Bibles, boots and saddles

Maybe you wore cowboy boots to your morning cowboy church service, says boston.com. After all, the Cowboy Church Network of North America, based in Midland, N.C., reports having "started dozens of churches in 12 states and Canada since 2003."

Neither Boston nor Midland has a native cowboy culture, but cowboy churches are about getting people casually and nostalgically into church. Baptism in a horse trough is about showmanship intended to attract an audience, not authenticity.

This evangelical beguilement is primarily a Southern Baptist church planting strategy, one which nonetheless has some rough Methodist, Presbyterian, independent and other analogs.

Church-planting may be the stated mainspring, but in this era of low church attendance and declining church membership, it's more often about bringing nonattending Christians back to church.