More and more you can see how people are being integrated into the game of marketing.

Last month, as part of reporting on the National Retail Federation's annual trade show at the Javits Center, I attended a keynote address given by some big-name marketing guru hawking his new book.

After the 1 1/2 hour presentation, a guy sitting next to me asked what I thought. I told him I found the speaker annoying, especially his on-stage performing, one minute acting disgusted, pacing the floor, addressing the audience in a condescending tone as if he was teacher admonishing an inept bunch of high school students, the next minute pouncing on some bullet statistic from his Power Point slide, giving the impression he had some gem of wisdom akin to a cure for cancer, then reminding everyone that a lot of what he's saying is no-brainer stuff anybody with a clue about staying competitive would have already mastered years ago.

It turned out the guy asking for my critique worked down around Wall Street as a—get this—consultant to retailers on the psychology of buyer behavior! He tried to convince me that the speaker was simply giving the audience what it expected of him, and if he hadn't delivered his shtick, attendees would have felt cheated.

Just yesterday, I was watching a profile segment on PBS' newsweekly show, Religion & Ethics, about New York Times best-seller author, Anne Lamott, who markets herself as a foul-mouthed, left-wing, pro-choice, pro-gay "born-again Christian" with a bad attitude.

"She's witty, irreverent, and often highly provocative," boasted the show's co-host Kim Lawton. "Lamott cannot be easily put in a box. She says her secular friends think she's a crazy Jesus freak who believes in the Holy Spirit and the resurrection. She's a Protestant who wears a Mary medallion around her neck and a red string blessed by the Dalai Lama around her wrist."

In her interview, Lamott gave an "I'm-so-cutting-edge" gleam when she herself informed, "You know, a typical Christian bookstore would not carry 'Traveling Mercies' or 'Plan B,' because I'm irreverent. I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus."

Lamott is said to have "surrendered her life to Jesus in a prayer laced with the F-word."

When asked about criticism that her faith was "simplistic and self-absorbed," Lamott responded, "I thought for part of a day that I really had to either stop talking about it so much or come up with a more sophisticated, maybe more of an East Coast kind of happening, intellectual faith. And then, I don't know, I took a nap or something, and that passed. And I thought, all I can do is really share what I think are the important stories of my life and our times."

But not just that. In a video out-take shown from a recent speech she gave in Wash., D.C., an incredibly self-righteous Lamott actually speaks for God (who, by the way, is referred to by her as "a mother-father God"):

"Faith without works is dead," she barks out authoritatively. "It's just not nice to sit around -- you can sit around in your prayer breakfast with all this faithy-faith and all this talking and thinking and 'hallelujahing' and it's nothing. It's nothing to God. I mean, I think it pisses God off."

What is all-too-evident about Lamott is she's simply mocking God. She sees herself as this ultra-hip and clever, envelope-pushing vehicle to market to those who are either confused about their beliefs or want reaffirmation on their preferred view of the Christian faith as this all-encompassing, freestyle endeavor where you can mold Jesus Christ to fit any and all of your personal convictions and lifestyle choices.

She even laughs in the PBS interview, "If Jesus does not have a sense of humor, I am so doomed that none of this matters anyway." In another spot, she admits playfully, "Sometimes I can imagine God just shaking his or her head going, 'Oh Annie, whatever.' "

Now that the entire media world—from movies and television to music and book-publishing—sees the staggering, seemingly unquenchable market today for Christian-oriented material, we're bound to see more and more people like Lamott emerge, attempting in their own way to craft out of themselves a winning marketing scheme.

Lamott, a native of California who appears to be in her late 50s, is shown in the PBS piece entering her "meditation room" complete with a wall mural of the Virgin Mary. It seems to me she fancies herself, in part, as playing to liberal-minded Baby Boomers who grew up in Protestant or Catholic households, became flower-child hippies in the '60s, and are now re-investigating their spiritual side.

"I want to really help overthrow and tear down this government, which I mean in a loving Christian way," Lamott is shown in the PBS segment saying at some sort of rally in California. In another outtake, she says, "My faith has been so challenged because I feel such a deep hatred and sense of betrayal as an American by the Bush administration. And yet Jesus said about four things that are absolutely the core of Christianity, and one of them is you really don't get to hate anyone."

I personally don't see any love in Lamott's "presentation" of herself as a self-professed Christian. Instead, she displays a deep ignorance by coming off as an obvious adherent to Satan's lie program that says humans are to create God in their own image.

Her personally crafted "mother-father God" thinks everything she does and says is adorable and He/She's obviously deigned it for her to market her genius to the rest of us.

"We're talking about feeding and nurturing the human spirit and bringing that forth into a world that is so thirsty and so starving to death and so battered," says a smug Lamott of the importance of her work.

She similarly puffs in her PBS interview, "I don't find spiritual insight sitting around thinking 'thinky' thoughts about what it all means and what—who God is and who shot the Holy Ghost—and, you know, I find God in the utter dailyness and mess of it all."

(Editor's Note: I'm just getting started on this whole thing today of marketing Christianity. Stay tuned. . .)