It’s controversial, but it’s  effective–I mean, if churches compete, the most effective obviously win.  The question, though, is what kind of church then winds up winning?  It’s a bit like diet: if you can buy any food you want, then you might well buy the food that you know is good for you, or you might buy junk food (or more likely, you’ll get something in between).  The problem is that this idea of diet can be changed multiple times a day, while where you go to church is an at least sort of permanent decision.  And so it affects your life in meaningful ways, and, ironically, it is intended to build upon itself.  So you might not like it at first, but eventually you come to really appreciate it.  This actually reveals deeper problems with liberal capitalism: I’m all about churches having a “escape clause”–if you don’t like it, you should be able to leave, but it’s frankly ridiculous to think that churches should be chosen like any other product in the marketplace.  That’s why children ought to be socialized into a church which they can then choose in which to stay or go.  Of course, the problem with all of this is it assumes that human nature is fallen and yet somehow the nature of the churches is not, which, needless to say, has been challenged recently.

Anyways, the article from Slate:

Church shopping, marketing, and the not-so-sanctified practices that go with them make easy targets for criticism. But competition among churches for worshippers has always been fierce in the United States, to the benefit of American religion and individual churchgoers. The prohibition against establishing an official state religion helped give us the shoppers’ paradise that is our religious marketplace. Disestablishment (Massachusetts was the last state to cut ties to its official church, in 1833) meant that preachers had to learn to get along without support from the state. It made the ability to recruit and keep a flock—and get them to give generously—crucial to a church’s survival. In 1992, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark argued in The Churching of America, 1776-1990 that this produced a ministry modeled on capitalism, with pastors acting as the church’s sales force.