Hillsong

New church, old problem

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Hey there everyone—

In December of 2015 I read a juicy profile by the amazing Taffy Brodesser-Akner about the “hyperpriest” Carl Lentz, pastor of a church that was fast becoming a New York City phenomenon. Hillsong NYC, an outpost of an Australian megachurch of the same name, was notable not only for the speed with which it was growing, but for its paradoxical mash-up of faddish nightclub culture and Pentecostal Christianity. Church services were literally being held in nightclub spaces, volunteers mopping up vomit and beer from the night before and readying for an 11 am service, timed and trendy enough that the very people who were partying the night before could come back the next day to church.

Lentz wore a $4500 black Saint Laurent leather jacket and black stretch jeans—all the better to show off his cut midriff and sexy ass—and his sermons were backed by a full band, lit with the slanted beams of multicolored lights you’d see at a concert. Camera shots taken from above show an auditorium full of people standing, arms held up, fingers outstretched to honor and receive the Lord’s blessing, cheering and clapping at the sermon, the music, the communal joy of so much love and feeling and possibility, ricocheting through the audience and back through the pastor, around and around again until the whole place was pulsing with worship.

Hillsong's services quickly grew in number, offered during the week. Lentz, indefatigable and sure he’d only met the first few thousands of his potential flock, fanned out with volunteers across the city, seeking more. He posted on Instagram, gave radio and television interviews, built relationships with movie stars, NBA players, and other carriers of cool. 

The apex came when he invited Justin Bieber to live in his home, sharing space with his wife and children. Bieber, in the midst of a public drubbing for being caught on camera wasted, pissing into a mop bucket, and generally acting like a selfish two-year-old, was desperate for guidance. His brand was desperate for a new story.

The moment that Hillsong and celebrity culture fuse goes like this. One night in 2014, Carl and Justin were praying, and Bieber said he wanted to be baptized. Now. But there’s a problem. Even in NYC, someone of Bieber’s stature can’t just walk into a public building and be granted the anonymity and sacred silence of a baptism. He’s got to find a place where everyone’s so famous they’re not even phased he’s there. Plus, there’s got to be a lot of water, because Hillsong baptisms are the real deal: full plunge, washed anew.

A light goes off in Carl’s head—he’s got it. He calls Tyson Chandler of the NY Knicks. He’s got a bathtub built for his seven feet. It’s 2 am. Carl asks: Can they drop by, borrow his bathtub? No problem, Tyson says. And that’s how Justin Bieber is born again.

Except it’s not over, not private, because the next day it goes on Instagram and now Hillsong’s even more of a thing. Now parishioners cue up behind a velvet rope hours before service to get in. It’s cool enough that lonely New Yorkers can admit they need it without losing face. It’s so alluring, in fact, that even Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who is Jewish and inherently suspicious of Pentecostal theology; who is able to see the entire mechanism blinking and shuddering under its own pressure; even she can’t stay away. 

She’s alienated by Carl’s beliefs that homosexuality is a sin, that abortion is a sin, and that people need to change as they walk with Jesus. But she’s struck and moved by Carl’s faith, by his sincere desire to have everyone, including her, come to services and join in:

He is so worried for my soul, and this should annoy me, but instead it touches me, because maybe I’m worried about my soul, too, and Carl wants so badly for me to enjoy heaven with him. How can I fault someone who is more sincere about this one thing than I have ever been about anything in my life? But on the other hand, if there’s one thing that’s true about Christianity, it’s that no matter what couture it’s wearing, no matter what Selena Gomez hymnal it’s singing, it’s still afraid for your soul, it still thinks you’re in for a reckoning. It’s still Christianity. Christianity’s whole jam is remaining Christian.

I read most of her Hillsong profile, riveted, while eating lunch at a local bakery. When I got to the part where Justin Bieber gets baptized, I wept. I’m not a Bieber fan. I was so mortified I stood up and left the bakery. But Hillsong even got me, second-hand, from 3000 miles away. So you know when that Hulu documentary on Hillsong came out a few weeks ago, I had to know what had happened since 2015.

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There wasn’t much, initially, to indicate that Hillsong would become a megachurch. The church that would become Hillsong was originally founded by Brian Houston, who had followed in his father Frank’s footsteps to found a church. Frank Houston built his reputation not only on the churches he founded in Australia and New Zealand, but also on his global ministry: he was known to travel to remote regions, and to places where indigenous tribes lived, to spread the gospel.

