IF YOU'RE THE SORT OF PERSON who reads stories by scrambling feature writers who spackle three anecdotal trends together in order to convince you, the gullible reader, that a movement is sweeping the land, then I probably don't have to tell you that four out of five culture critics agree: Jesus is hot!

He's been around since time immemorial, but now, as an outgrowth of the non-stop publicity of Mel Gibson's The Passion, His time has come, both as a conversation-starter, and as a merchandising spur. It seems the kids are snatching up Jesus nail pendants like they were 1998-era WWJD bracelets--the late '90s being the last time a next Great Awakening was allegedly on the verge of tip-off.

The fact that our next Great Awakening never quite arrives due to our wanton, materialistic culture never seems to give forecasters pause, not when an editor is demanding a Bible-beater lifestyle piece on deadline. So on we read. In a recent Entertainment Weekly symposium on Christians in Hollywood (let's let those four incongruent terms settle in: Christians, Hollywood, Entertainment Weekly, symposium) the creator of the Christian Veggie Tales grouses that the evangelical community doesn't hold Gibson to the same standards of historical accuracy: "I know what kind of letters we get when we portray a prophet like Daniel as a cucumber." Or there's Time magazine, which recently detailed how celebrities are favoring "Jesus is my homeboy" t-shirts, how Dyptyque is now selling scented candles meant to evoke the aroma of a Russian Orthodox Church, and how a new Bible titled "Refuel," which is packaged like a skateboarding magazine, is being marketed to teenage boys, who will find, along with their New Testament, articles on everything from how to resist pornography (try exxit.org) to how to remove plantar warts (duct tape = miracle worker).

WITH THE DEEPEST EXPRESSIONS of our faith being turned into consumerist elevator music, it was just a matter of time before a full-fledged Christian satire arrived, as it now has in Saved!--a hormonal high-school movie with a twist, in that it is set entirely at American Eagle Christian Academy. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, there is a healthy, if not overpopulated, tradition of Christian satire--the theory being that if God didn't want us to laugh at His creation, He wouldn't have made so much of it laughable.

More recently, there has been Monty Python's The Life of Brian, in which Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is reinterpreted by the hard-of-hearing as, "Blessed are the cheesemakers." Then there is landoverbaptist.org, a cyber-church which parodies narrow-thinkers and Scripture-distorters with a sermon archive that contains titles such as "From the Tower of Babel to Shuttle Demise: God Doesn't Want Jews Anywhere Near His Home," or one that tends to make us Protestants chuckle: "Prepare 'Goodbyes' For Your Catholic Friends, For they Won't Be Joining Us In the Hereafter!" in which "Brother Harry Hardwick explains why Jesus doesn't like people who pray to his Mother, count beads, and insist on getting their spiritual advice from pedophiles."