Worship for sale, worship for sale

In the beginning, there were the Jesus People.

They had long hair and short memories and they emerged from the 1960s with a unique fusion of evangelical faith and pop culture. They loved fellowship, but didn't like frumpy churches. They trusted their feelings, not traditions. They loved the Bible, but not those old hymnals.

So they started writing, performing, recording and selling songs. The Contemporary Christian Music industry was born.

And, lo, the counterculture became a corporate culture, one that was increasingly competitive and relentlessly contemporary, constantly striving to photocopy cultural trends. Out in the mega-churches, the definition of "worship" changed and then kept changing -- Sunday after Sunday.

Even though this industry "makes claims for musical diversity among its ranks, it is primarily a reflection of current folk, pop and rock styles," noted veteran pop musician Charlie Peacock, speaking at a recent conference on "Music and the Church" at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "Even today's successful modern worship music is composed of these and does not have a distinct style of its own."

The "bandwidth" of worship music today is actually quite narrow, he said, even if black gospel and "urban" music is included. This reality is especially obvious if the industry's products are contrasted with the dizzying array of church music found around the world and across two millennia of history.

Today, the bottom line is almost always the financial bottom line.

While believers lead the companies that dominate Christian music, secular corporations now own these smaller companies, noted Peacock. Clearly this is shaping the "Christian" music sold in religious bookstores and mainstream malls. But this corporate culture is also affecting worship and the heart of church life.

"The industry cannot be expected to always have the best interests of the church in mind," Peacock told nearly 500 scholars, musicians, entrepreneurs and clergy. "Christians within the companies may. But the overriding ideology of the system is to serve the shareholder first."

Serving the shareholders means an endless stream of new products, fads and artists -- just like in the secular world. The new always vetoes the old and the saints don't use credit cards or own stock. Thus, CCM is dominated by pop, rock, urban and new worship music. Classical Christian music is below 1 percent on the charts.

Most worship leaders are trying to blend these radically different musical elements, reported pollster George Barna, describing a survey of Protestant worshippers, pastors and "worship leaders." Sometimes the easiest solution is to have different services for different audiences -- a strategy the Barna Research Group found in three out of four churches.

Thus, the GI Generation attends a different service than the upbeat Baby Boomers or the mysterious young faithful of generations X and Y. The result looks something like an FM radio dial.

"What we know about Americans is that we view ourselves first and foremost as consumers," said Barna. "Even when we walk in the doors of our churches what we tend to do is to wonder how can I get a good transaction out of this experience. ... So, what we know from our research is that Americans have made worship something that primarily that we do for ourselves. When is it successful? When we feel good."

And sometimes people feel bad. According to the pastors, only 9 percent of the surveyed churches were experiencing conflict over music. But it's possible to turn those statistics around and note that 90 percent of all church conflicts reported in this study centered on musical issues.

Is peace possible? Peacock concluded that it will be up to ministers and educators to argue that there is more to worship than the niches on a CCM sales charts.

The industry can play a valid role in shaping the content of Christian music, he said, even in "contributing to the congregational music of the church. Still, the industry is at the mercy of a consumer with narrow tastes. Until this changes, it can't possibly function as a definitive caretaker and should not be asked to.

"This means that the stewardship of Christian music from the Psalms, to Ambrose, to Bach, to Wesley, to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and more, belongs to the church and the academy."

Truckers, snipers & prayer

There are still churches left in this land where folks gather every Wednesday night for "prayer meeting," since they're convinced God doesn't just listen on Sundays.

Central Church of the Nazarene in Fort Wright, Ky., is that kind of church. Last week, the Rev. Larry Dillon told his mid-week faithful that he felt God wanted them to spend some extra time praying about the sniper attacks near Washington, D.C.

"We prayed for the victims and their families," he said. "We prayed for the police. We also prayed that somebody out there would find the killers. ... Our people just kept praying, 'Please Lord, let this end.' "

One layman who couldn't be there was trucker Ron Lantz. Normally, he drove his 18-wheeler back and forth to Wilmington, Del., on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But he'd been called in special and had to be on the road Wednesday night and into the morning.

This is, of course, where this prayer story turns into a news story.

Christian truck drivers often like to take their breaks far from the temptations and noise of giant truck stops. The Myersville rest area near Frederick, Md., is one safe refuge where Lantz regularly pulls over and parks.

