In ad and media circles, where "irreverent" is a common term of praise, it's easy to forget a simple fact: Many Americans are decidedly reverent. Amid all that's new in the Internet era, age-old religious belief still plays a significant role in people's lives, often influencing their relationship with the consumer culture they inhabit. For marketers who pay minute attention to other aspects of people's behavior, it would be a blunder, if not a sin, to overlook this large factor in American life.

For starters, belief in God is nearly universal in this country. Polls consistently find about nine in 10 adults saying they believe in God or some unnamed "higher power." Also more the rule than the exception are belief in miracles (79 percent of respondents in a Harris Poll last November), heaven (75 percent), angels (74 percent), the "survival of the soul after death" (69 percent), hell (62 percent) and the devil (62 percent).

Amid the growing cultural diversity of the U.S. population, the vast majority of religious Americans are still Christians. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey last month, three-fourths of respondents identified themselves as Protestants or Catholics, while those professing no religion outnumbered those professing any non-Christian faith (see first chart on facing page). However, the predominance of Christian faiths in the U.S. coexists with considerable diversity of belief and practice. A report from Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, based on 2005 polling, offered this rebuttal to the notion of "monolithic" religious belief: "Americans may agree that God exists. They do not agree about what God is like, what God wants for the world, or how God feels about politics."

One might expect people who adhere to a belief in the afterlife to be less materialistic in this life. It's not so clear, though, whether this is actually the case. Polling this May by The Barna Group found evangelicals much less likely than respondents in general (43 percent vs. 70 percent) to rate "having a comfortable lifestyle" as a highly desirable goal. Then again, religious people sometimes think God wants them to have the good life as well as the good afterlife. Research by Baylor in 2007 found 57 percent of megachurch attendees agreeing that "God rewards the faithful with major successes."

"I would offer up that most Christian people don't think much about materialism, but they do think about how and where they spend their money," says Scott A. Shuford, CEO of FrontGate Media, a Mission Viejo, Calif.-based firm that works to connect companies with the audience of devout Christians. "These passionately Christian people still buy fashion, entertainment, travel and so on, but their closet is likely to include NOTW or Truth apparel along with Hollister and Hurley." (NOTW stands for "not of this world.") Adds Shuford: "Their African travel may include a missions trip along with the vacation."

Some research has looked at whether highly religious people are less apt than secular people to develop a devout attachment to consumer brands -- precisely because they already have a real religious attachment in their lives. Tulin Erdem, a professor at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business, was one of the authors of a paper on this topic. She says research has indeed shown that brands play a smaller role in religious people's lives. "We also find some evidence that this is partly so because both religion and brands fulfill similar needs -- sense of belonging, etc. -- so they act in that sense as substitutes."

Opinion research gives some mixed hints about the number of people for whom faith is so central an element in life that it's apt to influence their behavior as consumers. In one important respect, a majority of Americans are actively rather than passively religious. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life found 58 percent of adults saying they pray every day. And they don't think they're talking into a void: "A significant minority of Americans say their prayers result in definite and specific answers from God at least once a month (31 percent), with nearly one in five adults (19 percent) saying they receive direct answers to specific prayer requests at least once a week." The 2005 Baylor polling indicates how the incidence of daily prayer varies by religious denomination (see chart at far right on facing page).

On the question of how often people attend religious services, different polls get significantly differing results, which makes you wonder if some people are risking a divine bolt of retribution by lying about the matter. Anyhow, 37 percent of respondents to an Ipsos Public Affairs poll this summer said they attend services at least once a week -- as did 25 percent in a 2007 Harris Poll, 44 percent in a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll last month, 39 percent in Pew's 2007 polling, and so on.

Shedding light on how faith might shape believers' take on consumer culture, Pew looked at whether religious Americans feel at odds with modern society and with Hollywood. Among all respondents affiliated with a particular religion, 40 percent feel a "conflict between being a devout religious person and living in a modern society." That rose to 49 percent among those who attend evangelical churches and to 46 percent among attendees of historically black churches. And 42 percent said they feel their values are "threatened by Hollywood."



