That was a loaded question, because of tensions behind the scenes between the multi-media Dallas superstar and many mainstream Christian leaders.

Now, this legendary preacher — often listed as one of America’s most powerful evangelicals — has taken a big step toward convincing his critics that he is, in fact, an evangelical. Jakes has, after years of rumors about private assurances, publicly affirmed that he believes in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

The Rev. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle asked the question directly, during the recent Elephant Room conference at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla. This annual event brings together Christian leaders from a variety of backgrounds to discuss tough subjects. Baptist Press has circulated the interview transcript nationwide.

“So you believe,” said Driscoll, that “there’s one God, three Persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit? You believe Jesus was fully God, fully Man?”

Jakes didn’t flinch: “Absolutely.”

That one word represents a significant change for Jakes, the leader of The Potter’s House, a 30,000-member megachurch that serves as the base for his thriving work in books, Gospel music, social-justice causes and a host of other ministries. While the church is nondenominational, the preacher has long been associated with an unorthodox stream of faith known as “Oneness” Pentecostalism.

The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches that there is one God, yet this God has been revealed in history as three distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is a core doctrine that unites Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians worldwide — including most who embrace Pentecostal and “charismatic” Christianity, the world’s fastest growing Christian movement.

The split between Trinitarian and the “Oneness” Pentecostals occurred in stages early in the 20th Century, soon after the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. That famous spiritual earthquake ignited the interracial Pentecostal movement, with its emphasis on spiritual gifts such as prophecy, healing and “speaking in tongues.”

“Oneness” leaders denied the reality of the Trinity, saying there is one God — period. Thus, they continue to baptize in the name of Jesus, alone, rather than using references to “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Critics call this approach “modalism.”

In the Elephant Room interview, Jakes noted that his father was Methodist and his mother was Baptist. However, he stressed that he made his own decision to become a Christian in a “Oneness” Pentecostal church. Thus, he said, “I ended up Metha-Bapti-Costal, in a way.”

Several scripture passages influenced his change of mind on this issue, he said, especially the account of the baptism of Jesus.

“Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, for example, coming up out of the water [and] the Holy Spirit descends like a dove, the Father speaks from heaven and we see all three of them on one occasion,” said Jakes. This and other references “began to make me rethink some of my ideas and some of the things that I was taught.

“I got kind of quiet about it for a while. Because when you are a leader and you are in a position of authority, sometimes you have to back up and ponder for a minute, and really think things through.”

“Oneness” churches represent a relatively small piece of the global Pentecostal movement — about 5 percent of an estimated 640 million believers. Nevertheless, Jakes has clearly been trying to find a way to keep expanding his work into the evangelical, “charismatic” mainstream without cutting his ties to his past, said historian Vinson Synan of Regent University, author of numerous books on Pentecostalism.

“The reality is that he had to address this issue sooner or later because he has all kinds of followers, including lots of Trinitarians,” said Synan. “This man sells millions of books, makes movies and is an award-winning Gospel singer. He’s a major force in Christian culture in this land. …

“Well, he might not be able to keep doing all of that if millions of evangelicals think he is some kind of heretic. So he makes this one statement and he’s cleared with most evangelicals and charismatics, most of the time. He’s on his way to being more acceptable to just about everybody. That’s big, in the post-denominational world in which we live.”

Nor do they see a land that is only 1.6 percent atheist and 2.4 percent agnostic, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. They do not see a land in which another 12.1 percent of the people do not embrace any one religion “in particular,” but insist that “spirituality” plays some role in their lives.

In other words, they do not see a remarkably, if somewhat vaguely, religious nation — especially in comparison with other modern industrialized lands.

No, when elite evangelicals see America today the word that comes to mind is “secular.”

In fact, 92 percent of evangelical leaders from the United States who took part in a new Pew Forum survey said they are convinced that secularism is a “major threat” to the health of evangelical Christianity in their land, a threat even greater than materialism, consumerism and the rising tide of sex and violence in popular culture.

In a related question, a majority of U.S. evangelical leaders — 82 percent — said they are convinced that their churches are currently losing clout in American life.

