In fact, this embrace has gone even further than Beaudoin suggests. Popular culture is the universal reference point of the young, a new measure of community. People understand one another by the music they like or loathe, by the movies they embrace, and the TV shows that mirror their lives. X-Files's fans share one set of values, while Ally McBeal lovers treasure another.

It's dangerous to generalize about TV shows or their viewers, but anyone who works around younger people understands that, on Monday mornings, what nearly everyone is talking about at work isn't the latest news from Washington or a sermon they heard at church, but the weirdest indie film of the weekend or the gruesome battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan.

This passion is often cited as a prime example of how apathetic and uncivilized the young are. Look at how much they care about stupid music, TV, and movies, when there are so many serious issues, books, and other matters to consider.

Mostly, what's clear is that the young are creating a different kind of culture. Whether it's better or worse is for historians to sort out. Beaudoin seems to understand that institutions like journalism and religion have fairly narrow choices. They can change, or they can die.

"Far from residing in a cultural wasteland devoid of spiritual symbols, Generation X matured in a culture of complex and contradictory signs, some of them religious," Beaudoin claims. "Some currents within that Gen-X pop cultural stream carry more than mere microbes of an inchoate Gen-X spirituality. They are sufficient to begin funding a new theology by, for, and about a generation."

But the ferociously independent culture of the geeks challenges churches to preach and practice not from a position of power and righteousness, but from a sense of humility and weakness in the world -- a radical departure from the pious and hectoring stance taken by most religious leaders. When religious or political elders reach out to "young people," it is often in the most unbearably patronizing and ineffective of ways. Beaudoin is suggesting something much more radical and difficult.

His charge? "By shunning the trappings or privileged social status and seeking to serve, not be served, churches will respond faithfully not only to the prophetic change brought by Gen-X but, more important, to the example of Jesus," he writes.

Although Beaudoin rarely uses the term, he seems in Virtual Faith to be advancing a new kind of spiritual interactivity.

Interactivity is both leveling and humbling for the columnist, the politician, the pundit, and the priest. It alters the relationship between dispensers and receivers of information. It does, as Beaudoin suggests, demand a different way of thinking, a rejection of the imbalance of power between so many institutions and individual human beings. If journalism considers interactivity a bitter pill and resists it nearly to its own extinction, imagine how churches will respond.

"Being willing to sacrifice power and status for the sake of service to the gospel will do more for the church's message about Jesus than any amount of rhetoric from pulpits," Beaudoin says. "It will also go far in addressing Xers' suspicion of religious institutions."

He's right. He understands the culture he grew up in and its many problems with dogma and elitist institutions. It will take a lot more than humility to spread The Word in cyberspace. Even younger netizens have experienced unprecedented freedom of expression and access to diverse points of view. Why should they give that up to embrace dogma and somebody else's revealed words?

Still, real interactivity -- a realignment of the relationship between the dispensers and receivers of dogma -- would offer Christian churches (and other faiths) a radical opportunity to reinvigorate themselves and minister to netizens, rather than simply wag their fingers at the webheads' naughty and irreverent ways.

The Web is, at its heart, a rationalist culture. It's hard to imagine how fixed theologies like those of most organized religions could survive intact the online scrutiny given to ideas, opinions, and proclamations.

Religious interactivity would alter churches, just as it would probably alter the attitudes of many netizens. And Beaudoin seems to grasp that while the young resist the proclamations, they do instinctively embrace spiritual imagery all the time, from the fervent faith in the unknown (à laThe X-Files) to the poverty evoked by grunge. Spirituality seems to thrive and grow even when dogma fades. Email, the idea of human beings connecting powerfully to one another out in the ether, is inherently spiritual.

Beaudoin is issuing a powerful challenge to ecclesiastical authority by asking religious institutions, moral guardians, and political elders to stop fearing the irreverence of pop culture. And to listen, rather than lecture.

"The more popular culture is explored," he writes, "and the more irreverence is viewed as a legitimate mode of religiosity (in all its illegitimacy), the more Generation X will be shown as having a real religious contribution to make.

"Gen-X can also make great strides not only toward fostering its own spirituality but also toward reinvigorating religious institutions and challenging the faith of older generations."

If there is a weakness in many of Beaudoin's arguments, it is the presumption that, approached in a different, humbler, and more modern way, the young inhabitants of cyberspace will choose to make a conventional religious contribution at all. This is far from clear. If anything, this is a generation that makes up its own mind on its own terms at its own pace. Armed with new information -- with the new power to communicate with one another at will all over the world and with the ability to see and hear every imaginable point of view - Beaudoin may not grasp just how independent and different the group of people he calls Generation X really is.

Beaudoin has written a smart and compelling book. He makes much sense and writes about his generation's culture knowingly. Yet it's almost inconceivable that religion will respond to this vibrant new culture any more thoughtfully than politics or media have.

Our experience of the digital age so far suggests that powerful institutions would rather die than change and would rather decline than voluntarily loosen their iron grip on ideas and influence. And that the young people Beaudoin is so eager for religion to reach will end up shaping new kinds of institutions rather than accepting or embracing the ones we already have.

Related columns:

Part I of Katz's review of Virtual Faith

Is the Net the last free place to honestly discuss religion?

Phil Patton's Dreamland cannily explores the reality and mythology of a secret government compound.

On the big screen, the true meaning of The X-Files is revealed: love.