Interesting thoughts, I wonder when we got this big gap between religion and culture? Did it start with separation of the church and state or earlier?
Liberalism and Secularism broadly, but there's a whole area of study that lays out arguments for how we lack the metaphysical awareness or even the language to grapple with these concepts in everyday life. In a lot of ways it is tied to the very concept of progress that Liberalism has been pushing for centuries; we are on a linear trajectory towards a superior future, everything that came before is inferior, everything we are doing right now exists because it defeated everything from the past which means it is better. This is why the concept of progress is pretty fucking stupid and everyone secretly knows it, but nobody actually has the tools or knowledge to unwork this fucked up tangle we call a society so they just hang around and hope for the best.
Thomas Carlyle had a good book about Heroism and Hero Worship, explaining that the types of heroes we have change throughout time and we can't really bring them back. It started out with Man as God, using the example of Odin (at least the story, although he could very well have been a real man who was mythologized.) Which then goes to Man who Communicates with God, as in the Abrahamic Prophets. In this epoch they completely reject the notion of man as a God himself. And then as you go forward you have Man as King, not really in contact with God but adjacent to Him, and also representing higher civilizational ideals. And there's a few more in there but then we end up at the modern era with Man as Philosopher. We get to this area because of the commonalities among all of these Heroes throughout time: they are men on a mission, not of ambition, who seek to interface directly with the unknown. Then, they seek to communicate this knowledge to the people with language. In the case of Odin, he was the one who invented runes and the actual language. And you can see the same with the prophets and everywhere else. Even Kings were men of letters, and we still read guys like Marcus Aurelius to this day.
The case is made that philosophers are the only men of letters trying to interface with the metaphysical unknown and communicate it to the people, and it is these people across time who actually change the people in society; more than soldiers, more than inventors, more than economics and merchants, etc. In fact a lot of the scientists we do know about have that element where they cross over into the realm of the philosophical and the spiritual to make it relevant to people.
The reason I am saying this is because I think it is a good way to measure the value of what is being propagated in society. You can also use this to ascertain when a religious institution has become ossified and useless. Are you actually trying to make the universe make sense and have a complicated and perhaps violent relationship with the unknown, or are you just telling people to relax and not worry about anything and never change?
I think it was Evola who said that once a civilization is in its 4th phase and starting to decline - people can easily mistake the peak of a civilization for the beginning of its downfall - values do not become destroyed, they become inverted. A good example would be freedom. You can spend months researching the historical shift in the definition of freedom going back to Pre-Christendom, but to an American living in 1850 it is inconceivable that freedom would just be synonymous with hedonism and propping up antisocial freaks. To watch child pornography drawn by Japanese people. This is why on the surface, to the average person nothing has changed. It's about freedom like it's always been, that's what America is about! But it's that the definitions and value sets have become completely inverted so now that same man from the 1850s now has to argue against freedom, which is Unamerican, which makes him less of a citizen than the illiterate Mexican who got there 5 minutes ago who has nothing but contempt for America and its history. In the name of American freedom, you must defend this man who would celebrate your annihilation, and persecute that man who can probably trace his ancestry back 5 generations.
In short I'm not sure how to undo the civilizational inversion, and I don't know how to get your average person to understand that just because something has been defeated does not mean it has been disproven.