After the “death of god”, man lost a common frame of reference and replaced highly spiritualized modes of existence for highly economic modes of existence. Well, now we are facing the “death of the market” and finally realizing that it is a destructive fiction and that it is not reasonable to reduce everything to exchange value and calculation insofar as it leads to the actual existential crisis that is climate cataclysm.
We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in positions of authority.
Of course prior to 1980, the church had never done anything to harm those it claimed to care for. Not sure why Catholics are singled out here.
The only way to argue this is a "greed became dominant when man abandoned [our idea of] true worship" approach, which many religious people indeed argue but which is a pretty clear "no true Scotsman" type fallacy when held to the light of day.
Marx’s whole point was to argue why this proposition was false (why “everyone acting according to self interest” actually led, in spite of the good it produced in the short term, to longer term evils, like proletariatization, exploitation of workers, concentration of wealth, etc. though Marx did not forsee (and couldn’t of course) the catastrophic effects self interest would have on the climate)). The whole point is that the progression of capitalism up to this point has proven we need more than just “self regulating markets or self interested “rational” agents” since we’ve come to see the absence of other shared values leads to species level existential threats (again, climate).