This time, it was a few minutes before 1 a.m. and, as usual, the 61-year-old Lantz was listening to the national Truckin' Bozo Radio Show. The host was urging truckers to look for a 1990 blue Chevy Caprice with New Jersey license plate NDA21Z. Lantz pulled into the rest area and there was the car. He was one of the first callers to get through and alert the police.

"I called 911," Lantz told CNN. "They told me, 'We'll be there as soon as possible. We'll be there right away.' He didn't say how long. He said, 'You stay right where you're at.' I said, 'OK.' "

Lantz and another driver blocked the rest area's entrance and the exit and, about 20 minutes later, swarms of officers arrived. After a cautious stakeout around the car, the police awoke John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo and put them under arrest.

The next day, Lantz enjoyed a few sheepish moments in the media spotlight.

That was the end of that story. But what few journalists noted was that the folksy trucker was telling them that his story had a beginning, as well as an ending. Finding that deadly sniper-mobile followed some serious prayer, he said.

A week earlier, lots of truckers were talking on their CB radios about the sniper case. Finally, Lantz and several others told everybody to pull off the road. It was time for a prayer meeting. According to Lantz, at least 50 truckers and a slew of other drivers got together -- a mere 20 miles from that Myersville rest area.

Lantz is on the road again this week, far from reporters. But he told the whole story in church last Sunday, said Dillon.

"That truckers' prayer meeting is a big part of all this, the way I see it," said the preacher. "Ron said they all knew that the sniper was probably driving on the same roads that they were. So they prayed that the truckers out there would be able to help stop him, somehow. ...

"Ron's testimony is that he was just in the right place at the right time. But Ron doesn't think any of this was a coincidence and I don't think it was a coincidence, either."

It's probably hard for journalists to figure out where prayer fits into this kind of news story, said Dillon. But millions of people sincerely believe prayer makes a difference. So they keep praying. It's part of the story of their lives.

"I know people ask, 'If prayer matters, then why didn't God stop the killing earlier?' Well, God gives people choices. They can choose good or they can choose evil," said Dillon. "So we don't know why those men chose to do what they did and we don't know why God didn't stop them sooner.

"Those are tough questions. But we know that we're supposed to choose what's good and keep doing what God wants us to do. We'll have to get to heaven before we truly understand how all of this works."

Neo-traditional born-again dads

They show up for dinner, help with homework, lead the rituals of bedtime and park their butts in the bleachers when their kids are in action.

They are heavy on discipline, but also eager to praise. They have been known to spank their children, but they are also more likely to hug them. They certainly take their families to church -- early and often.

They are totally off the radar screens in Hollywood and elite academia.

They are ordinary, faithful, evangelical and Catholic men and University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has survey data showing that they appear to be more involved, more dedicated fathers than their secular counterparts, or even those who worship in more "progressive" pews.

"Conservative Protestant Churches and parachurch ministries have stressed values such as traditional gender attitudes, strict discipline, expressive parenting and parental involvement," noted Wilcox, in the Journal of Marriage and Family. "Moreover, because of their pietist tradition of worship and increasingly therapeutic approach to relationships, conservative Protestant churches have an expressive ethos that may carry over into family life."

It would be wrong, Wilcox explained, to call these fathers old-fashioned traditionalists who rule their homes with an iron hand and a stiff upper lip. Instead, Wilcox called them "neo-traditionalists" who are trying to blend discipline and doctrine with a new style of parenting that is also heavy on "affection and sensitivity."

The result is not "some kind of flashback to the 1950s," said Wilcox. "I think what we are seeing is evidence that there are lots of evangelical and Catholic fathers who are truly changing their lives to try to spend more time with their children. The evidence is that they are doing this because they believe God wants them to."

This survey will certainly be seen as a paradox, if not a threat, by other researchers, noted theologian Russell D. Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

"After all," he said, "wouldn't one expect that conservative evangelical dads would dismiss childrearing as 'women's work,' while they attend Billy Graham crusades or uproot South American rain forests, or do, well, whatever it is that evangelical men do?" But perhaps, he added, "evangelical fathers are more committed to their children, not in spite of their biblical understanding of the family, but because of it."

The national study of 1,000 fathers who live at home focused on several practical questions about daily life. Wilcox found that evangelicals were more likely to spend one-on-one time with their children and to take part in family meals and church activities. Catholic fathers had similar high scores, but tended to favor non-religious activities with their children.

