How unfathomable! He looks just like us<\/a>!<\/p>\n In the Brownian worldview, all religions \u2014 even Roman Catholicism \u2014 have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It\u2019s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized \u201creligiousness\u201d detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.<\/p>\n The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion<\/a> don\u2019t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion\u2019s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away<\/a>. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who\u2019s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they\u2019re making<\/a> or how many times they\u2019ve been married<\/a>.<\/p>\n These are Dan Brown\u2019s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels<\/a> and alternative Christianities<\/a>, he serves up a Jesus who\u2019s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah \u2014 sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, the funniest thing about all this utter conformism is that Brown readers love to boast about how daring they are for their intellectual independence from unthinking doctrine and dogma.<\/p>\n