If it isn't Christianity or anything else, they're forced to confront a lot where they've basically had a free ride chastizing and villainizing disenfranchized young white men. This fucks with the programming, so they shift towards being a ghoul about it.

Christianity ends up being the perfect scapegoat since no one wants to admit that this problem has become memetic. We magnified it to such an extreme that it has become hard-coded into the DNA of our culture almost the way in which myth and story influences the development of the larger organism, except it is emergent, errant, self-terminating logic. Of course we aren't mindful of this, and like a rat that chews through or touches the wrong wire in the walls - living moment-to-moment, we are undone by forces we cannot reasonably comprehend. The problems will accumulate until it western society becomes terminal and goes through another schism that cleans the slate, but that is the optimistic ending.