Trend trackers sure got a jolt to the system with that ARIS study (the one that found the numbers of "nones" were up while believers are down).  Since its release, the secular and religious press have been reeling.  It's hard to believe that Newsweek's "Decline and Fall of Christian America" still has the blogosphere abuzz. Why has the idea that New England is turning atheist managed to hold the microsecond-long attention span of the Internet for more than two weeks?

The evidence is fairly persuasive.  The number of atheists in America has nearly doubled, and the Northeast has gone into the "none" column.  But on the Sunday after Easter, when America's remaining Christians heard the story of doubting Thomas, two men are expressing their own doubts in the nation's ability to go secular.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of the new book "God Is Back," are standing behind American religion, and insisting that we're just in another period of reinventing our collective spirituality.  They rather cheekily point out in their Wall Street Journal column that "a fifth of the 'atheists' in a recent Pew Survey said that they believed in God, a semantic confusion rich in meaning."  They also remind us that TIME Magazine made the very same claim on its Easter edition cover: "Is God Dead?"—back in 1966.

For Micklethwait and Wooldrige, American religion remains the capitalistic enterprise it has always been, spurred forward by "pastorpreneurs," a term that applies to George Whitefield as well as Rick Warren.

It seems that the rest of the press is caught in the crossfire of this debate between Newsweek and the believers.  The result is a flurry of confusing and contradictory coverage.  According to one article, "religion is growing," then says another, "religion is doomed."  One Seattle PI blogger even offered the dizzying headline, "Christian America is shrinking and expanding at the same time."

None of this really seems to move the discussion forward.  The interesting question to me is: how is religion evolving?  In a month of so much forgettable reporting on religion, the story that stood out for me was the AP's Jay Lindsay's profile of a humanist chaplain at Harvard, and the new idea of building a congregation without the notion of God.

Very few of the original American branches of Protestantism have persisted unaltered since the 19th century.  Some look very different, others have died out completely, and still others have taken root. The role of reporters, bloggers and pundits shouldn't be to proclaim the death of religion, (after all wouldn't that put some of them out of a job?) but rather to spot what new forms American religion takes next.