(FORTUNE Magazine) – In the good old days, advertisers wanted merely to make you self-conscious about your body. But what about those unsightly spiritual blemishes? That dull, lifeless psyche?

After years of emphasizing the diet-friendliness of its SnackWell's line of low-fat cookies and crackers, RJR Nabisco launched a new campaign this summer that instead pitches the noshes as, literally, soul food. The ads, with the tag "Live well, snack well," show well-adjusted women snuggling in intergenerational tableaux--soft focus, fields of waving grass--while a voiceover says, "We like to think that snacking shouldn't be just about feeding yourself, but, in some small way, about feeding your self-esteem." They enjoin snackers (specifically, women 35 and up) not to "fill yourself" but to "FULfill yourself."

In other words, to Snack Good by Snacking Well.

This may sound like a greater psychic burden than one Zesty Cheese cracker can bear, but SnackWell's is hardly the only advertiser crediting its product with spiritual uplift. Earlier this year, Campbell's Soup adopted the pitch "M'm! m'm! good for the body, good for the soul"; in an eerie chicken-noodle ad, a foster child and mother bond over a steaming bowl of boiled fowl after a social worker drops the girl off. The allusion can't be lost on anyone who's walked through a bookstore in the past five years: The ad plays off the immense success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of pop bromides that Jack Canfield et al. have ladled out since 1993, making for a gymnastic 360-degree syllogism: Our chicken soup is as spiritually enriching as...chicken soup.

Joking around with spiritual themes is an old advertising standby, from photocopier-savvy monks to Snickers-munching souls at the Pearly Gates. But as Americans embrace holistic medicine and Madonna wants to bless you up on the Yoga-influenced Ray of Light, advertising is taking the language of nontraditional spiritual, pseudospiritual, and psychospiritual movements--the jargon of soul, self-help, and recovery--much more seriously.

Witness, therefore, Volkswagen's successful new Beetle campaign, with the tag, "If you sold your soul in the 1980s, here's your chance to buy it back" (recalling last year's "Volvo that can save your soul"). Finlandia highlights its "past life" as spring water in its stylish reincarnation-themed ads; Evian transubstantiates itself into holy water thus: "A life can be guided by many things. What is fleeting and artificial, or what is natural and eternal." And beauty-care companies are recasting their emollients as divine unction. The Allways Natural Aromatherapy Essential Oils line "enriches hair, scalp, skin, and spirit"; and the eau de parfum Bless Me by Lia Marcus contains scented, purified Jordan River water. We have gone from Chanel to shantih.

While this might seem an unholy alliance, the often-hazy language of pop spirituality can in fact be ready-made for consumer pitches. Take the Deepak Chopraesque concept of "wellness," which is echoed not only in the SnackWells name, but in its PR materials, which gush, "We sought to produce a nonfat yogurt consistent with Nabisco's wellness initiative." (Funny, no mention of RJR cigarettes....) See, here's the great thing about "wellness": It's not "healthiness"--not an insignificant semantic point if you consider that Nabisco just revamped the once-hot, now-flagging product line to up its fat content. And since no one can say definitively just what the hell wellness is, there's no reason it need not include eating a box of Caramel Delights.

Likewise with any such claim: Either you have less fat or get more miles to the gallon than the other guy or you don't, but the government agency capable of quantifying a product's effects on karma has not yet been established. And pitches imbued with a vague sense of spirituality may appeal as well to stressed-out modern consumers, since they imply that one can sanctify one's life without extra work--if you've got kids to pick up and a report due tomorrow, a can of soup is a lot more convenient than a month at an ashram. You gotta eat, anyway! Gotta wash your hair! Why not lather in a little satori while you're at it?

Adopting the trappings of the New Age thus tends to result in ads that are about feeling neither good nor well but just nice; for whereas spiritual and emotional quests by definition involve challenge, there's a reason we call crackers "convenience" foods. "A journey of a thousand miles," said Lao-tzu, "starts from beneath one's feet"--plus, it burns major calories and gives you rock-hard quads--but who has time for a workout like that? A reduced-fat brownie, it would seem, is a much easier sell.

--James Poniewozik

JAMES PONIEWOZIK writes about media and culture for Salon, an online magazine.