Perspective | ‘Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed’ reveals something more sinister than hypocrisy

The new Discovery Plus documentary series "Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed" sheds light on its many scandals.

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For the first two decades of my life, there was very little I did that wasn’t touched somehow by evangelical churches. I can still sing a random smattering of Bible verses, thanks to catchy little melodies we played on cassette tapes in the car. If I squeeze my eyes shut hard enough, I can reach down into the primordial dregs of my memory and find some of the pledge to the Christian Flag, bringing up with it the Play-Doh smell of my preschool classroom at a church-adjacent academy in Scottsdale, Ariz. I still remember the first time I ever felt so overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit that I wept during a church service — I was 11, and it was during a rendition of “Shout to the Lord,” a beloved praise anthem from none other than Hillsong, the Australia-based global charismatic church network known best at the time for its stirring, internationally popular worship songs.

I’m still working out why exactly I quit going to church in my early 20s, about a decade ago; for a long time, all I could really muster was that I could no longer ignore the gnawing suspicion that I’d be happier if I did. (I was.) As an adult, though, I’ve started to piece together that perhaps it had less to do with God or the Bible or Christianity itself than with the fallible, corruptible, misguidable human beings I answered to every Sunday.

So when I watched Discovery Plus’s new three-part documentary “Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed,” some of what it uncovered felt wholly, sadly familiar. Other revelations, though, were uniquely horrifying.

“A Megachurch Exposed” aims to spotlight the many alleged wrongdoings of Hillsong, which now has locations in 30 countries. It airs allegations that Hillsong’s leadership got rich off donations while heavily exploiting volunteer labor. And it argues that pastors have engaged in extramarital affairs and mishandled accusations of sexual misconduct by church staff, despite teaching the evils of impurity and lying.

Arguably Hillsong’s most famous scandal stateside involved the downfall of Carl Lentz, the young, attractive pastor (dubbed a “hypepriest” by GQ) often spotted wearing luxury streetwear and hanging out with the celebrities among his congregation — including Justin and Hailey Bieber, Kourtney Kardashian and Kevin Durant. In 2020, Lentz admitted to having a months-long extramarital affair and was fired from his position as head of Hillsong’s only American church, located in New York City. “A Megachurch Exposed” delves into that saga, while also featuring testimonies from former staffers, volunteers and congregation members — plus students at the church-adjacent Hillsong College — who allege that they’ve been worked to exhaustion for no pay or that at least one report of inappropriate behavior toward a young woman by a male staffer was under-investigated. (On the latter, the church has claimed it reported it to Australian authorities shortly after leadership found out. Hillsong has not responded to The Post’s request for comment on the documentary’s various allegations.)

This specific brand of leadership hypocrisy in church settings is, unfortunately, not specific to Hillsong. It’s practically a trope by now, the hyper-successful church leader who quite literally fails to practice what he preaches. Famed televangelist Jim Bakker went to prison in 1989 for fraud related to church fundraising. Jimmy Swaggart, whose televised sermons and Bible studies were broadcast all over the nation in the early 1980s, was suspended by the Assemblies of God Fellowship and eventually defrocked after he was caught hiring sex workers. Pastors at more than one church I attended with my family have resigned or been removed from ministry after being exposed as adulterers and even abusers; one had even stood in front of my friends and me, at youth-group gatherings and in church-camp firepits, imparting to us what seemed like a heartfelt message on the importance of maintaining sexual purity.

Even works of fiction have lately been dealing with hypocrisy in megachurch settings. HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” follows the high jinks of a blithely hypocritical family at the head of a Southern church empire. Kelsey McKinney’s popular 2021 novel “God Spare the Girls” tells the story of two sisters raised in a purity-minded faith tradition struggling to forgive their father for his infidelity even as the Texas church he leads every Sunday lets him off easy. The first two-thirds of “A Megachurch Exposed,” in other words, reveal the misdeeds of more than just its one titular megachurch.

The series’ final episode, however, is where “A Megachurch Exposed” takes a turn for the truly shocking, depicting an institution so profoundly compromised that its leaders won’t even fully confront the rot. It digs into a scandal that those who know Hillsong solely through its Bieber association may never have heard of: the child sex-abuse saga involving Frank Houston, founder of the church out of which Hillsong eventually grew, and the alleged coverup by his son Brian, who officially founded Hillsong in 1983.

According to the documentary, Frank repeatedly sexually abused at least one young boy in the late 1960s and paid him 10,000 Australian dollars as “compensation” in the late 1990 — when the abuse had been reported to the church but not yet to the authorities. The documentary then cites the minutes from a 1999 meeting of church elders that details their plans to keep the abuse quiet and reinstate Frank as head pastor after a temporary suspension. According to the documentary, at least seven other men have since come forward to allege sexual abuse by Frank Houston between 1965 and 1977.

