Just discovered this little trick or treat over on decidedly left-wing AlterNet. Don’t normally frequent their site, but I think it’s interesting to see how some people view Pastor Rick Warren. Interesting …

It’s not just Rev. Rick Warren’s taste in casualwear that makes him so frightening, but that’s part of it. Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life is a megalomaniac who disseminates his brand of evangelical Protestantism with the tireless zeal that Ray Kroc used to market Big Macs. His book has sold about 30 million copies worldwide since 2002. Saddleback Church, which he founded in Lake Forest, California in 1980, attracts more than 20,000 worshipers each weekend. His “seeker-sensitive” approach to the Gospel courts non-believers with rock music and other pop culture trappings. His sermons soft-pedal sin in favor of strategies for dealing with stress and marital discord.

A self-described “stealth evangelist” who believes in a “pluralistic America,” Warren peppers The Purpose Driven Life with quotes from the very unholy likes of Anais Nin and Bertrand Russell. He champions progressive causes such as ending global poverty and AIDS, and he has teamed up with Bono and the U.N., to combat these scourges. Many conservative evangelicals condemn him as a neo-liberal. Fortune describes him as “secular America’s favorite evangelical Christian.” Warren, 52, who has PowerPointed the way to salvation for President Bush and Rupert Murdoch as well as Coca-Cola and Ford, says he’s not right-wing or left-wing but rather “for the whole bird.”

JG