Brian and his dad were awkward, impassioned, dowdy. They had bad hair, mud-brown suits, ties with wide stripes, and cloddish gaits. But Brian’s genius was to recognize the power of music. He hired extraordinary musicians to play at his services, and a brilliant music director to compose the music. It was the director who asked Brian if the musical arm of the church could be called Hillsong, and the name stuck.

Hillsong started putting out music albums so popular they climbed the Christian rock charts, building the brand. Brian Houston then took a page from U.S. megachurches and started to go on air, explaining the church’s mission and asking his congregants to tithe. As Hillsong grew, so did its wealth, and by extension that of Brian Houston. In 2014, Hillsong Australia made $80 million, tax free. In time, he rose in influence and power, counting members of Parliament, business leaders, and bankers among Hillsong’s followers. He built Hillsong International Leadership College to train pastors for other Hillsong churches, and recruited the volunteer staff for the church’s many branches from the college’s graduates, many of whom hoped their service would lead to their being selected to lead new churches. 

It was at Hillsong’s college that Brian Houston met Carl, quickly recognizing the student’s charisma and recruiting him to become a pastor in the church. At Houston’s request, Lentz founded Hillsong NYC, along with Houston’s son Joel. The church hung banners on the street barricades, proclaiming “Come as you are,” and “Welcome Home.” The church was diverse, polyglot, gay and straight, dorky and cool, a mirror of NYC. Many took the banners at face value, and soaked in the church’s love, not seeing the tension between its theology, which was Pentecostal and conservative, and its ministry, which was accepting and open.

Just as Hillsong NYC was reaching its apex, trouble began to hit the home churches of Australia and New Zealand. There were rumors that Frank Houston had a history of abusing boys, rumors that Brian and Hillsong’s leadership initially denied. The Australian Parliament had commissioned a study on institutional sexual abuse of children, and Hillsong was reportedly one of the institutions under investigation. Finally, Brian acknowledged he was aware of “one incident” of abuse by his father Frank, which he learned about from the survivor in 1999.

Then in 2020, Lentz announced that he was leaving the pastorship of Hillsong for his “moral failings,” later posting on Instagram that he was having an affair and was unable to lead the church because of his transgressions. Brian Houston went on TV and denounced Lentz’s failure of leadership. He immediately also fired Carl’s wife Laura, though she had done nothing wrong.

Evangelical churches like Hillsong are organized like a big family. Just as in conservative families, which divide roles and responsibilities along gendered lines, churches like Hillsong see the pastor’s wife as complementary, and crucial to the strong foundation of the church. In Hillsong the pastors are men, but they often bring their wives up to the stage to receive praise and thanks from the congregation for their work. Just as the father is ultimately responsible for protection, order, and discipline–a representative of Jesus’s word in the household–so the pastor is responsible for shepherding his flock. It’s this same logic that drove the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent vote to disbar women from leading churches. Laura was one half of the unit—when Carl failed, she had to leave as well.

The church, already reeling from accusations of Frank’s sexual abuse of children and Lentz’s cheating on his wife, also had to acknowledge that Brian had received two allegations of “inappropriate conduct” with women, along with the accusation it was possible he had spent decades covering up his father’s abuse of children. In 2022, Brian stepped down as leader of the global church. The government officials who had attended Hillsong moved to another church, and began to distance themselves from Brian.

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Hulu’s documentary struggles to grapple with the enormity of what it uncovers. It’s on safe ground when it shows the pain a gay parishioner felt when he read a sign saying he should “come as you are” and then discovered that the church forbid gay people from occupying leadership positions. It follows a number of former Hillsong congregants, each of which had to grapple with the moral contradictions of the church. Their pain, and how they dealt with it, is enough to fuel the series’ plot.

But the series raises questions that are more provocative and complex. Is Hillsong an avowedly abusive organization, its leaders consciously aware of the harm it creates? Is it an organization that grew so quickly it could not manage its own leadership? Does an organization like Hillsong, with its massive internal contradictions, inevitably become a vector of abuse? And if so, why? 

Two thirds of the way through the documentary, the viewer learns that Carl was sexually abused as a child. The documentary never raises the question of whether Frank Houston abused Brian Houston, in addition to other his child victims.

I wonder if the electric charge between Carl and his congregation is in part due to the fact that he is honestly ventriloquizing their pain through his sermons. He’s not just empathizing with them; he’s not a stand-in for Jesus’s love; he *is* them. He knows the desperation and longing not because he’s on the other side of healing, but because he’s not, because he’s as driven and lashed by pain as everyone else. In that moment when his sermon hits its crescendo and they are literally reaching out to him because he’s telling their story, maybe for that split second his pain stops.

