Now they're wearing religion on their sleeves

"We don't want to have 'provocative' just to have 'provocative,' " Johnson says, calling the popular "Jesus is my homeboy" shirt, for example, a little disrespectful. "We want our message to be biblically sound and glorifying to the Lord.

"Our shirts have changed a lot [in 22 years of business]," he says, "from the social issues - abortion, prayer in schools, those sorts of things - to more issues of faith, what God's done for us."

Some youths - like some celebrities - might wear Christian garb just to be ironic. "It's not for us to judge the wearers' hearts," says Johnson, "whether it's mocking or heartfelt belief."

Some of this T-shirt button-pushing might also represent a kind of political pushback, others say. Shirts from the other end of the religious-to-secular spectrum have tweaked religion more of late - "Who would Jesus bomb?" for example.

"The whole political climate reinforces the message that [conservative Christians] are the real persecuted group in America, that's what this is all about, this kind of group pride," says Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

Mr. Frank says he owns several Christian shirts he bought on trips to Kansas City. He wears them, he says, to get a rise out of people in Washington.

"One says 'I prayed in school; I'm a real menace to society' - you know, the whole victimization-fantasy thing," Frank says.

Frank's shirt could hint at the next battleground if religious T-shirt culture leads to shoving matches in public schools.

"The question from a First Amendment standpoint is whether school authorities could single out T-shirts bearing religious messages for prohibition," says Peter Teachout, a professor at Vermont Law School in South Royalton.

Up until the past 10 years or so, Professor Teachout says, schools felt that if they allowed religious speech on school grounds it would constitute an impermissible "establishment" of religion.

"But then, in a series of cases, the current Supreme Court ... said, 'No, you can't use that concern about avoiding establishment as a grounds for discriminating against religious speech as compared with other kinds of speech,' " says Teachout.

Could "My God Kicks Your God's Butt" affect non-Christian students' access to an unthreatened study environment?

"There certainly ought to be latitude for discussion," says Teachout. "But the idea that kids are walking around with rival religious messages just seems to me a little bit inconsistent with the idea underlying the establishment clause."

Others say the T-shirt offensive might also be inconsistent with Christianity.

"It's easier to put on a T-shirt or put a bumper sticker on your car," says Mark Whited, campus minister at the University of Evansville in Indiana, "than to live the way Jesus was calling us to live."

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