The wait is almost over. On Wednesday, the third movie installment of the Twilight saga, "Eclipse," will light up silver screens and fan faces across the country. The media—tabloid and reputable sources alike—have followed this event with a devotion matching that of the most obsessed Twi-hard. But, as with the other films, most stories focus on the young stars' superbly crafted abdominal muscles, tantalizingly disheveled hair or rumored real-life hookups. While I'm just as likely as the next person to pick up US Weekly to find out what Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are up to behind closed doors, I can't help feeling that journalists have yet to explore what's really driving this popular culture phenomenon.

And yet, I'm not surprised. As a society, we have a history of dismissing popular culture, especially that consumed by young women, as silly and therefore irrelevant. As I wrote here when the first Twilight movie came out, to locate the draw of Twilight in Taylor Lautner's beefed-up body or Pattinson's tortured brooding is to miss the point entirely. There are plenty of movies and TV shows featuring exceedingly beautiful young people and unlikely love stories that do not even come close to achieving the kind of off-the-charts popularity of the Twilight franchise. Clearly there's something more than a sexy teenage love-triangle behind the nearly $1 billion the movies have already grossed worldwide, not to mention 100-million-plus copies of the books sold to date.

So what is this "something more"? I think it's none other than the "something more" the founding father of American psychology, William James, identified over 100 years ago when trying to explain the object of all religious experience. For James, the religious person experiences a world beyond ordinary, workaday existence that he or she is able to "keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck."

I believe that it is a longing for a world beyond ordinary experience that drives much of our fixation with the supernatural in our current pop culture offerings. (For a great exploration of pop and the paranormal, see Jeffrey Kripal's fabulous new book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal as the Sacred). In my view, the massive popularity of Twilight can only be properly understood if one sees its human-vampire romance as a vehicle for supplying subtle and easily digestible religious content to a spiritually starved culture.

Seen in this light, the Twilight phenomenon is fueled not (just) by teen hormones and melodrama, but also by spiritual longing. While it is no doubt true that many Twilight fans are active in traditional religious settings, an increasing number of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans feel that traditional religious organizations are failing to satisfy their spiritual needs. If this trend continues, we will likely see more pop culture offerings that address spiritual needs through supernatural storytelling.

While Stephenie Meyer's Mormonism is mentioned almost fetishistically in most articles about Twilight, very few have written in depth about the Mormon themes that animate the series (the books begin with a quote from Genesis, for God's sake). For example, Bella and Edward's potentially immortal, eternal romance screams out the Mormon concept of celestial marriage. Twilight also deals heavily with themes of free will and redemption – the apple on the cover of the first book serves as a good hint of its driving Adam-and-Eve motif.

When a pop culture phenomenon grabs hold of an entire generation of young women (not to mention their Twi-moms), plumbing the reasons for its popularity can yield incredible insights into contemporary culture. For an excellent breakdown of the religious themes in Twilight, see John Granger's essay, "Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden." For a great example of the kind of nuanced, insightful work that comes from taking Twilight and the lives of young women seriously, see Caitlin Flanagan's 2008 piece in the Atlantic Monthly, "What Girls Want."

Jennifer Hahn has a Master's degree in specialized journalism with an emphasis in religion from USC. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in Ms. magazine, Religion Dispatches, and Los Angeles City Beat.