Doing the Lord’s work

There’s this nifty instagram site, PreachersNSneakers, with a simple premise done well. He looks at photographs of evangelical preachers and then looks up the price of their shoes. Like this:

That’s Pastor John Gray in a really ugly pair of absurdly expensive $5000 tennis shoes. It’s an extreme example, but browsing through the page it’s clear that successful Christians think nothing of dropping $500, $600, $1000 on a pair of shoes that look weird and ostentatious, and also look out of place with the rest of their clothes. There’s just something strange going on here.

Also, I don’t understand the economics of the shoes themselves. These are cheap items built overseas by virtual slave labor, and then given an immense markup in the US. What virtue is being signaled by the existence of these ludicrous status symbols, and what are these preachers saying about themselves?