…can someone tell me how to write nothing pieces like this one and get them published in the NYTimes Magazine?

For personal reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, crisscrossing the West and the Midwest and noticing along the way just how far the new Bible Belt extends from its traditional Southern origins. Religious-themed T-shirts, posters for Christian rock concerts, signs promoting traveling evangelists and billboards preaching sexual abstinence don’t just dot the landscape; they are the landscape, especially in the smaller towns and cities. Christian pop culture seems, at times, to be all the pop culture such underdog places have, at least in any local, grass-roots sense. Big TV, big music and big film, by clustering in the nation’s glitziest ZIP codes and focusing — almost exclusively, at times — on the lives and loves of affluent young singles, have left vast swaths of the country to the preacher-folk, who’ve seized the day by slicking up their acts. It’s no wonder that some are now ready for prime time.

America’s first two Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th centuries, were not just religious movements, but democratic ones. They offered salvation at the retail level to the underrepresented, the overlooked and the previously uninterested, and they broke down the old institutional authority of a sheltered, privileged priest class. Suddenly, anyone could go to heaven, and almost anyone could lead them there. That’s what’s happening now, I sense, if you think of entertainers as our new priests and movies, books and songs as our new catechisms. This isn’t a fresh Awakening so much as a populist, media-savvy continuation of the fervor that first swept the seaboard colonies, then the frontier and, much later, my family home in a middle-class neighborhood of Phoenix.