Evangelical and Catholic fathers consistently scored higher than those from the denominations that researchers have long considered "mainline" and progressive. In his study, Wilcox included Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Methodists and Congregationalists in this "mainline" camp. Meanwhile, the evangelicals included participants from Southern Baptist, the Assembly of God, Christian Reformed, Pentecostal and other conservative churches.

Yet Wilcox understood that the "mainline" world is not monolithic, since he was raised as an Episcopalian before converting to Roman Catholicism. While the mainline denominations lean left on moral and cultural issues, they also include many individual congregations that are quite conservative.

Thus, Wilcox was able to dig into his data and test his thesis that beliefs make a difference. He discovered that about 30 percent of the "mainline" men identified themselves as conservatives on issues of biblical authority and whether the Bible was their final guide on "practical issues they face in daily life." Sure enough, he said, these conservative men were more child and family oriented than the typical fathers in the "mainline" denominations.

There was no way to avoid this theme in the data, he said.

"There is no doubt in my mind," said Wilcox, "that part of what is going on here is that these fathers have a strong belief that there is such a thing as a biblical worldview, one that stresses that God wants to play a vital, active role in their lives. They also believe God wants them to pass this belief on to their children, right there in their homes. So that's what they're trying to do."

Krispy Kreme Catholics & the Baptist Vatican

NASHVILLE -- As a boy in upstate New York, Father Bob Dalton learned how to talk to Italians, Poles, Ukrainians and various other kinds of neighbors.

"My Irish mother was always saying, 'They're just not our kind of people,' " said the 68-year-old priest, hinting at her accent. "But, you know, we learned to get along. ... It helped that almost everybody was Catholic."

Before long, Dalton became a priest in the Glenmary Home Mission Society, which works across the rural South. This meant learning a whole different cultural vocabulary. It meant learning how to talk to Southern Baptists.

By the early 1980s, Dalton was representing the Church of Rome at Southern Baptist Convention's annual meetings and in the hallways of the giant "Baptist Vatican" in downtown Nashville. He has talked to Southern Baptists in state conventions and regional associations, too. He has talked to Southern Baptists at the all-important level of the local church.

And this is what he has learned.

"Catholics and Baptists have a lot in common," said Dalton, who recently returned to his SBC liaison role. "But we're still looking at each other and saying, 'They're just not our kind of people.' ... We're two massive groups of people who still don't know each other."

Recent statistics gathered by the Glenmary Research Center found 62 million U.S. Catholics and 20 million Southern Baptists -- the nation's two largest flocks. These two culturally conservative giants continue to grow, but they are not growing closer together.

Official dialogues began three decades ago, with key leadership coming from "moderate" Baptists who were willing to risk being called "ecumenists." Progressive Baptists huddled with progressive Catholics, while Baptist conservatives seethed.

Then conservatives seized control of the SBC and, to the surprise of many experts, this soon led to an intense, but radically different, era of Catholic-Baptist work. Liberals howled about right-wing politics, while "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" and similar efforts found common ground on issues such as abortion, sexual abstinence and human rights.

A key 1994 document made news by affirming that Catholics and evangelicals are "brothers and sisters in Christ" and that both streams of tradition represent "authentic forms of discipleship." Before long, powerful SBC voices -- especially in regions heavy in ex-Catholics -- began saying that enough is enough. Southern Baptist leaders recently shut down the formal dialogue.

What happens next? The bottom line is that many Southern Baptists do not believe that years of dialogue have produced consensus on issues of salvation and biblical authority. A growing awareness of the Vatican II statement that salvation can be found through faith in non-Christian religions has only widened the gap.

One of the SBC's most outspoken scholars did not mince words on CNN's Larry King Show.

"I believe the Roman Church is a false church and teaches a false gospel," said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Indeed, I believe the pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office."

Clearly, SBC leaders realize "that those are fighting words," said Dalton.

The irony, said the priest, is that the lives of most Roman Catholics today are not radically different from those of Southern Baptists.

The Glenmary statistics show that waves of Catholics have moved to the Sunbelt, far from the northern ethnic enclaves of the past. They live in sprawling suburbs and eat Krispy Kremes at church coffee hour like everybody else. They live next door to Southern Baptists, who long ago shed their rural roots and went suburban.

