Death of the Cult = Death of the Civilization

O tempora, O mores!!

Let's start with the thesis voiced here.

...the great revelation of Christian anthropology is that man is also a cultural animal. Culture, rooted in the Latin word cultus, means life. Culture means life because cultus embodies the two great principles of life: care and praise—which are two of the first commandments given by God to humanity after creation and both wrapped up in the first of the Ten Commandments. A culture that abandons care also abandons praise. Conversely, a culture that abandons praise will abandon care. As a result, the slow march toward nihilism and nothingness, which is death, commences.....

Now look again at history.

....When one veers across that vast sea of culture, from the Mesopotamians to the present, one will notice something that strikes modern secular man in the face: all cultures rise and fall with their religious cult and reflect their religious cult. The great ziggurats, tombs, and statues of Mesopotamia were explicitly religious in their nature. The surviving statues and paintings of Egypt likewise reflect the deep religious nature of their culture. The columns, arches, and temples of Greece and Rome, their statues, coins, and epics, all dedicated to the gods. Even the “barbarians,” praising trees and stars, left Stonehenge and many runestones for posterity. The great works of Western art, music, and literature, are all Christian or Christianized in content and nature, from Botticelli, Petrarch, Michelangelo, and Dante to Rubens, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Milton. The Chinese Odes, temples, and depictions of filial harmony all quintessentially related to the filial pietism and divinized countryside of traditional Chinese culture....

"Culture" embodies two concepts:  both life and praise; both those are part of a licit cult.

The epitome of liceity in cults is Catholicism; the 'close seconds' are Christianities which are not Catholic, and Judaism, which lost its game on the death of Christ, which foretold the destruction of the Temple.

We are in the nihilist phase here and now.  What are you going to do about it?