Consider this paragraph in an MSNBC.com report about efforts by Southern Baptist researchers to shed light on the pros and cons of changing the name of America’s largest non-Catholic flock. Southern Baptist Convention leaders have been discussing this prickly issue off and on for a generation.

This new LifeWay Research survey was conducted, noted MSNBC, after SBC leaders created a task force to “consider the impact of the convention’s name on the denomination, which has been associated with such polarizing political figures as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, convicted Watergate conspirator-turned-Baptist minister Charles Colson and television evangelist Pat Robertson. Just this month, a Southern Baptist church in Kentucky voted to ban interracial couples, a controversial decision the pastor later overturned.”

Alas, this ban on interracial couples had been approved by a Baptist church that happens to be located in the South — not an actual Southern Baptist church. There is a difference. The tiny Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church quickly overturned its decision. MSNBC editors corrected their error, as well.

Nevertheless, this journalistic train wreck perfectly symbolized the cultural baggage that has become attached to that awkward and now inaccurate “Southern” label.

Truth is, it’s getting harder and harder to pin simple labels on Southern Baptists and other religious believers. This reality is especially important in an age in which Americans are increasingly hostile to labels.

“The trend you just can’t miss is the continuing rise of the non-categorized, the non-labeled forms of Protestantism,” said Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research. “You used to be able to look at religion in America and you could put most people into their appointed categories. Now we are seeing more people who just don’t want to be put into a category or they don’t want to stay put.”

It will be impossible, he said, for Southern Baptist leaders to downplay some of the negative numbers in this survey — numbers that are sure to make headlines. For example, while 53 percent of Americans reported having a favorable impression of Southern Baptists, 40 percent of those polled said their impressions were negative. The SBC’s image was especially bad in the West (44 percent) and in the Southern Bible Belt (40 percent).

One eyebrow-raising number in the survey is that, in terms of favorable impressions, Roman Catholics (59 percent) fared better in the South than Southern Baptists (52 percent). Southern Baptists, ironically, fared better in regions in which they have had a lower profile, such as the Northeast and Midwest.

The news was also sobering on a question focusing on the convention’s name and its evangelistic efforts. LifeWay researchers asked: “When I see (fill in denominational affiliation) in the name of a church, I assume it is not for me.” Nationwide, 35 percent of those polled “strongly agreed” that a Southern Baptist congregation would not be a good fit for them — higher than for Catholics (33 percent), generic “Baptists” (29 percent), Methodists (26 percent) and “community” or nondenominational churches (20 percent).

In other words, the mere presence of the word “Southern” cost SBC congregations six percentage points in head-to-head comparisons with other Baptists. In another question linked to decisions to visit or join a church, only 10 percent of those polled said that knowing a “church was Southern Baptist” would have a positive impact.

Meanwhile, the SBC fared worst among Americans who rarely attend church, Hispanics, many urbanites and young Americans. In all, only 17 percent of Protestant adults agreed that knowing a congregation was Southern Baptist would have a positive impact when it came time to decide whether to visit or join. The number among non-Protestant adults was a mere 2 percent.

The clear evidence that nondenominational churches — churches without labels — fared significantly better than Southern Baptist churches was especially significant, said Stetzer.

“People increasingly see religion in terms of silos and categories,” he said. “It seems that they look at churches and then quickly decide, ‘That one’s for me’ or they decide, ‘That one’s not for me.’ … The irony is that they will find many of the same beliefs in nondenominational evangelical churches that they find in our Southern Baptist churches — but people don’t know that.

“It seems that people will give a church a fair shot, but only if the label doesn’t scare them.”

After all, she knew very little about Facebook, YouTube, online homework, smartphones or texting, let alone “sexting.”

She did, however, know how to write letters. So that is what she did, writing personal letters to each student to let them know that she was praying for them, wishing them the best as they searched for a college church and looking forward to seeing them at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

According to church members, the “students sought her out and rushed to give her hugs and to say, ‘Thank you,’ whenever they came home,” said Kara E. Powell, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and directs the Fuller Youth Institute.

