By RAY WADDLE

Last week President Obama quoted the Bible and provided the sharpest barb of his inauguration – it is time, he said, to put away childish things.

He didn’t spell out the childish things, but everybody could guess. He meant former President Bush’s attempt to wage two foreign wars without paying for them. He meant Americans who thought they could incur debt forever without consequences. He meant all of us.

To the list also add religious groups, who now flirt with irrelevant sideline status while political leaders try to solve a national crisis of credit, confidence and identity.

Plenty of people boil down the financial mess to a failure of personal responsibility, a lack of transparency, a dearth of discipline, combined with lust for easy profit. That sounds like spiritual language to me, and a spiritual problem.

Yet there is little sign that religious congregations, with few exceptions, have done anything to challenge a culture that worships high-fivin’ free-market ideology and ostentatious consumerism, secular orientations that contradict every religious insight into flawed humanity.

The house of worship down the street is supposed to be a moral counterculture that calls on its own wisdom traditions to push back against delusional egoism. The house of worship down the street is supposed to tell a story that differs from supercharged individualistic mythology. The religious narrative says: other people deserve respect, doing good matters, divine forces are bigger than us, and we’re all in this together.

Yet for decades churches by the thousands abandoned their traditional warnings against the human talent for misjudgment and self-destruction. Afraid of appearing un-American, they made no protest against naïve policies that assumed financial markets will police themselves without adult supervision, and technology will save us, and vast accumulations of personal wealth are an incorruptible blessing.

As a result, religious voices are now virtually absent from ethical debates about bailouts, deficits, responsible tax policy and war.

Instead, mortgage shysters and investment mismanagers shape the culture. Yet they are also shaped by the culture. When spirit-minded voices have nothing to say about off-the-books corruption, they concede the floor to the big-time operators who assume they call the shots in a soulless universe where only the bullies and cheats win.

No wonder a new Gallup Poll says religion’s social influence is waning. Two-thirds of Americans say religion is losing influence on life. Three years ago, it was about 50-50.

But such numbers are volatile. Religion’s social witness has proved resilient before. Religious faith provides a story of purpose and healing that runs against the dominant paradigm of conquest and hysteria. Without that story, what’s left is the paltry ego with its endless commentary about its own triumphs and victimhood, and many debts to pay.