In this study, researchers surveyed nearly 2,200 evangelical leaders from around the world who were invited to participate in last year’s Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa.

“This rising fear of secularism” among top American evangelicals “really surprised us, especially when you compared their feelings to the more optimistic attitudes among evangelicals in other parts the world,” noted John C. Green of the University of Akron, a senior Pew Forum research advisor.

So what is happening? For generations, he explained, evangelicals have “primarily been defined in terms of their conflicts with other religious groups, with other faiths. … But now, it seems that they are increasingly starting to see themselves in terms of conflicts with those who are either indifferent to religion or who are openly hostile to traditional forms of religion.”

Thus, it seemed that when these evangelical leaders used the term “secularism” they were not always referring to people and groups with no religious convictions at all. Instead, they were expressing their concerns about the rising numbers of people in America and around the world that simply do not practice any one form of faith, as traditionally defined.

“They don’t seem to know what to call the unorthodox expressions of faith that you see among the so-called ‘spiritual, but not religious’ people,” said Green. Thus, the frustrated evangelical leaders may be “lumping them all together under the term ‘secularism.’ “

In contrast to this surge of pessimism in North America, evangelicals from other parts of the world were more optimistic about the future. This was especially true among those from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the rest of the so-called “Global South.” Other survey results included:

* While only 41 percent of northern leaders believed the state of evangelicalism would improve in the next five years, 71 percent of those in the Global South were convinced things would be “better than now” for their churches. In the Global North, 33 percent of those surveyed thought things would soon get worse.

* While in overwhelming agreement (96 percent) that “Christianity is the one, true faith,” these evangelical leaders were somewhat divided on a key authority issue, with 50 percent saying the “Bible should be read literally, word for word” and 48 percent saying “not everything in the Bible should be taken literally.”

* Not surprisingly, 90 percent of evangelicals from Muslim-majority nations said Islam poses a major threat to their future work, compared with 41 percent from those living elsewhere. However, survey participants from Muslim lands held more favorable views of Muslims and their faith than did evangelical leaders from other countries.

* The Lausanne Congress participants were convinced that evangelicals in the Global South currently have “too little influence” in the leadership of world Christianity. Researchers found it particularly interesting that leaders in the United States and other parts of the Global North were even more likely to hold this point of view — 78 percent compared to 62 percent — than their counterparts in the Global South.

These duties have long been part of his job description. Meeting with leaders from the world’s booming evangelical and Pentecostal flocks?

Not so much.

However, recent ecumenical contacts by this high-profile representative of the Moscow Patriarchate is evidence that times are changing. Time after time, during meetings with evangelical leaders and others here in America, Hilarion has stressed that it is time for Orthodox leaders to cooperate with traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants and others who are trying to defend ancient moral truths in the public square.

“I am here in order to find friends and in order to find allies in our common combat to defend Christian values,” said the 44-year-old archbishop, who became a monk after serving in the Soviet army. He also speaks six languages, holds an Oxford University doctorate in philosophy and is an internationally known composer of classical music.

For too long, Orthodox leaders have remained silent. The goal now, he said, is to find ways to cooperate with other religious groups that want to “keep the traditional lines of Christian moral teaching, who care about the family, who care about such notions as marital fidelity, as giving birth to and bringing up children and in the value of human life from conception until natural death.”

On this occasion earlier in the year, Hilarion was preaching from the pulpit of the 5,000-member Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, a conservative congregation that remains part of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which recently approved the ordination of noncelibate gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

While in Dallas, Metropolitan Hilarion’s public schedule included meetings at Dallas Theological Seminary, a prominent institution among many of America’s most conservative evangelical leaders. He has also, during the first half of the year, met with nationally known evangelical leaders in New York, Washington, D.C., and at Princeton University.

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, one of evangelicalism’s flagship publications, the archbishop said it is crucial for all churches — including Eastern Orthodox churches — to expand their work into public life, even if this creates controversy in some quarters.

“Very often nowadays our church will publicly express positions on what’s happening in the country,” he said. “Some people ask, ‘Why does the church interfere? It’s not their business.’ We believe that the church can express its opinion on all aspects of human life. We do not impose our opinions on the people, but we should be free to express them. And people will have to choose whether to follow or not to follow, whether to listen to what we say or to ignore it.”