However, another church member later stressed that the researcher had not heard the whole story. “Instead of writing one letter and that was that, she had actually written a letter to each of the students every week,” said Powell.

This was one of the most striking stories that the seminary professor heard while doing follow-up work for the Youth Institute’s six-year College Transition Project, which followed 500 Christian young people as they jumped from high school to college.

The goal was to find strategies for parents and religious leaders who wanted to help teens develop a personal faith that would “stick” when tested. The research was released earlier this year in a book entitled “Sticky Faith: Everyday ideas to build lasting faith in your kids,” written by Powell and another Fuller colleague, Chap Clark.

The letter-writing grandmother, said Powell, was an example of one major lesson discovered during this process. After years of “segregating” teens off into their own niche, age-specific worship services and programs, there is evidence that young believers also profit from intergenerational contacts, conversations and mentoring projects with senior adults. Young people are also more likely to retain their faith if they helped teach the faith to the very young.

Right up front, the researchers admitted that the young people in this study had higher than average grade-point averages, were more likely to have been raised in unbroken homes and had grown up in churches large enough to employ youth ministers. That was the point.

Nevertheless, some of the results were sobering.

* When studies are combined, it appears that 40 to 50 percent of “churched” young people will abandon their faith — at least during the college years.

* Only one in seven young people in the Fuller study felt they were ready for the personal, moral challenges of college.

* Events in the first two weeks establish patterns for many college careers, especially those linked to alcohol, sex and involvement in religious activities.

The finding that will inspire, or trouble, many parents, according to Powell and Clark, is that the faith practiced by most young people is rooted in the beliefs, values and choices that they see practiced in their own homes. If young people see their parents praying, it’s more likely that they will pray. If they hear their parents weaving faith into the joys and trials of daily life, it’s more likely that this behavior will “stick.”

It’s one thing to talk to children, said Powell. It’s something else to find ways to truly communicate — two-way communication — with the young about faith, doubt, temptation and forgiveness. Breakthroughs can take place while discussing everything from homework to movies, from a parent’s confessions about mistakes in the past to a child’s hints about his or her hopes for the future.

“We are not saying that it will help if you lecture to your children about faith,” she said. Instead, the goal is for “every parent to be a student of what their children love and, whether its sports or movies or who knows what, to be able to engage their children on that topic. You have to ask, ‘What is my child passionate about?’ You also have to be honest and let your children know what you’re passionate about.

“Then you have to ask how you can bring faith into those conversations so that you can share your faith journeys. There is no way to force this. If it isn’t happening naturally, the kids are going to know it.”

Then again, if Mormons gather for a seminar on what Southern Baptists believe, the odds are good that one of the teachers will be a former Southern Baptist.

“There’s an important word that people forget when they start talking about Southern Baptists and Mormons and that word is ‘competition,’ ” said the Rev. Richard Land, one of the most outspoken leaders of America’s largest non-Catholic flock. He leads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

“We are talking about the two most evangelistic churches in North America and most of the world,” he said. “There are lots of Mormons who used to be Baptists and lots of Baptists who used to be Mormons. … It’s natural to see some tensions now and then.”

Meanwhile, some Mormons and Baptists keep colliding in the public square every four years or so — just about the time White House wannabes butt heads in Republican debates.

The latest storm centered on remarks by the Rev. Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. A supporter of Rick Perry of Texas, Jeffress told the recent Values Voters Summit crowd that Mormon Mitt Romney is “not a real Christian” and later insisted on calling the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a “theological cult.”

Obviously, that language offends Mormons, said Land. Truth is, no one in today’s Southern Baptist leadership believes that modern Mormons should be described with the word “cult” as most Americans would understand this hot-button term, defined according to “psychological or sociological” factors.

