Yes, it's all connected. I'm just thinking in terms of priorities. The US is a crass and vicious nation, and I think the vicious aspects need attention first.
>Has American Protestantism ever produced anything as beautiful as Bach, or
>any random church in Florence?
Sure, the thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson :) After all, what mattered to RWE most was the view beyond the church, not of the church. E.g., from his Divinity School Address of 1838:
"I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. ... A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history."
<http://www.emersoncentral.com/divaddr.htm>
Carl