The commitment not just to do good but to try to become a "good person" is probably as prevalent as it has ever been in the Western world. This longing is consistent with the West's singular spirituality, which taught that people face divine judgment merely for being who they are.

The doctrine of original sin only emphasised the universal corruption of humanity in order to stress the universal need to rely on God's forgiveness alone; because everyone was born bad, everyone needed to be redeemed. Modern history suggests that disbelief in a saviour might not have removed Western people's deeply ingrained need to be saved.

But with grace sidelined by secularism, salvation has become solely dependent on the forces of this world: the market, technology, politics and self-help movements, all of which share a language of redemption.

Of these worldly entities, none has judged and redeemed as readily as market forces. It is often observed that faith in the market has many characteristics formerly reserved for the deity: it punishes and rewards individuals, organisations and communities, and requires that citizens and governments trust in it as an ultimately beneficial power, despite the suffering and sacrifice that must be implemented in its name.

But since the failure of communism - itself popularly understood to be due to its failure to accept the reality of human nature - and the more recent Global Financial Crisis, market-faith has seemed to rest more on monopoly power than on genuine conviction.

Liberal democracy, the other central creed of modernity, has suffered a similar crisis of faith. In the first half of the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes promulgated an ideology of salvation which, aided by the destructive capacity of new technologies, led to persecution, violence, genocide and war on a scale never before imagined.

But the problem of subsequent decades was that it was not only extremist political ideologies that were widely discredited, but politics itself. Democracy's biggest danger remains what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against: a pervasive disenchantment created by unfulfilled and often unfulfillable expectations.

Even technology, which has been central to the salvation project of the modern West, has been somewhat discredited. While there remains a widespread hope that personal, environmental, social and economic challenges can be transcended through technological innovation, faith in big technology to solve and to save has been increasingly questioned.

It is noteworthy that the archetypal symbol of the new millennium is an intimate personal device that both connects the individual to the world and increasingly defines, through social media, his or her place in it. Through this technological reformation, the individual has been given direct access to technology's redemptive power without the intermediary of the discredited state.

The focus on a personalised redemption has been gathering strength since the 1950s, but it does not, as is widely assumed, represent a rejection of communal tradition. While Augustine (when he was not raging against the Pelagians) stressed the authority of the church, the doctrine of original sin was never easily reconciled with an institutional monopoly over salvation. The sentiment which exploded in the Reformation - that the individual needed no intermediary to be saved - was latent in the Bishop of Hippo's teaching that sin was personally received at conception, and that Christ saved one soul at a time. The West's self-obsession began with its creation story.

What is new is for there to be so little consensus on the path to salvation. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche welcomed the fact that "God is dead," but far from accepting human nature, he saw it as something that must be overcome, not by trying to escape the reality of Selbstsucht (innate selfishness) but by harnessing its power to create a new being. Nietzsche did not expect that most people would have it in them to undertake this heroic act of will, and was himself prevented from doing so by the onset of mental illness, but his starting point - that God is dead but humanity is still broken, and each person must find his or her own path to redemption - was reproduced by many less confronting self-help creeds.

Yet by the late twentieth century, even the reassuring promise that everyone could become "whoever they want to be," if only they abandoned self-doubt and believed in themselves, had been discounted by decades of disappointment. Norman Vincent Peale's influential thesis of the 1950s never eventuated: power did not come with positive thinking. People were instead offered a smorgasbord of hope, in which wholeness, happiness and communal affirmation could be theirs if only this product was consumed or that piece of advice accepted.

The goal of overcoming personal limitations, whether these be physical, emotional, sexual or relational, became a major driver of the economy, used to sell goods, services, people, places and ideas. But not even the iconic image of the information-technology reformation - Steve Jobs's once-bitten apple, which is reproduced on each personal appliance his corporate creation spawns (Adam's bite has never been so well publicised) - seemed to satisfy.

If seeking salvation has been such a wide-ranging project, why has a solution never been found? Original sin suggests an answer to this question. The doctrine teaches that human beings are born, not just bad, but also guilty. The market theorist, advertising baron, technology guru, self-help counsellor and charismatic leader all speak to the desire to fix human brokenness, but they cannot forgive people for being who they are. Even when the legitimacy of these feelings is angrily rejected (and Christianity is named as their source), people often denounce what they personally experience: a deep-seated sense of guilt that is seemingly unrelated to actions or deeds.

The discontent that is spawned by original sin remains both a creative and a destructive influence in Western culture, as it has always been. The determination to remake people and places, which, for good and ill, has transformed life everywhere on earth, is unlikely to have been as vibrant or damaging if Western Christianity had emphasised the innate goodness within every person. Of course, there have been many factors contributing to both the neurosis and the vigour of the West, but the searing energy of its people becomes more explicable when we remember their extraordinary creation story.

Facing up to the legacy of original sin provides neither a diagnosis nor a cure for personal and social challenges. It does, however, help illuminate one aspect of the pain: the aching and never satisfied self, and one danger of which to beware in any solution: the promise to provide a "fix" for being human.

Perhaps the first step towards healing our relationship with ourselves, each other and the natural world is just to accept that, after fifteen hundred years, the idea that "there is something wrong with me" might be so internalised that it has become part of who we are. A newborn baby is no longer "born bad," but one component of her most intimate cultural inheritance remains the scar that suggests otherwise.

This is an edited extract from Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World by James Boyce, published by Black Inc. Books.