The archbishop’s statements were especially significant and timely because of a related conflict now raging in the Orthodox Church in America, which has Russian roots.

A major cause of the controversy was the decision by the church’s leader, Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen, to privately endorse The Manhattan Declaration, a document produced by a coalition of conservative Christians that focuses on abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality and religious liberty issues. Numerous Catholic bishops and several other Orthodox leaders have also signed as private citizens, not in their roles as church officials.

At the very least, this bitter dispute has demonstrated that some OCA leaders are opposed to public stands on hot-button political issues, especially any that proclaim the church’s teachings on sexuality. Some prefer isolation and silence.

However, Metropolitan Hilarion, in his taped sermon in Dallas, said it is shocking to see churches divided by “what hitherto seemed unthinkable — namely marked differences among Christians in their understanding of moral law. … There has surfaced a desire to revise, or to be more precise, to adjust, the unambiguous commandments of God to any manifestation of human fancy, a trend that has spread out with the speed of a cancer. …

“Maybe this is one of the reasons why so many families break, why so many marriages end up with divorce, why so many children are raised without a father or a mother and why the birthrates in many countries have become so low. … Family is no longer a primary value to many young people. This is a tragedy of our times and this is a challenge that we can face together.”

The cast of “It’s a Wonderful Life 2” reassembled on stage at Celebration Covenant Church, a suburban megachurch north of Dallas. There were characters from a Victorian tableau, along with Frosty the Snowman, young ballerinas and children dressed as penguins. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus were there, too.

Then, entering from stage right, came “an adult Christ stripped down to his loincloth and smeared with Dracula blood, dragging a cross to center stage while being whipped by two centurion guards,” writes Stuever, in “Tinsel,” his open-a-vein study of Christmas in the American marketplace. “Here is where the Nativity, Dickens and Burl Ives collide head-on with Good Friday, as Jesus is crucified while everyone sings ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ ending on a long, noisy note: ‘newborn kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.’

“Then they freeze.

“Hold it for applause.”

The scene was achingly sincere and painfully bizarre, with holy images jammed into a pop framework next to crass materialism. For millions of Americans, this is the real Christmas.

“I wrote it in my notes, right there in that church,” said Stuever. “I wrote, ‘It’s Picasso.’ … I just couldn’t believe it.”

There is nothing new about a journalist “embedding” himself to experience life on the front lines. Rather than heading to Iraq, Stuever moved to the Bible Belt. He lived in Frisco, Texas, for six months in 2006, then made 12 short follow-up trips during the next two years.

The veteran Washington Post reporter convinced three families to let him see Christmas through their eyes, from the Back Friday craziness to the somber trashing of mountains of ripped wrapping paper. The book’s credo is voiced by Tammie Parnell, a 40-something business dynamo who decorates McMansions for women who are too busy to prepare for a Texas-sized Christmas.

“Fake is okay here,” she tells Stuever. “Diamond earrings. Christmas trees. If you want me to prove that fake is okay here, let’s you and I go to the Stonebriar Country Club pool one day and check everyone out.”

The bottom line? Most Americans say they want Bethlehem and the North Pole, but the truth is that they invest more time, energy and money at the North Pole. That’s fine with Stuever, who is openly gay and calls himself a “Christmas loser” — while wrestling with the lessons of his Jesuit education and the loss of his Catholic faith.

“A dip into even the most reverent inquiries by Bible scholars,” he argues, “easily leads to the conclusion that there was no actual manger scene in Bethlehem, no shepherds dropping by to see the baby, no star in the east, no Magi, no frankincense, no myrrh. … Many scholars have concluded, some more gently than others, that the Christmas story is intentionally fictive, written by the earliest, first-century evangelists to beef up Jesus’ street cred as a believable Jewish Messiah. Like any superhero, Christ needed an origin story rife with the drama, metaphors and the meaningful symbols of the era.”

Thus, “Tinsel” seeks the meaning of Christmas in the material world itself, in the blitz of shopping, in houses draped in high-voltage lights, in the complex joys and tensions of family life. Stuever argues that the binges of shopping and feasting are as ancient — and more significant today — than the rites of praying and believing.

