By RAY WADDLE

In the early 90s I started noticing a revolution underway around town.

Outdoor church marquee signs springing up. Then alternative services on Saturday nights, healing services on weekdays. Direct-mail invitations to come-as-you-are worship. Sanctuary video screens and electric guitars -- the disappearance of hymnals and pipe organs in some places. Glossy brochures, professional church publicists, fresher coffee in the hallways.

And, at the newest worship centers in town, plenty of parking.

Before our eyes, the traditional faith landscape had turned into an innovative spiritual marketplace. The Gospel of Mark was making room for the gospel of marketing.

This caused an unforeseen division in religious America.. One side happily embraced business-style marketing techniques as an efficient way to attract new audiences. The other side shunned marketing as a four-letter word dripping in secularism and alien to biblical values.

The conflict spills into the 21st century. Pro-marketing congregations often log big increases in membership. Critics call them sellouts to entertainment. Anti-marketers do church the old and honored way, with mid-tempo organ music and the same order of service every week. But young people are staying away; many old-school churches are dying.

Enter sociologist Rodney Stark, who suggests there is nothing new about this state of flux and exertion. The marketing of religion -- the economy of salvation, if you will -- has been going on 6,000 years.

Religion works rather like an economy, he says. There are producers (denominations) and consumers (us). The consumers are a diverse lot. Some want a demanding spiritual message. Others want it soft and non-committal. Some consumers are high-energy curb-side activists. Others are mystics.

This consumer pluralism remains stable over time. The rise of religions, and their fall, is tied to their success or failure at understanding the public demand for spirituality. Religious “monopolies” -- state-subsidized religions, whether in ancient Sumer or modern Europe -- die out because they get lazy. They lose touch with consumer needs, and believers become indifferent.

A free-wheeling system of competing faiths and styles -- the American scene -- keeps spiritual supply and demand in balance.

Stark, who teaches at Baylor University, will elaborate on the history of religious markets in a free public lecture series here starting Tuesday (FEB 14) at the Vanderbilt Student Life Center. The topics are: The Market Approach to Understanding Religion (Feb. 14), Subsidized Religions: 6000 Years of Negligence and Laxity (Feb. 28), Religious Competition and Roman Piety (March 14), and Christian Establishments and the Neglect of Faith (March 28). The lectures are at 6 p.m., following a 5 p.m. reception.

Stark is a blunt, readable theorist who often goes against the grain of conventional academic wisdom. In recent books, he has defied fashionable latter-day debunkers by arguing that monotheism gave birth to science and Christianity led to capitalism. He has shown how religion in America grew stronger -- and spiritually demanding churches prospered -- once freedom of faith and competition became national habits.

In a recent interview, he criticized mainline Protestant churches. They are losing membership because they are fixated on (liberal) politics and neglecting traditional faith, he said.

“It’s a little like going to a ballgame and no one’s going to bat.”

These church bodies have declined since the 50s, he said -- not the 1950s but the 1850s, when their growth rates started to fall below the general population growth rate, and they started losing market share.

Churches that preach sin, salvation, hell and hope -- churches that still “hold church” -- do well.

“If you forget to hold church, people won’t come.”

I think he is right about pluralism. Temperament and taste create hundreds of theological niches. (My theory is people worship according to the kind of spiritual authority they gravitate towards. Some honor the holy text as their source, or the long story of church tradition, or the bread and wine of Holy Communion, or that authoritative person in the pulpit, or they encounter the sacred in nature or poetry.)

But surely politics is not just a liberal church habit and theme. The Iraq war, health care, the culture wars all seep into congregational life across the board these days -- right and left. Political identity (pro-Bush, anti-Bush) has given many a congregation a new surge of energy and purpose. The conservative churches are just as political as the leftwingers – the difference is conservative congregations are far more in tune with the cultural spirit of the moment. Understanding the cultural moment is what the liberals need to place on their agenda.