. Yet all three nations, and Mexico as well (where Protestant influence was almost nil), underwent anticlerical revolutions. In the case of France during the French Revolution and Spain under the Communist-oriented Republicans, thousands of Catholic clergy were murdered, often in the most brutal manner. Even Cromwell would have blanched at the ruthlessness of the Jacobins and Marxists.
Anglo-American Protestants strayed far from Biblical precepts in a number of areas. Evangelicals and fundamentalists made some mistakes in their response to liberal Protestantism as well. The greatest error on the part of the mainline churches was their ongoing attempt to synthesize the worldview of the French and Scottish Enlightenments with that of historic Christianity, This was particularly true with respect to the areas of higher criticism, which denigrated the historicity of the Biblical text, and Darwinism, with regard to both macroevolution and the age of the earth. Even conservative theologians like the Calvinist B. B. Warfield and the dispensationalist C. I. Scofield attempted to find some sort of via media with the theory of evolution. (Of course, so did Popes Pius XII and John Paul II in encyclicals a half-century apart.)
Another mainline Protestant error was in the area of eschatology. Before World War II, many mainline Protestant ministers and laymen were postmillenialists, but not in the sense of the more Biblically based Puritans or Reconstructionists. This view was a deviation from the traditional amillenialism to which Catholicism and the Reformed and Lutheran branches of Protestantism historically assented, influenced by the views of Augustine of Hippo. Postmillenialism in the liberal sense assumed that the world was making steady progress out of poverty and superstition and that the church was the instrument by which the millennial kingdom would be established. Hence, political activism in areas such as pure food and drug laws, breaking up of trusts, and universal public education would, in the minds of liberal Protestant leaders like Walter Rauschenusch, G. Bromley Oxnam, and Henry Sloane Coffin, lead to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
The liberal Protestants and post-Protestant groups like the Unitarians were a major force in promoting both religious and secular liberalism. With few exceptions, like Gresham Machen, the conservative Protestant reaction was singularly ineffective and compromised. The Holiness movement and the fundamentalists strongly emphasized personal morality, becoming avid supporters of Prohibition and advocates of blue laws. When they were not calling for government action to limit personal freedom, they supported various moves to suppress free speech. Even Jehovah's Witnesses, a post-Protestant sect that held to a strict moral code but opposed war, were subject to harassment. Many conservative clergy did nothing to stop various acts of violence by lynch mobs against blacks or the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, some conservative ministers and others not so conservative actually endorsed the Klan. In the South and the Border States, Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelicals were strong supporters of the New Deal. All of their actions managed to discredit conservative Protestants among the public at large.
Government and society at large turned against evangelicals and fundamentalists in the post-World War II era through bans on prayer and Bible reading in public schools, the general shrinkage of local government authority, and an increased hostility in both elite and mass culture. With few exceptions, like Carl McIntyre and Francis Schafer, their spokesmen were detached from cultural and political matters. The half-century of political withdrawal by evangelicals following the wildly unpopular Prohibition experiment and the Scopes trial public relations fiasco deterred the development of effective argumentation against their opponents. Their predominant support for racial segregation was thrown back in their faces: prominent conservative Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and W. A. Criswell would publicly apologize in later years for their support of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s.
Both the liberal mainline churches and the conservative evangelicals confused power with righteousness and their sentiments with Biblical mandates. As America heads into a post-Christian era, it is time for serious reflections on what strategies will be effective in making use of the weaknesses of the Left and overturning the secular humanist order. This country can survive four or eight years of Hillary Clinton. It will not survive the poor stewardship of Christians when given political power.
Your entire essay is very informative, but the excerpt above is a little off the point I am trying to make. I do not see the breakdown in orthodoxy (as expressed in broken families and the rise of liberal church support for gay marriage, etc) as a direct cause-and-effect result of the rebellion against Rome. That spirit of rebellion was, as you noted, part of the age which included the Enlightenment movements; it was one element among several which, when they met in America, combined to contribute to the current dilemma. Political power became conflated with arrogant self-righteousness in the Protestant establishment, in turn contributing to the rationalizations of liberalism and the drift towards "social work" instead of obedience to law in jurisprudence and theology.