I’ve never shopped at Forever 21 (truly, I’m not the target audience as you can see from the picture below), but I didn’t realize just how true that was until recently.

Students of mine are doing research on the value-priced clothing store Forever 21 and they told me something that was fairly shocking. On the bottom of all Forever 21 bags, it says “John 3:16″. I couldn’t believe it so I went to the store myself and asked for a bag. There is was!

I went online and evidently this has been going on for about 5 years (at least in the blogosphere). I also went to Forever 21’s website and while they do not promote their evangelicalism they do have a line of clothing for “extended sized” women called Faith 21.

I don’t know if this is suggesting that you need more faith when you are larger or if you need faith to help lose weight (something written about extensively here). In either case, it seems like an odd name for a brand extension.

I can only wonder how many Jews or atheists or Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims in NYC know about this evangelical connection when walk through the store on 14th Street….and what other “secular” retailers have an evangelical mission that we don’t know about.

…on kiva.org, that is.

I was at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference this weekend and Premal Shah, President of Kiva was one of the key note speakers.

For those of you who don’t know, Kiva is a microfinancing site that allows individuals to make loans (as small as $25) to people in (mostly) developing countries. (A current controversy the company is facing is their decision to support American workers as well as those in the so-called Third World.)

To increase the fun factor on the site, Kiva came up with the idea of creating teams so that groups of people could donate money and track their giving against other groups. The two teams that lead the pack are the “Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious” and the “Kiva Christians.” However, aethists have given close to $1.7 million while the Christians are just under one million dollars.

I find this very interesting, though I’m not sure exactly what it means. It could be that atheists are more internet savvy than their Christian brethren. It could mean that Christians are giving to their churches rather than Kiva. We don’t know. However, it does beg the question: since atheists don’t give to a religious institution (which is a substantial part of the donated money in the United States) where do atheists tend to donate…besides Kiva, of course?