The marriage of religion and business has deep roots in American history. Itinerant Methodist preachers from Francis Asbury (1745-1816) onwards addressed camp meetings of thousands of people, and often borrowed marketing techniques from business. Aimee Semple McPherson, one of America's first radio Evangelists, built a church for 5,300 people in Los Angeles in 1923. (She had none of Mr Hybels's worries about religious symbolism: she topped her church with an illuminated rotating cross that could be seen 50 miles away.) And the gospel of self-help and prosperity is as American as apple pie. In his 1925 bestseller, "The Man Nobody Knows", Bruce Barton, an adman turned evangelist, pictured Jesus as a savvy executive who "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organisation that conquered the world". His parables were "the most powerful advertisements of all time".

Referring to recent Talk2Action posts and threads, the article does also quote critics who complain about the diluting of religion in favor of middle-of-the-road feelgood messages:

There is no shortage of criticisms of these fast-growing churches. One is that they represent the Disneyfication of religion. Forget about the agony and ecstasy of faith. Willow Creek and its sort are said to serve up nothing more challenging than Christianity Lite-- a bland and sanitized creed that is about as dramatic as the average shopping mall.

Another criticism is that these churches are not really in the religion business but in the self-help trade. Mr Osteen and his equivalents preach reassuring sermons to "victors not victims", who can learn to be "rich, healthy and trouble free". God, after all, "wants you to achieve your personal best". The result is a wash: rather than making America more Christian, the mega-churches have simply succeeded in making Christianity more American.

But I believe this conclusion misses the point - it's exactly the accumulation of money and followers that makes the megachurch movement so interesting to the political right. These churches have already spent the time and money to accumulate large memberships; these members are easy targets for "family value" referendum and voting drives. Rove and company don't care if a hundred thousand church members are sufficiently fundamentalist. What matters to them is that they are together and easier to reach with the right's authoritarian messages and information. Any crowd OK with the idea of one almighty being as the answer to all questions is potentially more open to concepts like trusting your political leaders (no need for transparency and court-approved searches) and a unitary presidency. These churches have already weeded out the skeptics and critical thinkers, and now fit tens of thousands together in one location every week - just the people the Republican Party wants to talk to.

The final paragraph points to its viral tendencies spreading throughout the world, and where business and religion go, conservatism tends to follow:

The mega-churches are also on the march well beyond red-state America. America has an impressive track record of exporting its religious innovations. Pentecostalism, which was invented in a Kansas bible college in 1901, currently has well over 100m adherents around the world. Even Mormonism, that most idiosyncratically American of religious faiths, has 6.7m followers outside the United States. There is no reason to think that the latest style of marriage between religion and business is an exception. Rick Warren has inserted his "purpose-driven operating chip" into churches in 120 countries around the world. He and his congregation have also set themselves the goal of eradicating poverty in Africa. The Willow Creek Association has 4,700 member churches abroad; a meeting in the staid English town of Cheltenham recently attracted almost 3,000 people. The merger between business and religion has been fabulously successful in America. Now it is starting to do battle with the "evangephobia" that marks so much of the rest of the world.

Los Angeles-based artist Joel Pelletier is the creator of "American Fundamentalists (Christ's Entry into Washington in 2008)", an 8x14 foot painting depicting American religious, political and economic fundamentalists. He has been touring the US with the painting talking about "American Fundamentalism and the Threat to Democracy and Freedom of Faith." In March 2006 the painting itself goes to Washington DC; other confirmed 2006 locations include Buffalo, Detroit and Minneapolis (more at americanfundamentalists.com)