These were always just my ideas, and I'm not an authority as such, nor even very clever.

But, gven my studies in Sociology and Psychology and a lifelong interest in matters mythical, religious, arcane, historical and just plain odd, I'm drawn to the opinion that the relationship between morals and religion is a two-way one whereby the society shapes the religion and the religion codifies the morality which already exists - albeit as an unexpressed understanding -within the culture.

In other words, whatever Christianity originally was, it has been reshaped by our society to support the behaviours society requires.

The dissolution of a religiously-supported common morality and culture is a result, not of Enlightenment thinking, or of science, but of the more recent emergence of mass media, which allows various interest groups to manipulate and control the behaviour of people from within their own homes, thus rendering the pulpit obsolete for their purposes.