Some Barna research gives a further indication of the quandary serious Christians can feel as consumers. In a pre-Christmas poll last year of religious Christians with kids age 2 to 18, 78 percent said they'd bought DVDs of movies or TV shows for their teenagers, and 87 percent said they'd bought these for kids 13 and under. "However, one-quarter of those adults (26 percent) did not feel comfortable with the DVD products they bought." Likewise for music CDs: "About six of 10 parents bought these discs for their kids, yet one out of every three of those parents (33 percent) had concerns about the content." As for video games, 39 percent of the parents of pre-teens were concerned about the content of games they'd bought, as were 46 percent of parents of teens. In the report on the data, the research firm's directing leader, George Barna, wrote, "Parents have to make a choice as to what is more important: pleasing their kids' taste and sensibilities, or satisfying God's standards as defined in the Bible. When the decision made is to keep their children happy, the Christian parent is often left with a pit in their stomach."

For FrontGate's Shuford, advertising has become "a defining part of culture." As such, he says, "I do believe that many are as offended by and reject the OMG and OMFG Gossip Girl ads or an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog as they are by anything else in culture that specifically offends them." Still, it's easy to overstate the degree to which believers in general and devout Christians in particular are estranged from modern consumer culture. While noting the term "offended" is apt for describing how some Christians react to some ads, Shuford suggests that "it might be better stated as 'uncomfortable with.' " Though certainly wishing the ads were less raunchy than is sometimes the case, "not all Christian consumers expect Christian sanitized messages from the non-Christian culture they live in. They are also human. A sexy David Beckham or Megan Fox ad gets noticed, but they won't necessarily feel great about the brand as a result."

Asked by Adweek to cite themes in advertising that are most apt to rub strongly religious people the wrong way, The Barna Group's Barna replied: "Common executions that are offensive are those that feature gratuitous sexual imagery or language; derisive comments about God, churches or Christians; overtly supportive imagery or content that favors or supports homosexuality or sexual promiscuity; and campaigns that suggest there are no moral absolutes." Of course, devout churchgoers are scarcely the only people who take exception to pop culture and advertising. Byron Johnson, one of the professor-authors of the Baylor reports, remarks, "I'd be surprised if many Americans were not offended by most of the advertising they view."

When religious Americans take umbrage at ads, movies, books and the like, the people who created those works may dismiss these critics as narrow-minded souls who habitually consign all who disagree with them to fire and brimstone. One bit of polling casts doubt on such a stereotype, though. Pew's research found "a non-dogmatic approach to faith" on the part of a majority of religious Americans. The idea that "many religions can lead to eternal life" won agreement from 66 percent of Protestants (including 57 percent of those who attend evangelical churches), 79 percent of Catholics, 82 percent of Jews and 56 percent of Muslims.

While evangelicals and other believers may look askance at some kinds of modern marketing, one school of thought suggests they might be especially receptive to another genre: green marketing. There's been much talk in the past year, anyway, that highly religious Americans have embraced environmentalism as a way of caring for the Earth that God has created. Barna's polling on the topic casts some doubt on that idea. It does find that "millions of evangelicals -- often perceived to be on the sidelines of the green movement -- have become more environmentally conscious in the last year." But while 63 percent of Americans in general say they're certain that global warming is taking place, just 27 percent of evangelicals say the same. Moreover, notes George Barna, religious Christians "are just as skeptical as the rest of the consumer marketplace about the proliferating claims of 'greenness' being made by many organizations."

In part, skepticism about global warming is of a piece with the generally conservative slant of highly religious Americans. In Pew's polling, for example, 50 percent of those who attend services at least once a week also fell on the conservative end of the political spectrum, while just 12 percent identified themselves as liberal. But this doesn't mean people think God has political leanings of his own. In the 2005 Baylor polling, just 4 percent of respondents said they believe God favors a particular political party. The number was higher among evangelicals, but still quite low (at 8 percent).

In any case, it isn't as though there's a strong consensus among Americans that religious views ought not shape one's political views -- even if one happens to be the president. In a Time/ABT SRBI poll this summer, 49 percent of respondents said the president should "allow his own personal religious faith to guide him in making decisions as president," versus 38 percent who said he should not. Having seen how some other presidential advisers have performed over the years, maybe voters figure God could hardly do worse.