Indeed, modern day "religions" are as you describe, chameleon, jettisoning inconvenient doctrines with shifting winds of populism. It is inaccurate to impute ludditism to religion, since the core of all human societies, prior to the Westphalian state, was religion and her institutions. All progress (scientific or otherwise) for vitually all of written human history were sponsored by religion at the center of social matrix.

Protestanism denies the real presence of their Messiah in the eucharist, which all of Christianity affirms and remains at the center of its religious rituals. "Evangelicals" would not be closer to God's word, given that they ignore the basis of Christian religion: theophagy.

Since Vatican 2 reforms, Western "Christianity" is as you encountered: empty, hollow, useless. They assume that God commands good, rather than What God commands is good. Thus, they run in circles discussing philosophy, art, politics, then back-around again in the Pandemonium fortress of psudo-religious drivel. In some ways, I too prefer the ignorant fanatics of ISIS to a Western "Christian."