In search of some Lenten devotional reading, my friend Bill Haley wandered into his local Christian store.

“Do you have Henri Nouwen’s Show Me the Way?” he asked, referring to the late Catholic writer’s collection of Lenten meditations.

“Oh no, dear,” answered the clerk at the cash register. “He’s dead. We don’t carry books by dead authors.”

Like 90 million other Americans, I have a household idol. Like household gods from pagan cultures throughout history, it is small enough to fit in my hand and roughly human in shape—three times as tall as it is wide. And as with all household gods, it promises to serve me if I will serve it. So I feed it regularly—with a kind of invisible food that, I believe, gives it energy and perhaps pleasure. In return, it promises protection, power, knowledge, and even intimacy. My god has been very good to me. And on days when it fails me—when I let it go without food, or make inappropriate demands of it, or the one time when I thought I had actually lost it—I feel pangs of anxiety. At those times I vow to be a better servant of this precious little piece of useful magic.

Once upon a time, I wanted to hear the voice of God.

The charismatic Christian community that introduced me to Jesus expected him to speak, vividly and verbally, today. While my prayer life generally consists of squinting my eyes and listening for some echo of a divine voice beneath my own thoughts, I can testify that they were right. A bare handful of times in my life, I have heard words that came, speech-like, unbidden into my mind.

Unfortunately, some of the times God’s voice has been clearest have been times when I disobeyed.

“Of course, we’re not about numbers,” the young pastor said. He paused awkwardly—or was it humbly? “But after six months, we have 800 to 1,000 attending our service every week.”

If I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it 100 times (not that I’m counting). Evangelicals have a wondrous way of letting you know that they’re “not about numbers” while still letting you know exactly which numbers they are not about. Curiously, those whose ministries attract large numbers (and who draw many of their management and marketing techniques from the numbers-driven world of business) seem most likely to offer this disclaimer.

Dream with us of an America transformed. At a sold-out concert at the Las Vegas House of Blues, hundreds of fans of the hottest pop sensation of the year sing along to lyrics that unabashedly proclaim dependence on God. On national television, an innovative and much-lauded musical artist reads from Scripture. The major media, no longer bastions of anti-Christian prejudice, take faith seriously, and novels written by Christian authors and dealing with explicitly Christian themes hold several slots on The New York Times best-seller lists. Meanwhile, the nation’s highest political leader repeatedly and publicly acknowledges his need for God and his reliance on faith. This is a world in which Christians are no longer second-class hangers-on in a secular culture. It is a world in which the gospel is presented on MTV, ABC, ESPN, and the highest-profile Internet sites. It is a world in which believers no longer feel ashamed.

Sound like an impossible dream? Wrong. It’s the United States of America, circa 2000 A.D.

To understand the power of “generation” talk in America, you’ve got to think like a marketing executive.

One of the cornerstones of modern marketing—closely related to the all-important concept of brand—is the theory of segmentation. Once upon a time, soap manufacturers made soap, a product that pretty much everyone needs. Then along came Proctor & Gamble, who realized that they could make several different kinds of soap and market them to different audiences. In the process, they could sell not just soap (for which consumers would pay a certain price based on supply and demand) but also an additional intangible sense of quality—not necessarily the quality of being a better bar of soap, but the quality of being better for a particular kind of person (say, a housewife or a busy businessman). Consumers, P&G discovered along with every other modern corporation, would pay for that intangible quality of fitness “for people like me”—and since that quality was intangible and thus very cheap to produce, it was highly profitable.

Paul sobbed as he prayed, “God, I need to know that you forgive me.” Though he and his girlfriend had ended their addictive sexual relationship several months earlier, he could not quite believe God had forgiven him. Reciting the words from a Graham Kendrick song we often sang—“And now the love of God shall flow like rivers. Come wash your guilt away: Live again!”—he looked into our eyes and confessed, “I need that kind of cleansing.”

Lisa had experienced God’s grace in her life. Even so, she could not escape the sense that she needed to earn God’s approval and that her efforts were never quite good enough. I understood her problem better when she told me her wealthy grandfather, who had paid her older brother’s way through Harvard, had let her know he had no interest in paying for her Harvard education. “If I had been a boy … ” she began, her voice trailing off.