That would be a good thing, though. And I can think of a number of ways I could, if I had a cohort of active, willing, and ambitious people with me, exploit such power to make it have a mind of its own, with or without the founder's blessings.
If you had a cohort of willing, active and ambitious people you could exploit almost ANY existing power structure in the game. The problem being that such a thing is extremely rare these days.
Battlemaster is all about the big themes and politics and wars in the middle ages (I believed someone called it MediPunk), one of the standard tropes is the firebrand preacher who declares a state ally evil incarnate.
So far as I see it the priest game should be a balance, one can either gain power by converting nobles or by converting a -lot- of peasants. Both should be weapons of middling power, because through most of the middle ages the Church was an effective check on the powers of even the Emporer, whereas in BM one can just hand wave and say "Meh" if the religion followed by 95% of your peasantry excommunicates your realm.
The priest game and religion at large has always been mostly a RP aspect to BM, and as I understand it this is by design. They were also not meant to replicate the power and control of the Catholic Church, though SA is doing a pretty good job of it anyway. I would think that if religions are already too scared to use the rather powerful feature they already have to influence politics and back up their faithful, they are hardly going to do so because we add one more button. Just as a Ruler in BM can be toppled rather easily by their nobility, thus creating a system where the Ruler should be courting powerful nobles to support them, the same holds true for religion, you want to throw around some religious weight, make sure you have the support.
Ask yourself how much sway would the Church have had if they couldn't threaten you with soured relations from the other Catholic Monarchs, and just look at England for an example of how powerless the Church could be if the Monarch didn't particularly care about the possible fallout.
