HEATHER LEFT THE charismatic movement the night after she walked through a "fire tunnel" and pretended that the Holy Spirit had knocked her down. A fire tunnel consists of two parallel lines of eager Christians and looks like a Virginia reel. People walk through the tunnel one by one as the others pray for them. The idea behind this is that when godly Christians pray actively, particularly when they pray together with noise and energy--when they "shout to the Lord," as a popular song by former Hillsong Worship leader Darlene Zschech puts it, reworking Psalm 100--the Holy Spirit comes, and then spiritual current flows from the hands of those who pray into the bodies of those for whom they pray. Sometimes, those who pray feel their hands grow warm and tingle with power. Often, those who walk stumble and fall, zapped by God's power, drunk on God's love. They fall because when the spirit comes in force, it feels so overwhelming that their knees give out. They lie on the ground, grinning with joy. But when Heather fell down that evening, the way everyone expected, she knew she was faking it. She never went back to the charismatic church again.

The God that emerged from the cultural tumult of the 1960s was meant to shoot into people's lives like a bolt of lightning. The 'new paradigm" churches, as University of Southern California religious studies professor Donald Miller called them, emerged in response to the spiritual sensibility of the age. People had experimented not only with psychedelic drugs but also with yoga and transcendental meditation. The Beatles made Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi famous. On April 8,1966, Time magazine published a cover story titled "Is God Dead?" In this context, the new Christian churches imagined themselves as reaching out to the unchurched, rescuing young people from acid and introducing them to a Christian life that was not only just as vivid--but better. They promised their followers that they would meet God in encounters as passionate and as real as those of the first disciples.

These new churches announced that they didn't do "church"; they offered "a real God for a real people," in the phrase I saw emblazoned on a T-shirt at a Christian conference. This God wanted an intimate relationship with you, to talk with you about ordinary things--how your day went, what you were having for dinner. He was your friend but also God, and he could do miracles. Filled with the power of his Holy Spirit, these neo-Pentecostal or Third Wave Christians--what I will call "charismatic evangelicals"--healed the ill and cast out demons. They did the things Jesus said they would do in John 14:12: "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." That was the message: he who believes will have "hands of power." By the 1990s, around a quarter of all Americans belonged to one of...