“Clearly the Mormons are anything but that,” he said. “They’re the president of your Rotary Club and the leaders of your local bank. No one thinks they’re one of the dangerous, separatistic cults that you read about in headlines — people like Jim Jones or the Branch Davidians.”

However, most Baptists and members of many other Christian churches have grown up hearing Mormonism described in “theological or doctrinal” terms. A Southern Baptist website on new religious movements states: “A cult … is a group of people polarized around someone’s interpretation of the Bible and is characterized by major deviations from orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, particularly the fact that God became man in Jesus Christ.”

In recent years, Land has numbered himself among those who describe Mormonism as a kind of fourth Abrahamic tradition, a new faith that has reinterpreted the past under the guidance of its own prophet and its own scriptures. In this case, he said, “Joseph Smith is like Mohammad and The Book of Mormon is like the Koran.” Mormons believe they have restored true Christianity, while Trinitarian churches reject this claim that they have lost the faith.

Thus, it’s not surprising that a new LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 liberal and conservative Protestant clergy in America found that 75 percent disagreed with this statement: “I personally consider Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) to be Christians.” The surprise was that 48 percent of mainline Protestant pastors strongly agreed that Mormons are not Christians.

Meanwhile, the Vatican in 2001 posted its stance on this issue: “Whether the baptism conferred by the community The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called Mormons in the vernacular, is valid.”

The response from the late Pope John Paul II was blunt: “Negative.” His verdict validated that of scholar Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Of course, the reason these issues are being debated in the first place is that Romney — a prominent Mormon leader — is a Republican frontrunner in an era in which conservative Catholic and Protestant voters play a prominent role in Iowa, South Carolina and numerous other primary contests. Mormons voters and donors are crucial, as well.

Land, who urged Romney to seek the presidency in 2008, is convinced most conservative believers will have no trouble backing the former Massachusetts governor, when push comes to shove.

“Most people know that they’re voting for a president, not a Bible-study leader,” he said. “Actually, the problem Romney is having in the primaries is not that he’s a Mormon, but that many GOP voters are not sure that he’s Mormon enough.”

For golfers this is the smell of “eternal hope” that they can start over, according to the stressed-out young pro whose story drives the novel “Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days in Utopia,” by sports psychologist David Cook.

“Each time a golfer steps to the first tee surrounded by this tantalizing fragrance he stands at even par,” muses Luke Chisholm. “We all own par on the first tee. Hope is eternal. It’s on the 18th green that one has to face the music.”

Death, of course, is the ultimate 18th green.

Which is why Chisholm ends up — now in a mainstream movie — kneeling at an empty grave in Utopia, Texas, trying to decide what epitaph he wants on his blank tombstone. Viewers who know anything about cinematic tales of redemption will not be surprised to learn that Robert Duvall plays the wise Southern sage who, with seven days of wisdom, helps save this young man’s soul and his golf game.

It’s the kind of scene that would have occurred in “The Legend of Bagger Vance” — if the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had made that golfing parable.

The bottom line is that the independently produced “Seven Days in Utopia” represents another stage in the development of a faith-friendly branch of the movie industry. The film even features the talents of two Academy Award winners, with Duvall and actress Melissa Leo.

In the pivotal graveside scene, Chisholm tries to say thank you to the elderly Johnny Crawford, a golf pro who escaped into ranching. Duvall’s character simply points skyward.

“Don’t thank me,” says Duvall’s character, on a Sunday morning that just happens to be Easter. “Thank him, because God is in all of us. Inside each of us, if you listen, there’s a still, small voice of truth leading us, talking to us, and telling you that you can see God’s face, feel his presence, trust his love.”

The novel’s version of this scene is even more blunt, complete with a multi-page sermon on the fateful biblical encounter between Jesus, a proud fisherman named Peter and a large school of fish that had evaded the future apostle’s nets all day. Chisholm ends up confessing his sins, including that golf had been his god, and being born again.