For Stuever, Christmas is fake, but that’s fine because fake is all there is. He argues that millions of Americans struggle to find the “total moments” of nostalgia and joy that they seek at Christmas because they are not being honest about why they do what they do during the all-consuming dash to Dec. 25.

“It’s so easy to see all of the craziness on TV and say, ‘Oh, those poor, stupid people,’ ” he said. “But when you get down there in the middle of it with them and listen to what people are saying and try to feel what they are feeling, you realize that all of that wildness is not just about buying the new Wii at Best Buy. …

“It’s a religious experience for them, even though it couldn’t be more secular. They’re out there searching for transcendence, trying to find what they think is the magic of Christmas.”

As any evangelical worth his or her salt knows, that question sounds like this: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Super aggressive believers prefer: “Are you saved? If you died tonight, would go to heaven or hell?”

Carter remembers replying: “I’m, yeah, actually I have.”

What happened next was strange. The young man was “visibly disappointed” and “wore a look of minor defeat” because he wouldn’t get to save a soul during this lunch period. He ate quickly and departed and, this is the crucial detail for Carter, they never spoke again.

The evangelist wasn’t looking for a friend or dialogue with a believer. He wanted to carve another notch on his Bible, using techniques learned during a soul-saving workshop. If his blunt approach offended strangers, or even strengthened their “Fundie-alert systems,” that was their problem, not his.

Every decade or so there are new, improved techniques for making these spiritual sales pitches, each backed with snappy catch phrases and, these days, with hot websites, books and videos. Then everything changes again a generation later, noted Carter. What you get are stacks of leftover “Left Behind” video games, “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, “emerging church” study guides and copies of “The Prayer of Jabez.”

It helps to know that Carter is himself an evangelical who is concerned about evangelism issues. As a journalist, the 39-year-old former U.S. Marine has worked for a number of conservative causes, including World Magazine, the Family Research Center and the presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. He recently finished helping build Culture11.com, a right-of-center forum for evangelicals, Catholics and mainline Protestants interested in discussing how religion, culture and politics mix in daily life.

That website’s future is uncertain, but before his recent departure Carter nailed a manifesto to that cyber-door — dissecting 10 fads that he believes are hurting evangelical organizations and churches. While most conservatives have been arguing about their political future, in the Barack Obama era, Carter decided to focus on faith issues.

It’s a list that will be puzzling to outsiders not fluent in evangelical lingo. The “Sinner’s Prayer, which reduces the quest for salvation to a short “magical incantation,” made the list, as did the emphasis on “premillennial dispensationalism” and other apocalyptic teachings in some churches.

Carter is also tired of long, improvised public prayers in which every other phrase contains the word “just,” as in, “We just want to thank you Lord.” He would like to hear more sermons focusing on the life of Jesus, as opposed to preachers and evangelists focusing on their own dramatic life “testimonies.” And while he is in favor of growing churches, Carter is worried that the “church growth movement” has evolved from a fad into a permanent fixture on the American scene.

“What most people call the church-growth movement is something that grew out of business principles, instead of growing — organically — out of the life of the church,” he said. “People started trying to figure out how they could change the church so they could get more people to come inside, rather than doing what the early church did, which was going outside the church and reaching people by actually getting to know them. …

“It’s like people started saying, ‘What kind of music do we need to play so that more people will join? What do we need to do to the preaching? What kind media can we add to the services?’ “

But the thread that runs through this online manifesto is that Carter is convinced that evangelicals need to spend less time striving to make quick conversions and more time training disciples who stay the course.

In the end, he said, techniques will not carry over from one generation to another.

“Part of the problem is that evangelicals really don’t have traditions,” said Carter. “Instead, we have these fads that are built on the strengths and talents of individual leaders. … But a real tradition can be handed on to anyone, from generation to generation. It’s hard to hand these evangelical fads down like that, so it seems like we’re always starting over. It’s hard to build something that really lasts.”

“What happened before the Great Reformation, we all know,” said Phyllis Tickle, author of “God Talk in America” and two dozen books on faith and culture. “We know, for instance, that some sucker sailed west and west and west and didn’t fall off the dad gum thing. That was a serious blow.”

So Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and then a flat, neatly stacked universe flipped upside down. Soon, people were talking about nation states, the decline of landed gentry, the rise of a middle class and the invention of a printing press with movable type. Toss in a monk named Martin Luther and you’re talking Reformation — with a big “R” — followed by a Counter-Reformation.

Back up 500 years to 1054 and you have the Great Schism that separated Rome and from Eastern Orthodoxy. Back up another 500 years or so and you find the Fall of the Roman Empire. The transformative events of the first century A.D. speak for themselves.

Church leaders who can do the math should be looking over their shoulders about now, argued Tickle, speaking to clergy, educators and lay leaders at the recent National Youth Workers Convention in Atlanta.

After all, seismic changes have been rolling through Western culture for a century or more — from Charles Darwin to the World Wide Web and all points in between. The result is a whirlwind of spiritual trends and blends, with churches splintering into a dizzying variety of networks and affinity groups to create what scholars call the post-denominational age.

Tickle is ready to call this the “Great Emergence,” with a tip of her hat to the edgy flocks in the postmodern “emerging church movement.”

“Emerging or emergent Christianity is the new form of Christianity that will serve the whole of the Great Emergence in the same way that Protestantism served the Great Reformation,” she said, in a speech that mixed doses of academic content with the wit of a proud Episcopalian from the deeply Southern culture of Western Tennessee.

However, anyone who studies history knows that the birth of something new doesn’t mean the death of older forms of faith. The Vatican didn’t disappear after the Protestant Reformation.

This kind of revolution, said Tickle, doesn’t mean “any one of those forms of earlier Christianity ever ceases to be. It simply means that every time we have one of these great upheavals … whatever was the dominant form of Christianity loses its pride of place and gives way to something new. What’s giving way, right now, is Protestantism as you and I have always known it.”

It helps to think of dividing American Christianity, she said, into four basic streams — liturgical, Evangelical, Pentecostal-charismatic and old, mainline Protestant. The problem, of course, is that there are now charismatic Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as plenty of Evangelicals who are interested in liturgical worship and social justice. Conservative megachurches are being forced to compromise because of sobering changes in marriage and family life, while many progressive flocks are being blasted apart by conflicts over the same issues.

In other words, the lines are blurring between once distinct approaches to faith. Tickle is convinced that 60 percent of American Christians are worshipping in pews that have, to one degree or another, been touched by what is happening in all four camps. At the same time, each of the quadrants includes churches — perhaps 40 percent of this picture — that are determined to defend their unique traditions no matter what.

The truly “emerging churches” are the ones that are opening their doors at the heart of this changing matrix, she said. Their leaders are determined not to be sucked into what they call “inherited church” life and the institutional ties that bind. They are willing to shed dogma and rethink doctrine, in an attempt to tell the Christian story in a new way.

“These emergent folks are enthusiastically steering toward the middle and embracing the whole post-denominational world,” said Tickle. “We could end up with something like a new form of Pan-Protestantism. … It’s all kind of exciting and scary at the same time, but we can take some comfort in knowing that Christianity has been through this before.”

That was the good news. The bad news was that they wanted to talk about God, politics and homosexuality, although not necessarily in that order. It also didn’t help that the people they wanted to talk to were midshipmen on the U.S. Naval Academy campus — on a football-weekend Friday, no less.

“Free speech is free speech,” said White, who, before going public as a gay activist, was a ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other evangelical leaders. White is one of the founders of Soulforce, which is based in Lynchburg, Va.

“If people don’t want to talk, all they have to do is say so and walk away.”

Soulforce activists drifted around the academy campus in small clusters last weekend, their bright pastel t-shirts standing out among the blue uniforms and gray Chesapeake Bay mists. They attracted packs of journalists.

The 40 or so protestors — mostly college students from nearby — offered this greeting: “We’re here to talk about the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. What do you think about that?”

Most midshipmen declined to talk. Capt. Helen Dunn, deputy superintendent at the academy, had issued this memo: “Members of this group may attempt to gain access to the Yard and approach you for discussions. We ask that you carry out your normal routine, … stay clear of our security personnel and the protestors, and to politely refer questions from media or the demonstrators to the Public Affairs Office.”

