“A distinctive feature of the Reformation, particularly associated with the leading reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, is the "de-sacralization" of nature. The distinction between the sacred and the secular is widely thought to have contributed to the rise of the natural sciences, which is particularly (but by no means exclusively) associated with Protestantism. The declaration that the natural world was not in any way sacred opened the way to its scientific investigation. There could be no religious obstacles to the analysis of the world. The world increasingly became seen as a machine or instrument—of divine origins, of course, but increasingly distant from God. The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence. God's presence was no longer channeled directly into the world through natural means; God had to be known indirectly.”
“As Eamon Duffy points out in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), [...] in popular Catholicism sacred and secular times, events, and places were so closely associated that they were of- ten indistinguishable. The rhythms of the year were primarily determined by the feast days of the church and the necessities of agriculture. The individual had a strong sense of place within a cosmos that radiated the glory of God and displayed a divine structure. The sacred was present within the world's events, rhythms, and patterns. One expected to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life.”
“Protestantism was the means by which a so- ciety that originally possessed a strong sense of the sacred became "de-sacralized" or "disenchanted," eventually leading to a culture which, to all intents and purposes, had no sense of God's presence in its midst. The inevitable result of this was secularization—the final elimination of God from the world. As Francis Fukuyama points out in his End of History and the Last Man (1992), "the generally accepted agent for this secularization in the West was Protestantism."
“The absence of any expectation of encountering the divine directly through nature or in personal experi- ence inevitably encourages belief in a godless world—a world that lives etsi Deus non claretur, "as if God did not exist." The charge against Protestantism is that it has brought about precisely such an erosion of any sense of direct encounter with the divine. Protestantism can respond, with excellent grounds for doing so, that the expectation of an encounter with the divine can lead to paganism, idolatry, or the vague- ness of a nature religion. Far better to limit such knowledge of God to what can be known reliably about God through reading or studying the Bible.”
Is this why Evangelicals Christians seem so soulless?