It’s hard to be that blunt in mainstream theaters. The movie also added some new action scenes, a father-son feud and a hint of a love interest for Chisholm — a lovely horse whisperer whose story may drive the sequel.

“We wanted a big net in the movie,” said Cook. “We wanted this to be safe for everybody to go see without being hit on the head with something really explicit.”

It’s safe, but The Hollywood Reporter noted that the movie still managed to steer its audience toward an altar call — in cyberspace. The team behind “Seven Days in Utopia” must, noted the lukewarm review, be “given full credit for coming up with something new in movies: To learn what happens at the end, you’ve got to go online. After carefully building up to a climactic scene in which the underdog hero must sink a long putt to win a sudden-death playoff, the camera looks away, narration intones to the effect that the protagonist now has a higher calling so it doesn’t matter much in the big picture whether he won or not and, if you actually want to know who came out on top, you must go to www.didhemaketheputt.com.”

That twist may sound corny to film critics, but it’s not, insisted Cook, who now lives in Utopia, a real town in the Texas Hill County.

During his professional career, including his time as president of the National Sports Psychology Academy, Cook said it was rare to meet an athlete who wouldn’t own up to spiritual struggles in life. Most struggle with fear.

“What I have found is that whatever helps you conquer fear only makes you stronger,” he said. “If sports is your god, it’s easy to be afraid when everything is on the line. But if you have faith, you can say, ‘The sun’s coming up tomorrow and God loves me. Why should I fear whether this little white ball goes in the hole or not? Why be afraid?’ “

“You ask a guy where he’s from and what he does and then he asks you the same thing. Many people just want to talk,” explained Father John David Finley, a missionary priest in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

The man in the next seat recently asked the priest a question he has heard many times: “What is Orthodox Christianity, anyway?”

Ironically, Finley was — at that moment — writing some comments about a contest in which participants prepared a 30-second “elevator speech” response to strangers who asked that very question. The contest was organized by the archdiocesan Department of Missions and Evangelism, Finley’s home base.

This particular man was a convert to Buddhism, although he was raised in a home that was Christian, to one degree or another. He was interested in how different churches interpret scripture and how Eastern Christians pray.

“He wanted to talk about icons,” said Finley. “He thought they were beautiful, but he also knew there was more to icons than wood and paint. He said, ‘They’re not just pictures, right? There’s more to icons than art, right?’ … What you hear in questions like that is a search for beauty and mystery and spiritual power.”

The term “elevator speech” comes from the business world and describes a punchy presentation of what a company does and “what it’s all about,” said Howard Lange, administrator of the missions and evangelism office. The idea of a national contest emerged from discussions in his parish, St. Athanasius Orthodox Church, near Santa Barbara, Calif.

“The idea is to convey the essence of your organization to someone in two or three sentences, in the short time that you’re on an elevator or maybe in a grocery store checkout line,” he said.

This is a hard task for all religious leaders in the increasingly diverse arena of 21st century American life. However, this challenge is especially hard for Eastern Orthodox leaders in a land shaped by Protestant history and culture, as well as the rising influence of Catholics from around the world.

Americans know, or think they know, what people believe in Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist or Episcopal pews. But for many, the first word that comes to mind when they hear “Orthodoxy” is “baklava.”

When Protestants talk about church, they usually jump into discussions of their preacher’s pulpit skills, their children’s programs, the excellence of their classical, gospel or rock musicians and other selling points. The Orthodox (I know this from experience, as a convert) need to back up a millennium or two and cover basics. Then there are the complicated — literally byzantine — histories of the churches in Palestine, Greece, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and, yes, even in lands such as North America.

The goal of the “elevator speech” contest, said Lange, was to focus on broad strokes, using language outsiders could understand — while not oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy. The winning entry, selected through an online ballot, stated:

“Orthodox Christianity is the authentic and original Christian Faith founded by Jesus Christ,” wrote Valerie Ann Zrake of New York City. “As an Orthodox Christian you can experience heaven on earth through the Divine Liturgy which is mystical, spiritual and beautiful, with it’s incense, icons, and sacred music. You can transcend time and space while you meditate upon the words and teachings of Jesus Christ. It’s the most pure form of Christianity — nothing artificial added. It’s the real deal.”

