A Statement on the Meaning of Lantern Hill's Church

I'm going to be speaking in first person as I provide some explanations for my story idea.
I come from a Christian background, and I am a Christian myself. So there's a reason why my story idea involves corrupt members of a powerful religious organization turning people into monstrous beings, and that's because I think there's dangers to be seen in allowing people who act like pharisees to run entire towns.
To put it plainly, the priest of the story, the one who controls the church, the one behind the story's conspiracy, is what I would personally refer to as a false prophet. He is going about faith the wrong way; instead of pointing to God as deserving of praise, this priest would rather have the people worship him and his accomplishments. He is willing to exclude groups of people who disagree with him, so that he, himself, can get glory from Lantern Hill's holy place illusion.
I, as the creative mind, believe that Heaven is the utopia that we must strive towards. I believe that there is nothing we humans can do in our own power to make the entire Earth a holy place utopia, as not one human has lived, and will ever live, a perfect life. We may worship the Lord, and we may follow the Lord, and we may have fellowship with one another in the Lord's name, but we cannot, in our own strength, make the earth perfect, as that would be a way to worship ourselves.
I am in no way aiming to undermine the various holy lands in the Middle East, and the structures and buildings constructed around the world in order to aid the worship of deities, as those structures and buildings are grounded in the inherent purpose of, well, aiding the worship of deities, rather than ourselves. I am saying that the priest's motivation to build and promote the church of Lantern Hill is the wrong one, as the priest is misguided by the idea that the organization's admonishment and prevalence would give glory to him, to the men around him, and, possibly, to the land he migrated from.
I live in America, and I see that American evangelicals and the Republican political party--which I often vote with, I'm fairly conservative myself--are highly correlated with one another. This is not necessarily a bad thing in my personal opinion, but there are some divisions that needs to be prevented, and there are some rights of the people that need to be maintained.
So what this story would be is a cautionary tale against true theocracy. Bodies of faith have been used in negative ways for the gain of man, but, in the example of Christians, the goal is to side with God and with Jesus, rather than with man, rather than with the world.