But many Catholics and Baptists have not realized how much times have changed, said Dalton. They still do not know how to talk to their neighbors.

"Maybe the formal dialogue did its thing," said Dalton. "It got us talking to the Baptist left and then we learned to talk to the Baptist right. But the next level of dialogue will not occur with our leaders sitting in conference rooms. It's going to have to happen between ordinary people over their backyard fences and down at the local Home Depot.

"We're living next door to each other. The question is whether we can learn to trust each other. Can we ever learn to see that we are one in Jesus Christ?"

MIA -- Spiritual fathers for spiritual sons

Sometimes the bishop calls the priest and sometimes the priest calls the bishop.

But one way or another, bishops and priests make appointments to meet over two cups of coffee. On one level, it is a meeting between employer and employee. On another, it's supposed to be an encounter between a father and a son.

These days, the atmosphere can get tense. There are questions that must be asked and a bishop has to ask them.

"Like any good father, the bishop must ask his spiritual sons specific, concrete, detailed questions about the manner in which they are living their vocations," noted scholar George Weigel, who is best known as the author of "Witness to Hope," a 992-page biography of Pope John Paul II.

"How often do you pray? Do you have a spiritual director whom you see regularly? Are you sleeping alone? Is Internet pornography a troublesome temptation? Is your recreation appropriate for a priest? Are your friendships, with both priests and laity, morally blameworthy? Do you have problems with alcohol? Is your celibacy fulfilling or burdensome, and are you living it faithfully and peacefully?"

A good bishop isn't trying to force a confession. The bishop also needs to avoid the role of therapist or attorney. But a bishop has to ask tough questions, according to Weigel, in order to rise above the role of "ecclesiastical executive" and assume the role of "genuine spiritual fatherhood."

That sounds obvious. But there are few safe, innocent questions right now, as Weigel makes clear in his new book, "The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church."

It's hard to be a spiritual father when there are legions of lawyers and journalists camped at the chancellery doors. Ask Bishop Edward Egan, once bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and now archbishop of New York. In an attempt to fend off liability lawyers, he once referred to his Bridgeport priests as mere "independent contractors." It's hard to imagine Cyril, Ambrose and Augustine using this kind of language.

At some point, said Weigel, bishops need to "stop whining" and risk reclaiming their role as spiritual leaders.

"The failures of episcopal leadership that turned a significant and urgent problem of clerical sex abuse into a full-blown crisis touched all three of the bishop's classic roles, that is, as men who are to teach, govern and sanctify," noted Weigel. The bottom line is that far too many bishops reacted to "the meltdown of priestly discipline ... as managers, not as apostles."

Many bishops stopped daring to ask the tough questions and embraced a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to a host of issues.

But someone has to ask a priest if he is lonely and, if so, what he is doing about it. Weigel noted that, "One of the most serious problems Catholic priests in the United States face today is loneliness, as more and more parishes become 'one-priest' parishes. Loneliness, in turn, is a breeding ground for temptation."

Someone has to ask a priest if his parish is growing or shrinking. Someone has to ask if he has preached any sermons lately on the tough parts of Catholic doctrine and how his people responded. Someone has to ask: How many in your flock have been inspired to become priests and nuns?

"To ask a young man to throw his life away for Christ requires a man asking the question to reflect on the radical quality of his own discipleship," said Weigel. "Putting hard questions to others requires a priest to first put hard questions to himself."

This means that bishops need to answer all of the same questions. This may not be what the lawyers advise, but bishops are not called to be lawyers.

"It sounds like the bishops have been operating with a different software than the Catholic software," said Weigel. "If a bishop has lawyers who tell him that he cannot act pastorally when dealing with a victim of abuse, or that he cannot address this in the church's primary language of repentance and forgiveness ... because of legal liabilities, then he needs to find new lawyers.

"He needs to find lawyers who will let him be what he needs to be -- which is a Catholic bishop."

Veggies attack the funny gap

While flipping through TV channels the other night, VeggieTales writer Mike Nawrocki discovered an absolutely hilarious preacher. We're not talking about the big hair, molasses and glitz humor that makes so many televangelists laugh-to-keep-from-crying funny. No, this preacher was using humor to communicate. He knew his people and he knew how to make them laugh.

