You concentrate on iconoclasts, misfits, hotheads, and the extremes of spiritual behavior. Why is that the place from which to tell the story of American religious belief and experience?

The margins of faith in America can tell you a lot about the mainstream. Oftentimes, they overlap. Take the 2,000 pagans who gathered in a field in Kansas, with whom we spent several days. About half the people we met were military, most of them lifers, and nearly all of them basically very square, wholesome, kind people. I think if most of those military pagans came to visit me in New York, they'd be terrified -- too weird, not enough barbecue. Or the "cowboy Christians" in Texas we write about. Cowboy Christianity is in fact a growing movement, but what it really represents is this idea of lifestyle Christianity, that you can shape your church to your particular interests, whether that's cowboys or Christian pop or extreme sports, all of which are increasingly common motifs.

We talked to a storm chaser who looks for hints of the divine within tornadoes because we wanted to understand the ways in which environmentalism literally becomes a religious belief system. We talked to gang bangers tattooing the Virgin Mary on themselves as protection against gunfire because -- well, because it was a great story. The fact is, those guys aren't freaks. They and their community in East L.A. consider them traditional Catholics. Each one of the stories we tell in the book reflects a very particular place and set of beliefs, often peculiar ones, but each story is also a reflection of much broader trends within American religion.

Now you're editing THE REVEALER, a Web review of religion and the press. What are you learning from your surveys of the media about coverage of religion in America?

That much of the media is not nearly as sophisticated about belief and religion as most people are. I'm not talking about specific knowledge of theology, although even there it's just amazing how ill-informed some major journalists are, but about the way belief works in the world. The media believe that labels tell the whole story. You say "Christian right" and you instantly know who you're talking about. But that's not true. George McVay, the cowboy preacher we met in Mt. Vernon, Texas, and Rev. Oliver Barnes, who led his Ft. Lauderdale Pentecostal congregation in a rousing gospel service to pray that a man gets the electric chair, are both self-described fundamentalists. As voters, they probably support the same man. But that's where the similarity ends. The media aren't interested in the differences. I don't believe that's because they are anti-religion, as some conservative critics would charge. Rather, it has to do with underlying assumptions about the world. Reporters look for common denominators, and most of the media operate on the assumption that politics is what matters most in people's lives. So they look for religious common denominators that can translate into political activity, which is like studying a giraffe by measuring its ears.

Do you have any stories to share about American religion from your research and travels that didn't make it into the final version of the book?

Holy dirt eaters and Hindu pickle collectors and the tall, beautiful, Caucasian Sikhs of New Mexico; the no-cross Christian fundamentalist "life domes" popping up like mushrooms across the country and the old Catholic churches being turned by immigrants into new Hindu temples; the Hasidic organic farm in Belchertown, Massachusetts, created to hasten the Messiah, and the militant pagan anarchists trying to erase a couple millennia of technology on compounds in the Northwest; the gay santeros of Miami beaming bad luck to Castro, and a sexy evangelical spy whose real name, we kid you not, was Molly Malone; the abandoned pulpit we found on the street in Chelsea and the funniest Reconstructionist rabbi in America, working with her Jewish Franciscan boyfriend to help restore the queen of Hawaii. And that's the stuff we weren't even looking for.

We're each working on our own books now, but fortunately we get another chance to do this kind of storytelling. We're working with a radio producer to make a show of stories we collected from our book tour; it'll air nationally on NPR in the fall. One of our favorites comes from a young guy named David Peters, whom we met when we gave a reading at Hampshire College, my alma mater, in Amherst, Massachusetts. For his senior thesis in anthropology, David was studying witch doctors and traditional magic. He'd spent months in Cameroon in Africa. One day this witch doctor says to him, "You came all the way to Africa to see miracles? You really ought to try Worcester, Massachusetts." Turns out the witch doctor's dream had been to go to Worcester to see the "living saint," Audrey Santo, a Catholic girl in a coma who is believed to be the cause of Eucharistic miracles, like bleeding holy images. The witch doctor says to this young guy David, "You should try that. You passed it by about 3,000 miles. Check your own backyard."