Americans love Faith served on a cafeteria tray, served up by magazine interviewers who scoop celebrity conversions into appetizing sound bites for the public to feed on. This week has given them plenty of new dishes.

This month in Rolling Stone magazine, pop-star Katy Perry (who is melting Popsicles from coast to coast this summer) declares that she still believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.  As many know, Perry had a brief stint in Christian music before becoming America’s bubblegum sex princess. But her comments are so tongue-in-cheek that it’s hard to imagine she is taking anything seriously, including the divinity of Christ. In the same interview she belittles her parents’ Pentecostal beliefs (“My dad speaks in tongues and my mother interprets”) and includes extraterrestrials among her beliefs. I say her sarcasm is a very good thing, for if Perry and I share the same faith, then I seriously misinterpreted fidelity to Jesus Christ.

Julia Roberts, on the other hand, has gone a different direction, finding Hinduism to be her warm and fuzzy faith du jour since filming the film version of the Gilbert mega-seller Eat, Pray, Love.  Elle magazine reports a sincere Roberts worshipping at the temple with her family to “chant and pray and celebrate.” The film actress is poised to make an influential statement about the inclusiveness of Eastern religions at a time when young Americans are moving further and further away from what they see as the absurd narrow road of Christian doctrine.

I absolutely love that I live in a country where both these women can move comfortably from one faith position to the next without fear, and I would never suppose to imagine where their faith journeys are taking them. Yet I wonder if our fascination with categorizing celebrities by their faith is a strange enterprise. My guess is that Americans adore unusual juxtapositions. These two stories become striking to the public because they suggest the unexpected: an oversexed pop star claiming Christianity or a Christian-raised Southern girl reading the Bhagavad Gita. The stories show a collision of ideals, and that is precisely the story. To most people, this odd pairing is no different from other ironies like a Catholic Mel Gibson imploding, or the flip-flopper Anne Rice moving back and forth between vampires and the Bible.

I also wonder if we’re simply living in an age of Faith trivialization. A decade ago, Charles Krauthammer wrote in a Time magazine editorial, “When it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods?”  This is perhaps even closer to the heart of the matter, a complete shift in the way we respect authentic religious conviction.

If I were a serious Hindu, for example, I wouldn’t sign up Roberts as my poster convert. Based on her limited statements to the media, I’d compare her interest in Hinduism to the sort of breezy hobby that Krauthammer describes. I have no way of knowing her soul, yet the casual embrace of a very serious ancient faith feels suspect at this point. As for Perry, plenty of people will rush to her defense, claiming that no one can deny her affiliation to Jesus, despite the utter contradictions between her life and the Bible she claims to accept. These are juxtapositions that the apostle Paul simply couldn’t abide, and trotting out the verse “Judge not, lest you be judged” shows our culture woefully misinformed about the mysteries of spiritual conversion.

It seems to me that an authentic conversion to Christianity reverses the ironies in our lives—not creates them. When Saul the persecutor was knocked silly by the Holy Spirit on the Road to Damascus, he knew this was no casual transformation, where he would experiment with all sorts of faith boundaries. He became a new man, a bondservant of Christ, whose life would now be consistent with the gospel message of Jesus Christ through and through. If I had to choose between the faith claims of Perry and Roberts—or those of Paul—I’ll take the Damascus Road every time.