They say we are moving more and more from a word-based culture to an image-based culture. The level of imitation by people is increasing dramatically.

More and more, people are being compelled by the culture’s influencers to succumb to conformity and imitation, indulging in escapism that’s intrinsically tied to the superficial and materialistic.

Just this past Friday, I caught part of an Oprah show in which a mother in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Naperville was certain her teen-aged daughter would be looked down upon by female classmates if she didn’t wear designer clothes from stores like Ambercrombie & Fitch, Limited Too and The Gap.

This same mother reasoned her child would have a better chance of being accepted into a hard-to-get-into college because she would be able to put down Naperville as her address on any application form.

In a Daily News story from last Wednesday about how teens are addicted to their cell phones, one 16-year-old kid from the Bronx was quoted saying, “If you personalize your phone with a screensaver and ring tone, it shows who you are.”

Another 16-year-old from Queens agreed, saying, “It’s your status. Just to make you look fresh. They’re gonna ask, ‘Where did you get that?’ It’s a show-off.”

Cindy Adams, columnist for the New York Post, wrote a week ago about how crowded the Hamptons is now becoming even in Spring, filled with people whose obvious motive is to feed their ego by putting on display their looks, their BMWs, their country club memberships, their dining options, their influential friends, etc.

She wrote, “At the first sign of a deer tick, folks with houses they’re dying to show off begin their pre-Memorial Day calls. Letting you know the coming summer’s tight with so many houseguests dying to stay over in order to see their new tennis court (badminton net/pool cover/septic tank) but, no matter how tough it is, they’ll manage to fit you in for a weekend. One friend rang to tell me, ‘Don’t worry—somhow we’ll squeeze you in.’ ”

Of course, none of this trend toward deeper imitation is lost on mainstream Christianity, whose very slogan lately has been, “What Would Jesus Do?”

By the thousands, churches around the country are now modeling everything about themselves after Rick Warren’s New Age-permeated “Purpose-Driven Church.” He’s training pastors by the tens of thousands to copy him right down to his penchant for Hawaiian shirts and sandals.

In his mega-bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” now said to be the second highest-selling non-fiction book in publishing history, right behind the Bible, Warren wholeheartedly recommends all we Christians imitate Jesus Christ.

“True spiritual maturity is all about learning to love like Jesus, and you can’t practice being like Jesus without being in relationship with other people,” he advises in his book. “What God cares about most is that whatever you do, you do in a Christlike manner.”

Warren’s “Point to Ponder” at the end of one chapter is, “I was created to become like Christ.” His “Question to Consider” in this same chapter is, “In what area of my life do I need to ask for the Spirit’s power to be like Christ today?”

What is so remarkably telling in all this is Satan’s been marked from time immemorial as the Great Imitator. His stated goal in the Bible is “to be as God.”

“Satan is the greatest imitator of God there is,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “He’s trying to take and substitute himself in God’s place. You and I aren’t trying to mimic God. We’re not trying to imitate God. We’re following God. He tells us what to do and we, in obedience, follow His instructions to us.”

A great verse to expose the satanic, corrupt nature of all the modern Bible translations (taken from a different set of manuscripts than the King James Bible) is Ephesians 5:1, which has Paul, in the modern versions, advising Believers to “be imitators of God,” rather than “followers of God,” as it’s written in the King James Bible.

“If you didn’t need any other reason to know that was a bad, unworthy, poor, slovenly translation, and a poor choice. . . Just the fact that the devil is the great imitator of God and Paul would never tell you to be like the devil and imitate God!” says Jordan. “To follow somebody is to take instructions and do what they tell you. The instructions are written down in the Book.

“To imitate somebody is to watch their actions and to try to duplicate them. If you’re going to follow, you’re going to walk by faith in what God says in His book. If you’re going to imitate, then you’ve got to look at circumstances around you, looking outside out there to all these circumstances and trying to read them to find the will of God in them rather than in the Word.

“As I’ve told you all many times before, you don’t find the will of God in the circumstances of your life. God doesn’t intervene out there in circumstances to try and teach you His will. You find His will in the Word of God, and the circumstances of your life are the context in which you go and do the will of God.”