These are tense days at America’s military academies, which are emerging as bitter battlefields in church-state wars.

At the Air Force Academy, the hot issue is salvation. Evangelicals have been accused of going overboard as they interact with non-Christians and non-believers. Evangelical chaplains have even been attacked for delivering evangelistic messages in voluntary chapel services and other optional events. A circle of conservative lawmakers recently wrote to President Bush urging him to issue an executive order guaranteeing the free-speech rights of chaplains.

Right now, the hot issue at the Naval Academy is sexuality. Activists are trying to break what they believe is a faith-based chokehold on military policies affecting the careers and relationships of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-gendered persons.

At the Air Force Academy, it’s hard to speak up in favor of conservative religious doctrines.

At the Naval Academy, it’s hard to speak up in opposition to them.

In both cases, believers — on left and right — are trying to proclaim what they believe is true. They are trying to change hearts and minds through the power of words and public witness. The problem, of course, is that one person’s free speech is another’s evangelism, public protest or, heaven forbid, even proselytizing.

At some point, said White, government officials must realize that people have a right to dialogue and debate. People have the right to talk and the right not to listen.

“It’s like all the people who want to censor television. You keep trying to tell people like that, ‘Don’t censor us. Just change the channel,’ ” he said, while greeting visitors outside the academy bookstore. “That’s what this is all about, too. We just want to talk to people and let them know what we think. What’s so scary about that?”

At first, Naval Academy officials threatened to have the demonstrators arrested if they came on campus. Then both sides agreed to a shaky compromise that allowed the activists the same rights as other visitors, other than the right to talk with midshipmen. Most members of the Soulforce team went right ahead and talked, said Reitan, leader of the group’s “Equality Ride” program.

In the months ahead, Soulforce teams will be traveling to a dozen or more other campuses — including the other military academies and an array of conservative religious colleges and universities from coast to coast.

“Hopefully, people at the campuses we stop at in the future will be willing to set up forums and create other kinds of settings in which we can discuss these issues in a more adult, academic manner,” said Reitan. “But we have decided that we’re not going to let our free speech to be edited during any of our future stops.”

That made sense, the experts told Beliefnet.com CEO Steven Waldman. The economy was on fire and this new wealth caused many people to ask big questions. Times were good, yet they felt empty. They went shopping for answers.

Then the nation plunged into recession, while signs of interest in spiritual matters kept increasing. That made sense, said the experts. People were struggling and, thus, they turned to faith for comfort and insights. This trend intensified after 9/11, even if the impact didn’t last in traditional pews.

So what’s the bottom line? Faith is not a niche-market trend.

It’s true that the look and feel of “mainstream” American religion is changing, in part due to people searching on the World Wide Web. “Organized religion” may be in a recession, but the rest of the “spirituality” numbers continue to add up, up, up.

“Wall Street considers a trend that lasts 10 years to be significant. This one has lasted 10 millennia,” argues Waldman, in a research paper he calls “The Faithful Consumer & The Spiritual Marketplace.” He recently cranked out a 13th draft, trying to keep up with the latest data.

“While philosophers have studied the faithful soul and politicians have courted the faithful voter, the marketing and business communities have so far ignored The Faithful Consumer. This is a big mistake.”

In the wake of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” — with its $600-million-plus payday — there has been increased research into the size of the “Christian marketplace” for goods and entertainment. Waldman is, of course, interested in these numbers because the vast majority of Americans tell pollsters that, to one degree or another, they consider themselves Christians.

What is harder to document is the broader spiritual market. The sprawling Beliefnet.com website — with 4.5 million subscribers to its digital newsletters — is thoroughly interfaith, with cyber-homes for everyone from evangelicals to pagans, from Orthodox Jews to feminist Mormons, from smells-and-bells Catholics to progressive Muslims. I should mention that I am the editor of the GetReligion.org site that is linked to the Beliefnet.com through its “Blog Heaven” forum.

