Piggybacking off this excellent diary (short form: rich guy tells the Pope to quit bashing capitalism or else he'll stop writing checks to the Catholic Church), I got to thinking today about this subject.
We here at Daily Kos often wonder how people who call themselves "Christians" can completely ignore Jesus's teachings about the poor and instead think that "Christianity" entails little more than gay-bashing and woman-bashing while fitting seamlessly with the ethos of the modern Republican Party (taxes bad, greed and selfishness good.) But Mr. Langone's comments about Pope Francis underscore a lot of what's going on.
Pope Francis can basically tell Ken Langone to shove it, because frankly his support is chump change to the Vatican, but a megachurch pastor whose church depends largely on donations from the local congregation has less power to do this. They know who keeps the lights on, and they want to keep the checks flowing, so offending a single large donor (or a group of them) is an untenable proposition. So increasingly, the message delivered from the pulpit has ignored the Bible's teachings about the poor and instead focused on... well, gay-bashing and woman-bashing.
(This is, of course, a two-way street, and the people who attend these churches probably already feel uncomfortable about the teachings of Jesus and just want the pastor to scare the kids into "moral" behavior.)
And if this sounds unthinkable to you, well, look at how many university economics departments have started preaching the gospel of supply-side since the Koch brothers started cutting checks for them to do just that.