Even in this simple statement, it was hard to avoid nuanced language. “Divine Liturgy,” for example, is the Eastern rite name for what, in the West, would be called the Mass. That reference would stump many seekers.

The bottom line, said Lange, is that there is no one ideal “elevator speech” to introduce faiths that are as ancient and complex as Orthodoxy. What works with a next-door neighbor who is already a churchgoer would not work with a skeptical graduate student who walks in the door ready to argue.

“You have to be able to relate to the person who is standing in front of you,” he said. “If this contest got Orthodox people to start thinking about that, then it did some good. It’s a start.”

“It’s no secret that the Harry Potter storyline about both good and evil wizards has fueled global teenage increase in Wicca and the occult,” according to an urgent Christian Newswire press release. “Stephanie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga about good and evil vampires has done the same thing for vampirism. Blood drinking among teens has surged. What’s next?”

Whatever comes next cannot hope to match the firestorm sparked by the 1997 release of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which led to global sales of nearly half a billion volumes for the seven-book series.

Nevertheless, that very first title — containing a medieval Christian alchemy image for eternal life — was a sign of debates to come. Publishers changed the title image to “Sorcerer’s Stone” in America, assuming Americans would shun “philosopher” talk. Before you could say “Deuteronomy 18 (There shall not be found among you anyone who … who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells)” — the Potter wars began.

It mattered little that Rowling soon outed herself as a communicant in the Scottish Episcopal Church and told a Canadian newspaper: “Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said, ‘yes,’ because I do. … If I talk too freely about that, I think the intelligent reader — whether 10 or 60 — will be able to guess what is coming in the books.”

Thus, the series unfolded, with each book containing waves of medieval Christian symbols, including many used by artists to point to Jesus — such as white stags, unicorns, hippogriffs, a phoenix and a red lion.

Meanwhile, the plots were built on alchemical themes of dissolution, purification, illumination and perfection, themes shared with Milton, Blake, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others. In each book, Harry Potter the “everyman” tries to sacrifice himself for others, before somehow being raised to new life in the presence of a Christ symbol.

Nevertheless, many critics failed to see how Rowling’s work stands in contrast to the spirits of materialism and individualism that dominate modern life, according to classics scholar John Granger, an Orthodox Christian best known as the scribe behind HogwartsProfessor.com and numerous related books. I met him at Nimbus 2003, an early global conference on Potter studies, and we have compared notes ever since.

“In a secular culture like ours, fiction of this kind serves an almost sacramental function for millions of people,” said Granger. “This offers a hint of the transcendent, a taste of spiritual transformation — but it’s not the real thing. … Reading Harry Potter could, however, help some people become more open to transformative experiences and perhaps even to yearn for them.”

In the end, the faith-based side of Potter mania produced at least five camps that rendered clashing judgments on these books, including:

* Rowling intentionally wrote occult books, creating a doorway into witchcraft for young readers.

* The books are merely tempting trifles celebrating adolescent behavior and mushy morals. They were not intentionally evil, but simply bad books.

* These fables are a mixed bag, mixing good messages with the bad. But if Rowling used Christian symbolism it was as mere window dressing.

* Rowling intentionally wrote “Christian books” containing literal, almost mechanical allegories that can serve as evangelistic tools, in and of themselves.

* The books, according to Granger and many other academics, are part of a British tradition of storytelling built on Christian symbols and themes (including clear biblical references) and can be enjoyed on several levels, including as stories of transformation and redemption. Thus, the Church of England produced “Mixing it up with Harry Potter” study guides.

