The Church of National Retail Chains

There is a short, albeit interesting, blurb about the rise of Christianity -- and the squashing of Gnosticism -- compared to the rise of retail behemoth Wal-Mart over at Adventures of an Occult Investigator: Of Gnosticism and Wal-Mart*.

[*The original site was hijacked, so I'm using a saved version of the page from Internet Archive.]