You could make the same claim of hypocrisy about any class of community leader or any cultural institution. Setting aside the question of whether pastors (Char

You could make the same claim of hypocrisy about any class of community leader or any cultural institution. Setting aside the question of whether pastors (Charismatic Christian, Evangelical Christian, Christian, or even Muslim) are a particularly hypocritical bunch, megachurches are fundamentally different. They can be exploitative even if the leader is personally honest simply because they're breeding grounds for exploitative peer pressure entirely unmoored from traditional institutional and doctrinal anchors.[1] Power corrupts, and megachurches centralize a ton of power into a single individual. Cults of personality are qualitatively different from your run-of-the-mill leadership position. If the Roman Catholic Pope tells the global Catholic community to do X, not many people will unflinchingly do X. People don't invest themselves as heavily in abstract doctrine as they do individuals. A megachurch is almost by definition a cult of personality, as to grow and thrive at such scale it takes an exceptionally charismatic leader in whom people invest themselves. And the doctrine of these churches tends to be particularly loose and particularly predicated on the exegesis of the leader, claims to biblical textualism and literalism notwithstanding. [1] Yes, traditional institutions may have intrinsic exploitative characteristics. But they also have intrinsic mitigations that constrain exploitation, otherwise they wouldn't have persisted for so long. Like a virus, the most virulent ones extinguish themselves rather quickly.