Maybe Lentz is less a pretender and a thief than someone who is in such pain that it drives him, day and night, in a relentless pursuit of something better. Does the pain power him to deliver service after service, day after day, and then to walk the city streets at night, searching for more parishioners? Or can he not sleep because of the flashbacks, not trust because no one is trustworthy, not rest because rest is a promise that never comes, because when everything stops the abyss opens up?

People often talk about abuse of power as if the pastor has it together and is consciously wielding his authority for the pleasure and gratification of his adult self. In some cases it is this simple, and horrifying: there’s a sadistic perpetrator who gets off on the pain of the vulnerable and oppressed. He gets off on being a God and then acts with God-like impunity. It sounds like Frank was this kind of person. Brian is currently on trial in Australia, with one of the main arguments against him the charge that he enriched himself and kept his father’s abuse a secret, knowing full well that it was still going on, and that if word got out, he’d be ruined.

But what the Hillsong documentary also reveals is what happens when the leader of the church is himself victimized, when he cannot be counted on to lead from an integrated adult self and may be leading from a child self that had its boundaries repeatedly violated, and that therefore struggles to hold a boundary as an adult. This isn’t an apology for Letz’s engaging in affairs, or for other pastors’ abusing children: it’s an acknowledgement of what happens when intergenerational abuse is built into not just a family system, but an institutional structure that pretends it’s a family, and the abuse radiates out, generation after generation, unchecked, uninterrogated, its victims humiliated and silenced.

People deserve community. They deserve a place to be able to ask existential questions about meaning and purpose, morality and transgression. They deserve, when those institutions that provide this are exposed, to not be shamed for wanting it, for hoping the people in charge can truly lead the way.

What this documentary doesn’t seem to understand is that the abuse perpetrated by the church leader generates the exact kind of pain the church is designed to address. 

Imagine the kind of torture and self-loathing that arises when you can’t quit the thing that’s tormenting you because you need it too much, can’t survive without it. Imagine how this feeling might keep you silent, even if you weren’t being coerced to do so, or offered a payout in exchange.

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The question I wanted the documentary to answer, which it didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, was “How do we make it stop?” Because I’m a root cause kind of thinker, the question begs another: “How does the abuse of boys happen in the first place?” How do we understand what drives men in power, leaders of religious institutions, to abuse the most powerless, and is it possible to get them to stop?”

The simple answer is to say that the problem here is Frank. Get rid of Frank, have an accountability process, be honest, cleanse the institution. The implicit argument here is that the problem with Hillsong isn’t its theology, per se, or its patriarchal organization; it’s that it was dishonest and corrupt. Everyone covered up the abuse in order to keep making money, so that everyone involved could have access to influence, power and wealth. In this story, Hillsong is a collection of corrupt individuals, consciously colluding in the production of an experience that enriched them. It’s “church as entertainment.” They might as well be studio executives; their job is to keep producing the events that bring in the crowds, and if there are a few bad apples in the mix, so be it.

But it’s not a movie theater; it’s a church. The people who are bringing the entertainment are saying they know God, and what God wants for them. They’re providing direction. They’re describing laws that should shape behavior; they’re telling the people who attend to change. 

At the end of the documentary we see Carl, post his own trauma recovery, looking weathered and haggard, having moved to Florida. He’s exchanged his urban leather for flip flops, baggy shorts and a tank top. His hair is now curly and long. He looks suburban; he lives in an enormous house with his family–he and Laura have reconciled. 

He tells the interviewer that there’s a difference between what recovery can do and what church is for. He’s still a pastor. He says nothing about institutional abuse; he says nothing about his theology; he seems determinedly turned inward, to himself, his family. If he’s questioning larger systems and structures, he’s not sharing it with the viewer.

The verdict in Brian Houston’s trial is expected to come down on August 16th, 2023. He could face up to five years in jail for covering up his father’s abuse of children.

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When the psychiatrist Judith Herman was sitting in her Harvard medical school lectures in the 1970s, training to become a psychiatrist, she was told that it was unlikely she’d see a case of childhood sexual abuse in her lifetime because it was so rare. When she was doing her residency at a feminist clinic a few years later, almost all of her female clients told her they’d been sexually abused, and many of them told her they were survivors of incest.