"It was very, very funny. But he was doing this in his own pulpit for his own people," said Nawrocki, who is "Larry the Cucumber" for 25 million Veggie video buyers. "I don't know if this preacher would have felt free to be that funny anywhere else. I don't know if he could have been funny outside his church."

Making ordinary people laugh is serious business to Nawrocki and his colleagues at Big Idea Productions, an independent company near Chicago built on the silly idea of vegetables acting out Bible stories. The twist in this tale is that the VeggieTales people have created a brand of humor that sells in mainstream superstores as well as in small Christian outlets. They don't just joke with the choir.

Now Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Junior Asparagus and the virtual vegetables have jumped to the big screen, where they face the long knives of secular critics and consumers. "Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie" opens this weekend in 1,100 theaters nationwide. Once again, the Big Idea team is chasing kids 8-years-old and younger, while wooing parents with in-jokes about Monty Python, "Jaws," "Lawrence of Arabia," "The Blues Brothers" and pop culture.

Industry experts are watching to see if the VeggieTales are truly funny -- not church sanctuary funny, but suburban multiplex funny.

"We all know that Christians have trouble with humor," said Nawrocki. "Part of the problem is that all humor is irreverent, in one way or another. But the biggest problem Christians have with comedy is that they're afraid of offending other Christians. So much of humor is rooted in hard truths and Christians are not fond of hard truths, especially if they're about the church itself."

Nawrocki and Phil "Bob the Tomato" Vischer have wrestled with these issues ever since they were tossed out of Bible college in the mid-1980s. Soon, they were combining their puppetry and comedy skills with computer animation and dreaming about taking on Mickey Mouse.

Meanwhile, they watched their hip friends turn into pastors and youth ministers.

"The implicit message I received growing up was that full-time ministry was the only valid Christian service," said Vischer, the founder of Big Idea. "Young Christians were to aspire to be either ministers or missionaries. ... But I wanted to make movies. And from the movies and TV shows I watched growing up and the influence they had on me, I figured God could use a filmmaker or two, regardless of what anyone else said."

The key, said Vischer, is that he was raised in a culture in which everybody went to church. Then he ventured into the harsh world of advertising and corporate media and he had to reach people who never went to church. When he created Big Idea, Vischer was determined to create humor that blended both cultures.

Vischer and Nawrocki wanted to make videos, and now movies, that were openly religious, but not aimed at pews. They did not, in other words, want to settle for making "Christian movies." As another Christian in the entertainment industry, David McFadzean of the sitcom "Home Improvement," once quipped, the typical "Christian movie" is very similar to a porno movie. " It has terrible acting. It has a tiny budget. And you know exactly how it's going to end."

That quote is funny, yet painfully true, said Vischer.

"We seem to think every artistic expression by a Christian artist, to be valid, must end with an 'altar call.' It's the equivalent of saying every valid football play must end in the end zone," he said. Thus, "many of our efforts are so philosophically aggressive that they read more like war propaganda than entertainment, effectively limiting our audience to only the most committed faithful.

"The end result is that our work and our worldview have little or no impact on the broader culture. We've effectively taken ourselves out of the game."

What is NON-religion news?

It is Martin Marty's custom to rise at 4:44 a.m. for coffee and prayer, while awaiting the familiar thump of four newspapers on his porch.

A week ago, America's most famous church historian prepared for a lecture in Nebraska by ripping up enough newsprint to bury his table in headlines and copy slashed with a yellow pen.

A former WorldCom CEO kept teaching his Sunday school class. A researcher sought the lost tribe of Israel. Believers clashed in Sudan. Mormon and evangelical statistics were up -- again. A Zambian bishop said he got married to shock the Vatican. U.S. bishops kept wrestling with clergy sexual abuse. Pakistani police continued to study the death of journalist Daniel Pearl.

Marty tore out more pages, connecting the dots. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey feared an Anglican schism. Public-school students prayed at flagpoles. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explored the border between church and state. And there were dozens of stories linked to Sept. 11, 2001.

"When I read newspapers, I see religion all over the place," said Marty, whose University of Chicago Divinity School career has led to 50-plus books and countless media appearances. "This has always been the case. I simply think it has been easier for others to see this reality during the past year."

For decades, Marty has been America's most quoted expert on the question: "What is religion news?" But the University of Nebraska's journalism school challenged him to answer a new question: "Is There Any Non-Religious News After 9/11?"