After years of debating Potter critics, Granger said he still finds it stunning that so many people can study Rowling’s work without seeing her extensive use of Christian themes and symbols. At the same time, her approach is “very English” and there is “no way anyone could call these books evangelical,” he added.

“Clearly these books contain Christian content, but there is no altar call at the end of each one,” said Granger. “If there was an altar call at the end, there never would have been a Potter mania. People would have seen through that.”

The bishops gathered at the ancient Council of Nicea didn’t face that kind of communications challenge and, thus, produced an old-fashioned creed that in English is at least 1,161 characters long.

No wonder so many of the gray-haired administrators in black suits in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops struggle with life online. It’s hard to take seriously the frivolous-sounding words — “blog” and “tweet” leap to mind — that define reality among the natives on what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “Digital Continent.”

“In the past, the church would often build new parish structures, knowing that people would recognize the church architecture and start showing up. On the Digital Continent, ‘If you build it, they will come’ does not hold true,” said Bishop Ronald Herzog of Alexandria, La., in a report from the body’s communications committee.

“We digital immigrants need lessons on the digital culture, just as we expect missionaries to learn the cultures of the people they are evangelizing. We have to be enculturated. It’s more than just learning how to create a Facebook account.”

This is important news in an era in which recent research from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the Catholic Church was retaining 68 percent of its members who, as children, were raised in the fold. While the church is making converts, those who have left Catholicism in recent years outnumber those who have joined by nearly a 4-to-1 ratio.

Almost half of those who left Catholicism and did not join another church exited before the age of 18, as did one-third of those who chose to join another church. Another 30 percent of young Catholics left the church by the age of 24. At that point, the departure rate slowed down.

Truth is, it is almost impossible to talk about the lives of teens and young adults without discussion the growing power of their social-media networks. For young people worldwide, social media and their mobile devices have become the “first point of reference” in daily life, warned Herzog.

“The implications of that for a church which is struggling to get those same young people to enter our churches on Sunday are staggering. If the church is not on their mobile device, it doesn’t exist.”

As recently as a similar report in 2007, it was clear the bishops were hesitant to discuss the digital world because they feared its power when used by the church’s critics, said Rocco Palmo, who produces the influential “Whispers in the Loggia” weblog about Catholic news and trends.

The Herzog report was a step forward, primarily because the bishops seem to realize this is a subject that they cannot ignore. That’s significant in an era in which many Vatican officials still cling to their fax machines and struggle to keep up with their email. During the recent Baltimore meetings, said Palmo, there were more iPads in the hands of younger bishops “than you would find at your local Apple store.”

“In the old days, that stone church on the corner was a sign of the presence of God in your community. Well, that’s what a church website is today,” he said. If bishops and priests cannot grasp “that one-dimensional reality in our culture, how are they supposed to grasp the two-dimensional, interactive world of social media?”

The theoretical stakes are high, noted Herzog, but it has also become impossible to ignore the raw numbers. For example, if the 500 million active Facebook users became their own nation, it would be the world’s third largest — behind China and India.

The bottom line: Catholicism may be “facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation,” said the bishop.

“Anyone can create a blog. Everyone’s opinion is valid. And if a question or contradiction is posted, the digital natives expect a response and something resembling a conversation,” said Herzog. “We can choose not to enter into that cultural mindset, but we do so at great peril to the Church’s credibility and approachability in the minds of the natives. …

“This is a new form of pastoral ministry. It may not be the platform we were seeking, but it is an opportunity of such magnitude that we should consider carefully the consequences of disregarding it.”

The sobering final phrases of the Hail Mary prayer have recently taken on a unique relevancy: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

A month ago, the conservative Catholic writer challenged readers of the American Papist website to join him in praying one Hail Mary a day on behalf of the iconoclastic atheist Christopher Hitchens, who has been stricken with esophageal cancer, a disease which leaves few survivors.