In 2014, Brian Houston was summoned by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for questioning. The documentary includes footage of his official testimony, in which he acknowledges his father’s sexual abuse of a minor but denies having tried to cover up the payment. A year later, the Commission found he had failed to report knowledge of child sex abuse to the authorities. (The documentary includes the following excerpt from Hillsong’s 2015 response to the Commission’s findings: “The victim was a 36-year-old adult when this abuse became known and could have taken the matter to the police himself at any time.”)

Earlier this year, Brian Houston stepped down as head pastor of Hillsong “for the rest of the year” to focus on fighting the formal charge of concealing sex abuse. This week, after an internal investigation into two complaints that Brian had acted inappropriately toward women, he resigned.

The documentary presents an impressive array of former employees, volunteers and members who readily condemn both Hillsong’s common megachurch problems and its devastating specific ones. But a quietly striking aspect is that few if any seem to have soured on Christianity. Some discuss the more favorable qualities of the other congregations they’ve joined since leaving.

A less thoughtful documentary on the subject might miss such a nuance, but “A Megachurch Exposed” doesn’t. Memorably, one former volunteer says, “If Jesus were to walk into a Hillsong church today, I don’t know if He would be welcomed.” And with a slow smile, she adds, “He would probably flip the tables there, too.”

• Link: Full document
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But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.

• http://wisdomofchopra.com
• https://sebpearce.com/bullshit

• On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” - George Orwell

White Fragility - what’s wrong with the premise?

It follows the same premise that narcissists use to get a victim to prove their own false guilt from within. The reason that narcissistic abuse is so damaging is because it causes the victim to damn one’s self, no matter their intrinsically known innocence. It manipulates the victim into assassinating their own character and identity, in spite of ironclad internal knowledge of innocence and a preponderance of outward evidence to the contrary. No amount of external evidence to the contrary is enough to alleviate the constant pressure to internalize the guilt, once a narcissist has their diabolical claws in your mind.

Requests to discuss allegations with a narcissist are met with a slow clever smile spreading across their face, and regulated breathing, as they respond, “The fact that you even want to discuss this, merely proves your guilt.”

DiAngelo argues that white people are inescapably racist, writing, “All white people are invested in and collude with racism,” and that “The white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.”

Back to how narcissists operate. How does it benefit the abuser to put the victim’s head in a “guilty of the unprovable” vise? It gives them godlike power over the other person. If you can convince an individual of the unmitigated hopelessness of themselves, you can lead them to assassinate their own identity, all the while believing that they deserve to do so.

The concept of identity assassination that is preached in White Fragility circles does not move the cause of justice forward. You cannot heal injustice by gaslighting everyone of a certain skin color. You cannot heal a lack of POC empowerment by excoriating the power of the individual to stand for or against racism on an individual basis, and to externally do everything within their power to fight injustice in their circles of influence and at the voting booth.

By accruing mass guilt to all white persons, you are removing their agency. Without agency, we cannot affect change.

Agency: to have agency over something means that one has the ability or authority to achieve control.

Furthermore, moral agency is an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.”

The premise of White Fragility, that that we are all born bad and our racism is inescapable, removes agency, moral or otherwise. In removing agency, author Di’Angelo has also removed accountability. Logically speaking, we cannot possibly be accountable for something over which we have no agency of change.

White people publicly accused of racism risk social ostracization and professional ruin. The idea that some white people may be defensive when accused of racism is not surprising. But though SOME white people may exhibit a degree of what DiAngelo calls fragility, her grandiose theory as applied to all or even most white people has two fatal flaws.

There is no way to prove or disprove one’s internal world. Narcs, too, love to deal in the realm of unprovable stuff, because evidence is too, well, inconvenient, for the desired power dynamic.

The legitimacy of a theory is in whether it is unfalsifiable or not. DiAngelo’s theory of White Fragility is unfalsifiable. It is impossible for someone to prove that they are not fragile, just as it was impossible for me to prove that I was not a whore.

More insidiously, just like my mom, DiAngelo frames her theory of white fragility such that any denial of her theory is interpreted as proof of its validity.

For example, DiAngelo writes that: “The mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement.”

DiAngelo leaves white readers with only two options. Either acknowledge your fragility, which proves DiAngelo’s theory, or deny your fragility, which according to DiAngelo, also proves her theory.

White people read the book because they care about fighting racism and being allies to people of color. They are ready to listen and are unabashedly looking for answers to difficult issues. What they are met with instead are Kafkatraps and logical fallacies in a ruse to convince ALL white people that they are racist and fragile.

So, what’s the answer?

I am listening. I care. However, I am unable to follow the siren song of a woman who would use the same manipulation tactics as my psychopathic mother with which to present “the answer”.

I will continue to believe in the power of individual agency to create a better future. Where there are causes that have a scientifically proven track record of increasing the agency and self-empowerment of POC, I will continue to support them.

I will not ascribe to anything that starts with the word, WHITE, which by definition is a bassackwards white-centric notion that decreases POC agency and a continued dependency on WHITE anything.

I will continue to use my finely-honed skills at noticing logical fallacies and kafkatraps. I will continue to stand against all manipulation.

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."