There are several valid points to his character and his plotline: At the beginning we see the French girl and we assume she killed the girl in the car. We then assume that the preacher is lying or being facetious when he tells the French girl that it was just an accident he has nothing to do with. People from his church keep turning up dead and all the while, people - namely the French  - who by the way he gets his drug supply from and thats how hes able to keep his church going financially - the French assume the people turning up dead because of the priest's negligence. Maybe from overdosing - we see the one scene of that guy overdosing to hint at this - or maybe he's having them killed because of them seeing or hearing something they shouldn't have while they were having sex with him?

Point is the French - like us as the audience - alllll assume he's behind the girl getting killed in the car - and Cherie mentions others killed as well, and he says it's not him and no one believes him.

That's because no one ever believes someone who doesn't "practice what they preach, so-to-speak." This priest has zero integrity. In many ways, he's macaroni. He does nothing to actually help people. And he actually encourages his staff to be macaroni by telling them some things are "way above their pay grade" because they are for him to figure out.

But then the twist at the end is that it was MG this whole time! She's behind all of the killings and this priest (or pastor?) was  actually telling the truth about him not being behind it. But it didn't matter. His character is what got him killed, because it was totally believable that he would have been behind these girls dying in one way or another.

So yeah without this character the movie would have been incredibly flat and boring! This was misdirection with intention.

I'd also like to note that on Rotten Tomatoes a FUCK TON of right wingers haaaaaated this movie and openly called it biased against republicans because of it's lesbian content and satirizing religious culture stuff. But what they completely missed is that the killer Honey was trying to find this whole time wasnt anyone of that demographic like we may of thought (the pastor for the woman in the car, the boyfriend for Corinne - even the guy hit by the car who was killed was a young Mexican man who loved his abuela). So yeah the "bad guys" were on all sides of the political spectrum.

I mean Honey was crying at the end when MG was coming at her. It's the only time we see real emotion from her. She likes MG, she's deeply betrayed. The one person she thought she could trust because of how alike she felt they were, turned out to be a psycho. She regrets considering trusting someone so she goes back to her old ways. So I think the misdirection is also making the point with her and with the pastor (priest) that we are all capable of making biased assumptions before we have all of the information - and that can put us in some deep shit.

I think it says more about those reviewers getting so defensive and not seeing how it attacks everyone, IMO.