ASHLEY WIERSMA (Student, Wheaton College): My marketing class right now is doing a really good job of integrating faith and learning from an ethical standpoint.

SHELER: Wheaton and other evangelical schools are sometimes criticized for requiring faculty to sign statements of faith, pledging fidelity to key evangelical doctrines.

Dr. WOLFE: Evangelicals say it's the individual himself or herself that should find a personal relationship with Jesus. But then when you have a faith statement and you have to sign it, and it's a pledge, you're taking away that voluntary character.

Dr. LITFIN: We are teaching here from a Christian worldview, we are not just teaching about the Christian worldview. We are looking for people who themselves embody it.

SHELER: Also controversial, Wheaton students must sign a pledge prohibiting them from drinking and smoking. Until recently, the pledge even forbade dancing.

GRADY ROOT (Student, Wheaton College): I don't have a problem with the pledge. A lot of people say that the pledge is restrictive, it keeps us from drinking and smoking and stuff like that. But I find those are things that I would choose to do regardless of whether or not I had a pledge.

SHELER: Wheaton dropped its ban on dancing just last year and, for the first time, held two on-campus dances -- another sign that evangelicals sometimes blend in as they engage the wider culture.

But Christian pop culture also has an impact.

RICK WARREN (Pastor, Saddleback Church, Orange County, California): Really, THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE is about doing the will of God, saying "God, not my plan, your plan -- not my will, your will."

SHELER: Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, is author of the runaway best-seller, THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE. It has sold more than 15 million copies and topped the NEW YORK TIMES advice best-seller list for weeks, promising to "reduce stress and simplify decision making" by pointing readers to Christ.

Mr. WARREN: Jesus said you find your life by losing it. By giving your life away in service, you find fulfillment. The world thinks fulfillment comes through salary or through success or through status or through sex. But actually, the Bible teaches, fulfillment comes through service.

Dr. WOLFE: I think he's just simply put his finger on an unease that lots of Americans are feeling, that somehow their lives aren't organized to a particular purpose. I see his book as appealing to many kinds of people, and not just evangelicals.

SHELER: Other Christian books have been major best-sellers. The "Left Behind" series, action- packed novels about the second coming of Christ, by evangelical authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, have sold more than 42 million copies worldwide, although LEFT BEHIND the movie flopped outside evangelical circles.

But evangelical marketing muscle helped make Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST a box-office hit in the U.S., grossing $360 million in the first 10 weeks.

Professor BILL ROMANOWSKI (Calvin College): I think the mainstream media is most interested in profit making, and if they think they could make money off religious groups, then I think they will make money off religious groups. Are they particularly hostile? Sometimes they are. Sometimes I think it's the people in mainstream media who don't understand Christian values and how people in religious communities think.

SHELER: The billion-dollar-a-year Christian music industry remains a major evangelical success story. It began in the early '70s with artists like Amy Grant mixing religious lyrics and contemporary music.

AMY GRANT (Recording Artist): And so you get someone who is a believer, and they play guitar and are at the coffeehouse, and so they are suddenly singing songs that sound like all the contemporary musicians they were listening to. But suddenly they were putting faith lyrics on it -- messages very directly about Jesus, about faith, about belief.

SHELER: For those early Christian pop singers, music was a ministry, their songs a form of evangelism. That was until Amy Grant went to the top of the charts in 1991 with "Baby Baby" -- a wholesome but secular love song.

Prof. ROMANOWSKI: When Amy Grant began to sing songs that were not explicitly religious, her fans just went ballistic. They were very critical of her, saw her as selling out. In another sense, you can also argue that Amy Grant was beginning to transcend or get beyond what was a pretty limited idea of what Christian popular art had to be.

Ms. GRANT: I feel like because somebody is a believer, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are required to have all their songs express their faith. One lover of art might be most profoundly affected by a painting of a crucifix. Another lover of art might be moved to tears to the point of falling on their knees and seeing God for the first time, really looking at a landscape. And, for an artist, how you express your wonder at life and your hope and your faith and all of that -- there are no rules to it.

SHELER: So in the end, who is influencing whom in this engagement of evangelicals and culture?

Prof. ROMANOWSKI: In terms of their ideal, their model of using popular art to express very specific religious convictions, I don't think that you see that taking root in the mainstream popular culture. In fact, I think you see the opposite happening. When evangelical artists get into that mainstream culture, they have to figure out ways to tell stories that are not explicitly religious.

Dr. WOLFE: One of my arguments really is that evangelicals often lose this battle. They're far more shaped by the culture than they are capable of shaping the culture. I could give lots of examples, but I think the whole megachurch phenomenon. You downplay the Christian symbolism, you take the crosses off the church, you make the pews as comfortable as you possibly can, you put McDonald's franchises in the lobby. Sometimes you don't even know you're in church when you go to church because the church doesn't look like a church.

SHELER: Putting faith into action, sorting out what it means to be in the world but not of it --those are the challenges facing evangelicals like the Clausens.

Ms. CLAUSEN: I know some of my friends look at me a little funny sometimes and think, "Wow, you are pretty strict with the movies you let your kids watch. Your kids are always calling home saying, 'Mom, can I go to this movie?'" If they feel this way, I'm very quick to say that I can't do this on my own; I need a blueprint, and I've chosen God's word. Yes, I'll be labeled as an evangelical Christian, but boy, I feel that's what's helping me to parent and to be a good wife and a good neighbor.

SHELER: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Jeff Sheler in St. Charles, Illinois.

ABERNETHY: Several of the artists in our story were big winners this week at the Dove Awards -- gospel music's version of the Grammys. Cece Winans won Contemporary Gospel Recorded Song of Year. MercyMe was named Group of the Year. And Switchfoot captured several awards, including Top Contemporary Rock Album.