When last I wrote about financial institutions, I revealed the self-depiction of capital in a Superbowl ad featuring the digitally-animated head of Christopher Reeve. This time a different kind of revelation has shown itself, in the person of the beatific cherub-cheeked boy in the current Bank of America campaign.

In the beginning, these ads annoyed me with their moody guitar backgrounds and the stupidity of their taglines. "grow," (sic) emblazoned on-screen in an obviously phony cursive handwriting font, appeals pathetically to the present lexically-challenged buzzphrase "grow the economy." The chorus of "why not?" appeals still more pathetically to a zero-point motivation for economic activity. The taglines can be construed interestingly to form the syllogism: "Grow: Why not?" All this against the mopey tune on the guitar says an awful lot about the finance-industry mindset for the past year. When financiers start special-pleading like this, you can bet the economy's going straight to hell.

Only recently, I realized that something deeper was going on. One of the first of the series had the little boy walking with suitably lovely classmates through a natural history museum. A voice-over boy's voice tells a story: the boy's father asked him what he wants to be when he grows up, the boy says he wants to be a teacher, the boy's father asks if he wouldn't rather be a doctor who can help people and make a lot of money, and the boy responds with wisdom beyond his years that he could be a doctor, he could make a lot of money, but "without teachers, where would doctors come from?" Then there's a closing shot of the boy in the golden glow of the sun, turning a rosy cheek into the light and giving the camera a forgiving look.

How this is meant to convince anyone to immediately acquire financial services from Bank of America I couldn't divine. All I could tell was that I hated that kid and his gauzy white smock.

He now appears in all their ads - in the middle of a Wall Street trading floor, walking through city streets, everywhere - and usually without a word, just his cheeks. "Grow: Why not? Please? For him? What is there to be afraid of - look at the little boy right there in the middle of the trading floor chaos." If only we believed, the ads suggest, if only we had faith, we could grow.

So Baby Jesus, far from throwing the money-changers out of the temple, has entered the temple of the money-changers - to save them, to save the economy, to save us, if we would only follow him. The chorus of angels calls to us: "Why not?"

Shrewdly, the ad makes economic pessimists out to be atheists. Only someone who hasn't seen the light would give a moment's hesitation before calling up BofA and committing their spirits, or at least their assets. Well, an atheist or someone who notices the fine print on the bottom of the screen telling you BofA's high finance operations are NOT FDIC INSURED and that the FUNDS MAY LOSE VALUE due to schism or Reformation. The analogy is quite eloquent: a religion loses its value the same way the stock market does, through a crisis of faith. And in the same way religious leaders promise a heavenly reward for faith, so too the prophets Greenspan, Bush, O'Neill. Amen.