Adding to the young discourse on megachurches in exurbia, former religion editor and author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time, Ray Waddle, traces today’s rapidly growing megachurches back to a short-lived theological movement in the 1960s called “Death of God” (DOG) theology, which aimed to remake religion for the modern age. Though DOG theologians were cast as atheists in the God-is-dead Nietzsche model (with some cause; their texts bore titles such as The Gospel of Christian Atheism), they were in fact mostly American Protestants who declared the obsolescence of the supernatural, but still considered themselves Christians, and sought to keep Christian ethics relevant in a scientific age by separating the idea of a transcendent God from believers’ continuing responsibility to make a better world. In its short, splashy career, DOG theologians made headline news, but mostly because their often misunderstood spiritual revolution provoked popular rage (one theologian appearing on the Merv Griffin Show was received by an audience chanting, “Kill him, kill him!”). As the sixties waned, so did faith in the secular spirit, writes Waddle, noting that there’s been little genuine theological controversy in the forty years since. But now Waddle sees the tardy heir to the DOG theology in modern megachurches, comparing the NYTimes headlines of the ’60s movement –“‘New’ Theologians See Christianity Without God” — with today’s multi-facility megachurches which offer myriad services in churches without crosses. Though Waddle is arguably lumping together two different “absences” of God — the DOG’s disowning supernaturalism is not equivalent to the megachurch’s missing cross and is at decided odds with many modern parishioners’ spiritual beliefs — his essay raises interesting questions about how much of the current movement is backlash against “death of God” secular religion, and how much is its ideological offspring, rebranded for much better market appeal?