It’s relatively easy to document what is happening in bookstores, radio networks, CD sales, cable television and magazines. What is harder, said Waldman, is to factor in the economic clout of spiritual consumers in areas such as education, health care, charity and even the travel industry.

However, he has arrived at what he considers a very conservative estimate of total spending in the “spirituality sector” of the economy — $225 billion a year.

People of faith are not part of a strange trend far from the mainstream, he said. They are the mainstream. What Waldman calls the “Faithful Consumer” is the normal consumer, part of a demographic group that is larger than the sectors called “women,” “Baby Boomers,” “singles,” “teens” or any of the usual ethnic groups.

Some marketing professionals seem afraid to talk about these numbers, in part because religion is often controversial and this demographic is so hard to pin down. Are “Faithful Consumers” people who believe in God or the gods? Are they united by their broader spiritual concerns or divided by their narrow, specific dogmas? Are they prickly true believers or blowing-with-the-wind seekers?

These days, the safe answer is “all of the above.” Americans love to shop.

So far, 18 million consumers have bought “The DaVinci Code” by Dan Brown, with its head-spinning blend of historical speculation, Gnostic legend, goddess worship and anti-Vatican polemics. Another 20 million-plus have embraced the up-beat, easy-going sermonettes of evangelical superstar Rick Warren.

It’s safe to say that some people bought both. This is America.

“There are people out there who do things like that, even though that confounds all of our stereotypes,” said Waldman. “We may not be able to understand some of the spiritual choices that people make. But you know what we can say? We can say that they cared enough about matters of the soul to buy these books and read them. …

“People are out there searching and if all we did was wake up the business world to that reality, we would have accomplished something.”

She was a journalist in Greece, but I couldn’t catch the name of her newspaper. She told me her name, but I didn’t get that, either. Lest readers judge me too harshly, it helps to know that I attend an Eastern Orthodox parish with Lebanese priest who speaks Arabic, Greek, French and English. I am used to interesting accents.

The reporter’s first question told me why she was calling — Google. Before long, I learned that she was interested in American politics as well as religion.

“You are an expert on Christians who worship with snakes, yes?”

Not really, I said. I have read books on the subject and I used to teach in the mountains of East Tennessee, but I never met snake handlers. In modern times, even some of the Baptists there drive Volvos, wear Birkenstocks and listen to National Public Radio like everybody else. OK, I didn’t say exactly that, but I tried to explain to her my limited contact with this edgy flock on the far fringe of American Protestantism.

“Can we interview you about this?”, she asked. “You have written about it?”

This told me that she had found — via Google — my 1996 column on “Snakes, Miracles and Biblical Authority.” It was based on lectures by Baptist historian Bill Leonard of Wake Forest University and described the theological lessons he learned from his friendship with the late Arnold Saylor, an illiterate country preacher who took rattlesnakes with him into the pulpit.

In that column, I noted: “Millions of Americans say the Bible contains no errors of any kind. ‘Amen,’ say the snake handlers. Others complain that too many people view the Bible through the lens of safe, middle-class conformity and miss its radical message. Snake handlers agree.

“Millions of Americans say that miracles happen, especially when believers have been ‘anointed’ by God’s Holy Spirit. ‘Preach on,’ say snake handlers. Polls show that millions of spiritual seekers yearn for ecstatic, world-spinning experiences of divine revelation. ‘Been there, done that,’ say snake handlers.”

Snake handlers, in other words, believe they have biblical reasons for engaging in their risky rites. They quote the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

The Greek reporter, it turned out, was interested in more than snake handlers. The newspaper wanted to probe American religion, in general. To be specific, it planned to visit Ohio, a crucial state in the White House race. She wanted to know: Did I know any snake handlers in Ohio?

Say what? I tried to figure out the logic behind this question, which seemed to be linked to European stereotypes of this country. The thinking might go something like this: Snake handlers are evangelical Protestants. President Bush is an evangelical Protestant. Therefore, Bush is the candidate of snake handlers. Then again, Bush is a United Methodist. I doubt there are many evangelical United Methodist snake handlers in Ohio. Was this an overlooked voting block?

I urged her to get in touch with Leonard, the actual expert on the subject. That was the least the newspaper could do.

