By RAY WADDLE

Back in the whiz-bang prosperous 1990s, a prominent minister told me he sold his house at a good profit because the Lord arranged the timing and the price.

His chatty announcement embodied and transacted a bold theological shift: God the Creator had become God the Realtor. The Prime Mover had morphed into the Prime Rate Mover. Very 1994. Never mind that roughly 30,000 children in the world died of poverty and malnourishment the same day. Lost in the minister’s bottom-line giddiness was the old idea that God is the God of the have-nots too.

In flush times, economic exuberance tries to creep into religion, overpower it, reshape it, have its way with it, tossing out traditional reverence. Call it theological deregulation. When organized religion loses its hold, or when scripture no longer inspires divine awe and mystery, then people feel freer to redefine God according to impulse and mood, without embarrassment. God becomes the promoter of wealth, national superiority, or personal entitlement, or the sponsor of apocalyptic despair and deadly terrorism. God becomes no larger than my financial portfolio and no different from my rage.

The history of ideas, ethics, and war is really the history of competing ideas about the divine – God the vengeful warrior, the benign parent, the indifferent technician, the projection of boastful ego. What’s different today is official religion has lost its monopoly as emcee and gatekeeper of the debate about God.

In other words, deregulation. Snarky bloggers and bossy biologists, not just old-school priests and professors, hold tickets to the metaphysical free-for-all. In such a climate, a new book like, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by neuroscientist David Eagleman, can offer inventive, provocative speculations on God without much stir, reimagining the Lord as an overworked manager, or a married couple, or the size of a microbe who doesn’t even know we exist.

These wander far afield from the biblical record, of course, which posts dozens of divine images, including Comforter, Column of Fire, and unrivalled Creator. Such images previously regulated behavior. So did the Ten Commandments, worship traditions, and the conviction that an all-knowing God sees our every move. People internalized a sense of conscience, self-judgment and restraint.

The now-familiar litany of modern ills and evils – from sex abuse to shoddy workmanship to swinish greed – is plausibly explained by a widespread assumption that God is no longer watching. Theological deregulation.

What’s next? The humbled economy tests all complacent assumptions about God’s material manipulations on our behalf. I think the times will shock many believers back to an old reverence, and religion will re-regulate itself, based on the simple wisdom of admitting the difference between human limit and sacred ground. May God the Realtor yield ground again to God the reality.