Tom Chantry has some very helpful thoughts on celebrity over at his blog.   I might add just one thing: as he points out, the matter becomes very dangerous when the leader becomes the creed; we might expand and rephrase that by saying that it is dangerous when the leader or even the church itself becomes a brand and , for whatever reason, simply too big to fail.  

It is always interesting to speculate as to why otherwise good, intelligent and thoughtful people end up doing crazy things, even breaking the law or justifying wickedness.   Often it can occur in a corporate context when the needs of the whole organization are seen to outweigh and even negate the needs of the individual.  Churches with powerful brand names at the helm, or churches which are simply powerful brand names (if not in the wider Christian world then at least within the chosen constituency) can prove remarkably vulnerable to such because there you do not simply have the power of corpotate branding reinforced by community, you also have the rhetoric of piety and forgiveness to cover a multitude of sins.

That carries the problem of celebrity branding beyond the merely distasteful and into the realm of the potentially very wicked.