“Can we go ahead and interview you? We do not have a lot of time,” she said.

A few days later, Leonard had not received any calls from Greece. He was still fascinated by the beliefs and customs of snake handlers and, come to think of it, he received a recent call from a Chinese newspaper asking questions about this topic. He declined to speculate on the logic of the Greek reporter’s Ohio questions.

Truth is, snake handlers “are the bain of liberals and conservatives,” he said.

“I can’t say why there is this interest,” said Leonard. “I don’t think it’s about Bush, but about strange religion in America — Pentecostals, healing, evangelicals, snake handlers. … They are always used as caricatures for something.”

That may sound strange, since the Southern Baptist Convention and the Republican Party that Reagan built now appear to be wedded at the hip. But people tend to forget that Jimmy Carter really is a Baptist. So are Al Gore, the Rev. Bill Moyers and Britney Spears, while we’re at it.

People also forget that Reagan was not a Southern Baptist or even what most would call an evangelical. He grew up in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), in the Illinois heartland of mainline Protestantism.

Still, I believe it’s safe to say that America’s deep political divisions on moral issues are the result of three cultural earthquakes — Woodstock, Roe vs. Wade and the Reagan revolution.

These events shaped modern Democrats as well as Republicans. They shaped religious conservatives and the growing bloc some researchers are calling the “anti-evangelical voters.” And these events created or deepened cracks in most religious sanctuaries that remain today and have, if anything, only gotten worse.

Take the Southern Baptists. I believe the rise of Reagan split that massive flock of 16-million-plus believers just as much, if not more, than doctrinal debates about “biblical inerrancy.”

Millions of Southern Baptists saw Reagan as a near messiah. For Southern Baptist conservatives, Reagan offered hope that the cultural revolution of the Woodstock-Roe era might in some way be overturned. They were wrong, of course.

Nevertheless, these conservative Baptists lost their historic fear of politics and jumped into the public square. But while the conservative grown-ups created the Religious Right, their children were in their multi-media bedrooms watching HBO and MTV.

The parents thought they could vote in the kingdom, but things didn’t work out that way. What they got instead was “I Love the ’80s.”

There were some Southern Baptists who saw Reagan as the Antichrist.

I saw this close up. I had a friend in graduate school who literally lost his moderate Southern Baptist faith because of the election of Reagan. How could he believe in a just and loving God, if a Reagan could be elected president?

After all, the Reagan loyalists hated the really cool movies and they liked the really bad movies. They didn’t read the proper books and magazines or laugh at the hip comics. And Reagan was embraced by all of those “fundamentalists” who wanted to ruin the Southern Baptist Convention, which they believed was poised to achieve mainline Protestant maturity.

Most of all, they believed that Reagan was dumb. And if Reagan was dumb, that meant that hating Reagan was smart. Everyone who was smart agreed. If you didn’t agree, then you were dumb.

So defeating Reagan was part of voting in a smarter, more nuanced kingdom.

What these anti-Reagan Baptists and new evangelicals really needed was a progressive, smart, complex Southern Baptist in the White House — someone like Bill Clinton. That would be perfect. But things didn’t work out precisely as they imagined, either. They got “Sex & the City.”

Many of them liked it. Many didn’t, but the alternative was worse. The alternative was being labeled a religious conservative, the kind of person who liked Reagan.

There seemed to be no other option, no middle ground.

But perhaps Reagan wasn’t a messiah or the Antichrist. What if he was just a normal mainline Protestant churchman from the 1950s?

Maybe he had good intentions and he did his best. Maybe he accomplished many things on the global level and didn’t do so much on the cultural level. Maybe his beliefs were sincere, but not very specific. Maybe he made some people feel good and others feel bad. Maybe his greatest domestic political legacy is the Religious Right and the Religious Left.

But questions remain. Was Reagan truly a cultural and moral conservative? Did he cause the “pew gap” the researchers find in all the polls of modern voters? Could Reagan, if he had really tried, overturn the culture of Woodstock and Roe? Could he have helped Americans do a better job of focusing on their families? I have my doubts.

There are things that politicians cannot do.

It’s a culture thing. It’s a moral thing. It’s a faith thing.