It is certainly harder for journalists to avoid religion now, said Marty. This is true from Washington to Islamabad, from Wall Street to Hollywood. But the deeper reality is that Sept. 11 didn't change anything. It only made the power of faith -- as a healing force, as well as a deadly force -- more obvious.

Truth is, most Western leaders have long believed that religion would inevitably fade, he said. Thus, the West has been dominated by two big ideas.

"One idea was that every time you looked out your window, there was going to be less religion around than there was before," said Marty, in a forum for journalism students, ministers and media professionals. "The other idea was that whatever leftover religion you find, it was going to be tolerant, concessive, mushy and so on.

"Instead, there has been an increase in religion and the prospering religions are all extremely intense. The versions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism that are prospering tend to be among people who care very much about what their faith is about."

Countless despots have learned that faith cannot be killed with force. This is especially true outside what Marty called the "spiritual ice belt" that extends across Western Europe and North America. Soon, Africa and Asia will be sending waves of missionaries to the West.

Meanwhile, most of the world's hot spots are occurring where Islamic expansion is colliding with the growth of traditional Christianity in the Third World. While the world watches Afghanistan and Iraq, the insiders are watching Nigeria and Indonesia.

It's all part of the same story.

In the mid-1990s, Marty directed a massive project to study the "militant religious fundamentalisms" on the rise worldwide. It concluded that the leaders of many such groups would resort to military action, when they failed to achieve victory through constitutional means. And if military might was not enough, Marty noted that the study warned that "they may very well take no prisoners, allow no compromises, have no borders and they might resort to terrorism."

How should networks and newspapers respond? It would help, said Marty, if they hired more journalists who are trained to cover the complex and emotional world of religion. But that response is no longer adequate, after Sept. 11.

"What I am talking about today is not a call for a huge flood of religion reporters. We need some. We need more," he said. "We need space in which they can write. ...

"But we are past that, right now. We are now dealing with issues that all journalists are going to have to try to understand. ... The horizons of religion and the news have touched and we all have to realize that, now."

My Big, Fat, Greek Mystery

To the faithful, there was nothing new about hearing an ancient litany in Greek.

But it wasn't business as usual for Gregory Waynick, who was planning to be a Southern Baptist pastor until his studies in history and theology led him into Eastern Orthodoxy. As a young deacon in Nashville, he was terrified the first time he tried to sing a few lines of Greek chant.

"I'm sure my pronunciation was pretty sad," he said. "But when I looked up, I saw that all of the little old Greek ladies had tears in their eyes. They were so moved that I was even trying to speak a little bit of their language. They responded so warmly to all of my attempts to understand their language and lives."

As a convert, Waynick flashed back to that scene in his life and many others after seeing the movie "My, Big, Fat Greek Wedding." Most of the memories were good, but not all. An older Greek priest bluntly once told him that Bible-Belt Americans didn't belong in the Orthodox faith.

It was faith, not marriage that brought Waynick into the Eastern church. Still, he said the hit romantic comedy is surprisingly accurate in its portrayal of a proud, protective community in which the lines between culture and faith are constantly blurred.

"Their faith is something they don't think about. It's at the subconscious level," said Waynick, who is now a priest in the thriving St. Mark's Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton, Fla. "The problem is that when that culture begins to fade in their children -- the language, the traditions -- they may have little to hang on to in terms of their faith."

"My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" is about a young Greek woman named Toula Portokalos who falls for a white-bread vegetarian Anglo man. The movie cost only $5 million and debuted April 21 on 108 screens. Now it's on 1,764 screens and BoxOfficeGuru.com is asking if Nia Vardalos and her wacky family movie will gross $175 million in American ticket sales.

Studio executives tried to convince the actress to go with the demographic flow and turn her screenplay into a big, fat Italian or big, fat Hispanic wedding.

But Vardalos had a secret weapon named Margarita Ibrahimoff, the daughter of a Greek-born father and a mother who grew up in a Greek village on the Albanian border. This particular Greek girl turned Hollywood player is best known by another name -- Rita Wilson. It helps that Wilson married a non-Greek man named Tom Hanks.

Obviously, the team that produced "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" understood this emotional terrain, said Dean Popps, a national leader in networks of Greek Orthodox laypeople. The cliches were dead-on target and most Greeks will laugh and be thankful that mainstream America has acknowledged their existence. But the movie treats the church as a mere visual prop.

