The difficulties with the Neopagan adoption of the Protestant church model were twofold. The first problem was simply that the people who were trying to impose it were trying to produce a supply when there was no demand. Everybody I knew in the Neopagan scene who wanted to have paid clergy wanted to be paid clergy; there were very, very few people who wanted to do the paying! Nor did they have any particularly new truth, just a desire to be fulltime pagans paid by other people to do what everyone else was doing anyway.

The second problem was more subtle. Successful fringe religions in the US may have some of the basic elements of the standard Protestant church model but most of them offer something the churches don't. Sometimes it's healing (the Christian Science model), sometimes it's contact with spirits via trance mediumship (the Spiritualism model), sometimes it's self-improvement (the New Thought model), sometimes it's something else, but they always have an appeal that's not limited to going to going to church once a week. The Neopagans who wanted white clapboard covensteads and paid clergy never seemed to get that. Most of them were uncomfortable with magic, divination, and casual sex, the three things that made Neopaganism popular in its early days, and didn't have much of anything else to offer.