“I am going to begin praying … for the salvation of his eternal soul,” wrote Peters, “that God will be with him ‘at the hour of his death,’ that God will help his unbelief in this life, and that those he has led away from God will come back to His infinite love and mercy. I am in no way praying for him to die, I am praying for him to live eternally.”

Peters is not alone and Hitchens knows it. While some believers hope that he suffers and dies, post haste, the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” told CNN that he has been surprised that others — who are “much more numerous, I must say, and nicer” — are praying for his healing, both body and soul.

This has been one of the strangest side effects of Hitchens’ journey across the “stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.” This is a zone in which almost everyone is politely encouraging, the jokes are feeble, sex talk is nonexistent and the “cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited,” wrote Hitchens, in a blunt Vanity Fair essay. The native tongue in “Tumorville” is built around terms such as “metastasized,” phases such as “tissue is the issue” and quotes from the writings of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

Most of the inhabitants also do quite a bit of praying — for themselves, for their loved ones and even for suffering people they have never met.

Hitchens told evangelical broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that he remains convinced these prayers “don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way.”

The bottom line, explained Peters, is that his faith asks him to “pray for everyone, even those who hate us. … Hitch just happens to be a famous public enemy of the faith, so more people know what is happening in this life, so more people are talking about why it’s good to pray for him.”

While it is “absolutely horrible” that anyone would pray for Hitchens to suffer and die, he added, many believers may find it hard to do more than pray for “God’s will to be done.” That is the “safe prayer” that is always appropriate.

Meanwhile, a quick Internet scan reveals that some believers are, predictably enough, praying for Hitchens to be converted to Christianity for the sake of his own soul. Others are specifically praying that the scribe who — with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins — is called one of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism will not only convert, but also become an apologist for faith. That happened decades ago with an atheist named C.S. Lewis, after all.

“Ultimately, I simply will pray that Hitch has a good and holy death,” said Peters. “I really do not care if he has a public conversion. I care that he, somehow, has a private conversion and that he will be reconciled to God.”

As much as believers love these kinds of “foxhole conversion” stories, Hitchens is convinced he will not surrender. However, should rumors spread that he has “hedged his bets,” the writer has made several public statements warning his admirers that if such cry to the Almighty were to take place, they should ignore it.

“If that comes it will be when I’m very ill, when I am half demented, either by drugs or by pain and I won’t have control over what I say,” he told CNN. “I can’t say that the entity that by then would be me wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing. But I can tell you that — not while I am lucid. No, I could be quite sure of that.”

The same thing is happening during coffee hours in religious congregations of every shape and size, which is a testimony to the complexity of the religious themes and symbols embedded deep in the show’s mythology. Tough theological questions have circled the island of the castaways ever since the fateful crash of Oceanic Flight 815.

Do absolute moral truths exist? Do good intentions ever justify evil acts? Does real love always lead to self-sacrifice? Can faith and reason coexist or even mesh? Can people change or are they doomed to commit the same sins over and over? What does it mean to be saved? To be delivered?

Some questions are more plot specific. Biblically speaking, what would happen if a patriarch named Jacob was killed by a brother who may or may not be named Esau? Why do some of the island’s inhabitants occasionally speak Latin? What is the significance of the fact that most of the characters had horrible fathers? Where do the female survivors get all those tight-fitting tank tops?

” ‘Lost’ is a religious parable with obvious biblical references trying desperately not to be a religious parable,” according to Catholic writer Roberto Rivera y Carlo, who is best known for his work with the evangelical apologist Charles Colson.

“The religion that has been most straightforwardly stated on the show has been straight-no-chaser Christianity. People pray like evangelical Christians or faithful Catholics. There’s no kumbaya-style religion. … Ultimately, ‘Lost’ is an exploration of free will versus determinism or human freedom versus predestination. Take your pick.”

Let’s see, the plots involve hope, doubt, reason, freedom, sin, virtue, salvation, damnation and seekers striving to find empirical evidence to back their often agonizing leaps of faith. No wonder there is a central character named John Locke, along with others named Milton, Hume, Rousseau and C.S. Lewis (a Charlotte Staples Lewis, this time around).

