Ave Maria is a planned town near Naples, Florida which will be devoted to Catholics. As planned, it will have 3,000 full-time residents with an additional 5,000 college students in attendance at Ave Maria University, a new Catholic University. This is not to say that non-Catholics will not be allowed in, though they might feel uncomfortable.

When I first heard about this planned community, I couldn’t help thinking of Disney’s Celebration, Florida — a community planned by Disney that was scuffed at when first announced in the mid-1990s. (See Slate for a slide show of this community.) However, the naysayers were proved wrong and Celebration has become quite a successful community.

What this also led me to think about was the whole idea of community — something that had been the purview of religion for centuries but seemed to slip away more recently. Religion had ceded community to secular institutions, which did not in many cases do a particularly good job in fulfilling people’s needs. When the church growth movement discovered this obvious market need, they worked to fill it with a vengence. In fact, the ability to provide community is one of the things that has helped make megachurches so successful. Many megachurches are erected at busy crossroads in newly developed exurbs. While the municipalities may not provide much in the way of community building, the megachurches stepped in to fill the void for many transplanted Americans.

Ave Maria eliminates the need to go to the megachurch. No matter where you are you are in the “sacred space.” I find that kind of creepy. I certainly understand the need that we all have for community. I’m just not sure that a church shouldn’t be balanced with the secular.

I believe we have finally achieved the ultimate in religious commercialization.

Yesterday, Wal-Mart announced that they will be selling religious action figures (see story). These dolls, which include Jesus and Samson, will be available in 425 stores around the country. This represents about one third of Wal-Mart outlets. Which stores will receive these products is being determined by which stores sell the largest number of Bibles (my suspicion is that distribution will be focused in the South). The dolls are produced by One2believe and it is worth the clickthrough to check out the website.

This is not this mega-retailer’s first foray into religious commerce. It began with books like the Left Behind series and Prayer of Jabez and then The Purpose-Driven Life. Sales of religious products grew in the wake of The Passion of the Christ, which led to increased sale of not just DVDs, but also religious jewelry.

As goes Wal-Mart, so goes the rest of the retail business. Expect to see Jesus at a store near you.

The latest trend in video file sharing is YouTube knockoffs. One that is currently in beta is GodTube, a site devoted to religious videos mostly with a Christian theme.

Like YouTube, the quality of the videos is decidedly uneven. Videos by record companies are (mostly) well produced, while much of the other content is not. A sampling of what appears on this site includes video of youth church services, a Fox News report on Muslim extremists in Canada and a clip from The 700 Club.

As Wire noted in an article called The Best of the Worst of GodTube, “And while many of the videos GodTube has to offer are no more offensive in their pervasive stupidity than the majority of YouTube’s slack-jawed amateur offerings, there is something a bit insidious about them.” Insidious because the videos have a fundamentalist Christian bent that seem unwilling to acknowledge an alternative point of view. While we, ok I, may not agree with this, it seems that this is the whole point of Wired 2.0. To give people a place to say what they want to — whether it should be said in a public forum or not.

From a marketing perspective, one of the things I found interesting about the site is that there are a number of promotional pieces produced by book publisher, Thomas Nelson. There was a 3 minute clip for Max Lucado, another for a book written by Denise Jackson, wife of country music star Alan Jackson, and an eBible demo. I expect that other publishers — where’s Zondervan? — looking to reach a young audience will find this outlet soon as well.

USA Today, the arbiter of all things mainstream, noted the recent rise in “children” who are more religious than their parents in an article called “Religious bonds divide some parents, kids.”

I put children in quotes because the people they are writing about are in their early 20s, most of them college students. The age of these newly religious understandable, because this tends to be the time in life when decisions about religious practice are assessed or reassessed. Not surprisingly, different parents have different reactions to these changes in their offspring; some are proud that their children have found something that nourishes them spiritually, while others miss favorite pastimes like father-son talks in a local bar.

Growing religiosity is actually not a new phenomenon. Megachurches and the increase in evangelical Protestantism has been in the news a lot in the last 20 years. While the article claims that growing orthodoxy is expanding in many different faiths, the piece does not provide context for this by including any sort of research.

One place where you may find some context is in The new faithful: Why young adults are embracing Christian orthodoxy. In this 2004 book, Colleen Carroll writes of how many Gen Xers are finding faith in more extreme faith practices. She particularly looks at the growth in Catholic and Orthodox churches in addition to Protestant ones.

Intuitively, this surge toward orthodoxy makes sense to me. Gen X has been asked about everything in their lives from the time they were young children. They were the first generation to experience significant divorce rates which added to the pampering many of them received. As adults, they have hit a sort of decision overload. Therefore it should not be surprising that they want someone else to make decisions for them, and orthodoxy certainly does that.

I will be curious to see if this continues as a trend as our lives becoming increasingly less certain.