Upon her graduation, she and her colleague Lisa Hirschmann conducted a study, setting out to investigate whether childhood sexual abuse was as rare a phenomenon as they had been taught, or as prevalent as their clients told them. Herman wrote about the results of their study, publishing Father-Daughter Incest in 1981 and pretty much single-handedly overturned the psychoanalytic argument about child abuse that had been in play since the end of the nineteenth century.

In Father-Daughter Incest, Herman asked why it was that fathers were so likely to abuse their daughters, whereas mothers were unlikely to abuse their sons. There was a strong relationship, she found, between highly patriarchal family organizations and incest. The less power the mother had in the family or outside of it, and the more the father had full control over the family system, the more likely it was that he would believe he had access not only to the body of his wife, but also to all of those in the family system. In highly patriarchal families, Herman argued, the caregiving and nurturing of the children would fall to the mother, and the father would be more distant and therefore less likely to empathize with the consciousness and pain of his daughter.

Herman recommended that to prevent incest, families should have a more lateral power organization. Fathers should be given the opportunity to bond with their children, breaking their ability to see their wives and children as objects, available to meet their needs, and to imagine the emotional effect of their violence on the bodies and selves of their children. She drew a direct line, that is, from the patriarchal law of the father to the belief that the bodies of children are at the disposal of the patriarch, who rules the family in the same way that God rules over man. 

Herman focused her analysis on the abuse of girls. When I looked to see if there are arguments that distinguish the abuse of boys from girls, I found that childhood abuse is largely seen through Herman’s original lens—that little boys are also seen as objects, abused by men who see themselves as granted full patriarchal authority over the body and lives of others, not only their families, but in the case of church leaders, over entire congregations.

I am struck, however, by the lack of analysis of what makes young boys, specifically, targets of abuse. We’re used to hearing stories of little girls being sexualized, dressed up like miniature versions of adult women, of tiny beauty pageants prepping little girls to be adult sex objects. But we don’t see versions of little boys being sexualized and paraded around on stages, because in patriarchy men’s bodies are not objectified in the same way as women’s. 

The lack of public objectification of boys, I think, makes their sexual abuse more invisible, and by extension, forbidden to acknowledge or discuss. We “know” that women are raped and harassed and that little girls are sexually abused at high rates. Violence against little boys, however, like the rape of adult men, is still enough of a taboo that it is not a part of our public discussion of sexual violence. Sexual violence is still coded as a female experience, because discussions of sexual violence in the dominant culture are most often about the abuse of women and girls.

To be raped is to be penetrated. To be penetrated, in patriarchy, is to be feminized. And to be a feminized man in patriarchy is to be seen as a sissy, as weak, as gay.

For a boy or a man to be sexually abused is not only to be subject to the full power, authority and violence of the abuser, but also to be rendered feminine within a patriarchal binary schema of gender. It is no wonder that many men who are raped, especially those who identify as straight, fear that they were assaulted not because they were victims of a crime, but because the other men who raped them saw a “gayness” in them and thus attacked. 

Many male rape survivors will behave in excessively patriarchal ways after the assault in an effort to compensate for the attack. They’ll get super drunk and start bar fights, engage in domestic violence, humiliate and shame others, all to mask their “weakness” because they were attacked.

Male victims of childhood sexual abuse who go public must name two forms of violation: one of assault; the other of gender. For some men, acknowledging the ways they were rendered “feminine” is harder than acknowledging that they were assaulted. I wonder if the lack of conversation about male survivors of childhood abuse and rape makes boys and men believe that they are alone, and they’ll be misunderstood if they come forward. I wonder if the culture’s refusal to see men as able to be victimized, because it shatters the patriarchal construction of masculinity, is keeping men quiet.

Perhaps part of the reason we don’t have better theories about the abuse of boys in churches is because we aren’t publicly making space for the accounts of male survivors. Violence against women, and especially childhood sexual abuse, became part of the public conversation because of the consciousness-raising groups that were part of the second-wave feminist movement. Without the support of weekly discussion groups, which were designed not for therapeutic reasons, but to help its members to understand patriarchy and its effects, many women would not have had the necessary support to come forward and talk about their abuse. Today, as masculinity is being examined, what would happen if men gathered together to talk about patriarchy and interrogate masculinity, the way women interrogated femininity 50 years ago? How can we collectively make it safe enough for them to do so?

Stay safe out there this week, and I’ll see you soon.

xo

Rebecca