The men who have been running the program for most of its life — Damon Lindelof, who is Jewish, and Carlton Cuse, a Catholic — have called themselves “men of faith,” while confessing that “Lost” has become a “mash-up” of their favorite Bible stories, college philosophy textbooks, fantasy novels and movies. Thus, it will be impossible to understand Sunday’s finale without wrestling with its final, indeed ultimate, spiritual questions.

“If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption,” said Lindelof, in a New York Times interview that has caused waves of online fan discussions.

“It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community.”

In the end, it’s almost impossible to say that “Lost” has one overarching theme, said the Rev. Chris Seay of Ecclesia Church in Houston, author of “The Gospel According to ‘Lost.’ “ However, if forced to choose, he said it’s clear that the central characters have been forced to realize that they cannot survive as selfish, isolated individuals — they must “live together” or they are doomed to “die alone.”

However, this also means they have had to confront the reality of their own flaws, he said. Over time, he said, the survivors learned that if they were going to be saved they would have to “fear the evils they find inside themselves more than they fear what is out there in that jungle.” That’s the kind of message that works in a pulpit, as well as on a large-screen television.

While “Lost” does contain its share of references to Eastern religions and direct references to Christian classics, Seay said recent episodes have reminded him of a defining event in the Hebrew Bible — the Exodus of the people of Israel out of captivity in Egypt.

“In a way, these years on the island have been their time of wandering in the wilderness,” he said. “They’ve had to learn how to live in forgiveness with one another, to face their own sins and find some kind of healing and some hope for the future. … You have to ask, what would a promised land look like for this set of characters?”

“I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall,” noted Peter Hitchens, in a recent essay published in The Daily Mail. “To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. … Our rivalry was to last 50 years, and religion was one of its later causes.”

Under ordinary circumstances, a column in a London newspaper about a fractured relationship between two brothers would not warrant much attention among readers who care about matters of faith and doubt.

The Hitchens brothers, however, are not your usual brothers.

As an adult, Peter Hitchens regained his Christian faith, after years as an atheist and his new book is entitled, “The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith.” The title of this column was more conciliatory: “How I found God and peace with my atheist brother.”

Big brother Christopher, meanwhile, has become famous as an evangelist for atheism, a scribe who revels in stabbing sacred cows with his pen — as in his book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” Then there is his bestseller, “God is not Great: Religion Poisons Everything.”

“There are,” he argues, “four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. …

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”

Hitchens the younger understands that logic, in large part because he once walked the same road. As a teen, he burned his Bible outside his Cambridge school. To his disappointment, “Thunder did not mutter.” He set out to rebel against everything that he had been taught was good and right and holy. This is what smart British boys of his generation were supposed to do.

Eventually, he stopped avoiding churches and great religious art — leaving him open to unsettling messages from the past. While gazing at one 15th century painting of the Last Judgment, he found himself emotionally and intellectually moved.

“These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions,” noted Hitchens. “On the contrary, their hair and the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me, and people I knew.

“I had a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. My large catalogue of misdeeds replayed themselves rapidly in my head.”

Then came the great oaths of his wedding rites, followed by the baptisms of his formerly atheistic wife and their daughter. A fellow journalist heard that Hitchens had returned to church and, with “a look of mingled pity and horror,” bluntly asked, “How can you do that?”

The twist in this story is that while Peter Hitchens has returned to faith, and Christopher has grown more and more outspoken in his crusade against faith, the brothers have gradually regained their affection for one another. And while many have urged them to turn their personal debates about God and the nature of moral truth into an intellectual traveling circus, neither of the brothers wants to do that.

“I am 58. He is 60. We do not necessarily have time for another brothers’ war. … I have, however, the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault,” noted Peter Hitchens.

“I can only add that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case which is most effectively couched in poetry.”