"It's good that someone is saying, 'It's OK to be Greek. It's OK to be Orthodox,' " said Popps. "But at the same time, it's a bit awkward. I mean, take Hanks. He's a great actor, but does he know anything about Orthodoxy? When it comes to issues like abortion and sexuality, he opposes everything the church has taught for centuries. ...

"I mean it's one thing to like our culture. But this faith is something you're supposed to live out in your daily life."

This tension is symbolized in one of the movie's few serious moments, when Toula's fiance is baptized in a rite that is a complete mystery to him. Afterwards, he shows her his new cross and says, "I'm Greek now."

The crucial question, said Waynick, is whether those whose lives are rooted in Greek culture and traditions will be able to pass on a living faith to their children. It will not be enough to simply go through the motions.

"Times have changed and their children will not remain Orthodox just because their parents are Greek," he said. "It's not enough to sing a few Greek hymns, when your kids are sticking Eminem into the CD players in their sports cars and moving in with their American girlfriends. ...

"They will have to claim the faith as their own and their churches will have to help them do that."

Spirituality up, doctrine down

During the 1990s, pollster George Barna released many reports showing that Americans were growing less traditional on issues of sin, salvation and the scriptures.

Church leaders found his data disturbing. On many occasions they asked: Could anything reverse these trends? What would it take to inspire significant numbers of Americans to repent and return to their roots?

"I told people that I thought it was going to take something big, some kind of genuinely shocking event that would show that there is right and wrong and good and evil," said Barna. "I sincerely thought that if something like that happened, many people would turn to God and that we would see lives changed."

Apparently not, he said.

The Barna Research Group's latest data indicate that nearly half of the Americans polled say faith has played a vital role in helping them cope with the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. In poll after poll, Americans claim their interest in spirituality is rising.

But Barna said there is no evidence Sept. 11 that had any lasting impact on how ordinary people practice their faith or live their daily lives. Worship attendance quickly returned to normal -- 43 percent. Bible reading is par for the course -- 41 percent. It is especially interesting that the "unchurched," the percentage of Americans with few or no ties to organized religion, is precisely the same as before the attacks -- 33 percent.

Barna said it didn't help that 41 percent of churchgoers said their congregation did nothing at all during the past 12 months to address issues raised by the attacks. Only 16 percent said they had heard sermons or other teachings focusing on Sept. 11.

"It's clear that our churches did little to try to crack the spiritual complacency of the American public," said Barna.

Researchers at the Gallup Organization have been looking at similar numbers.

"People are talking about how they are more spiritual now," said Frank Newport, editor of the Gallup Poll. "But this just isn't showing up in any way that we can measure. Maybe they are more spiritual. Maybe that statement is true. But this new interest in spirituality is showing up in what people are feeling, not what they are doing."

The bottom line: ask Americans questions about how Sept. 11 affected their religious feelings and the poll numbers will soar. Ask them questions about specific religious beliefs and practices and the numbers will plateau or even decline. The emerging consensus seems to be that vague, comforting spirituality is healthy, but that doctrinal, authoritative religion may even be dangerous.

That may be a hard news story to report and write, but it is still a major story, according to Steven Waldman, editor and chief at Beliefnet.com. When probing the impact of Sept. 11 on religious life in America and abroad, it is fairly easy to note what did happen. Yes, Americans responded with character and compassion. American attitudes toward Islam have seemed to change on a daily basis. There has been shocking evidence of brutal anti-Semitism.

But Waldman believes the big news is "what didn't happen. The fact that people initially went to houses of worship -- and then stopped -- should be viewed as a huge story, not a non-event." The bottom line, he said, is that "Americans didn't view organized religion as much help. ... While the pews were emptying out, psychologists' offices were filling up."

And as the 12 months passed, Barna's staff kept asking a series of tough questions about right and wrong and about good and evil.

Barna was stunned to find that, soon after Sept. 11, the percentage of Americans affirming that they believe in "moral truths or principles" that are eternal and unchanging actually declined -- from 38 to 22 percent. Only 32 percent of born-again Christians still believe in the existence of absolute moral truth.

"Those numbers have not risen" in recent months, said Barna. "Why is that? ... Perhaps many Americans have simply decided that it's just too much work to claim very specific and detailed beliefs and then to try to follow them in daily life. It's just too hard. It's too limiting on their behavior.

"I think most Americans want to keep their options open."