I often thought it was interesting that the interpretation of the bible from within the civilization with the highest prison population is about your personal responsibility to have a personal relationship with God or face harsh punishment.

So, what's funny is that original sin doesn't necessarily lead to personal responsibility. Indeed, when original sin is taken to its most extreme (to the point where, because of it, our own intellect is corrupt/fallen), then it actually turns back on itself (hegelian!) and makes it so that nothing that you do can be just/right on its own. This is actually what Luther and Calvin picked up on, with the unfortunate side effect of turning to an obsession with labor and work in a calling (this is from Weber) to basically prevent the psychic damage that really reckoning with original sin causes. There's a similar potential for pessimism with historical materialism, BTW (i.e. it's all deterministic ), so turning to Christianity is a good impulse to understand the idea of "personal responsibility".

So my take on this is (based on my reading, etc - i'm writing a diss on it) is that Augustine actually accepted the implications of grace and original sin fully, and he turned back to other humans. In the Confessions there's a bit where he says "weep with me if you have charity," so like, it's not so much about personal responsibility as it is about mutual suffering and sympathy. In Augustine we can find a lot of useful ways of thinking about historical materialism and human agency, since he basically suggests that agency, on its own, is weak and futile. For Augustine, it has to be joined to God's grace, but as materialists we can substitute in something like "class consciousness/worker solidarity" and recognize the same solution to the problem. After all we generally don't buy into "Great man" ideas of power and agency - these things are systemic instead.

So, all ideologies flow out of the base / mode of production, right? If so, then we would expect Christianity under capitalism to reinforce notions of personal responsibility in religion as that sort of atomization and alienation of humans is an essential component of capitalism.

To some extent what you're doing is flipping Weber's thesis - which I think is acceptable, especially now. If maybe Luther/Calvin were earnestly trying to avoid the real psychic damage of losing all agency (predestination is a hell of a drug), at this point in capitalist development the direction has been reversed, and in America you can see it w/ prosperity gospel, etc. If you really believe Christianity, how could you possibly support capitalist production? Only by interpreting these things through capitalist production/ideology which says that the capitalist has merit based on his wealth (which, I should note, Augustine entirely abjures these sorts of merits. He makes it really clear in * City of God* that these sorts of things are arbitrary and not a sign of virtue or "saved-ness"). Changing the mode of production then will either cause some heinous backlash or transformation.

However, while the material conditions need to change, we can also operate in the realm of ideology, since there are dominant, residual, and emergent strains (raymond williams). If we pick up the "real Christianity" from the ashes at the same time as we move forward to an emergent socialist consciousness, it is possible to further heighten the cognitive dissonance between Capitalism and Christianity, and perhaps cause people to if not incur psychic damage, at least break the capitalist/christanity lockstep.