Hillsong

This piece originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in June 2023.

As a rule, it’s a bad sign when multiple documentaries and podcasts about you come out simultaneously. A single documentary can be cause for celebration. Two or three at once is rarely a reason to break out the champagne. More than three and you’re really in strife.

A few years ago, Lance Armstrong got the multiple documentary treatment. More recently it happened to Elizabeth Holmes, and the late Jeffrey Epstein, and the organisers of the hilariously disastrous Fyre festival.

Now it’s the season of the Hillsong documentary. Late last year came the four-part Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed. A podcast called Faith on Trial debuted earlier this year. In the US, the four-part documentary The Secrets of Hillsong just went to air. This weekend SBS will premiere The Kingdom, presented by Marc Fennell, who grew up attending several Pentecostal churches in Sydney, including Hillsong. And to add insult to injury, Hillsong will be getting the satirical treatment in the first episode of The Betoota Advocate Presents, which premieres later this month on Paramount Plus.

The Hillsong story began in New Zealand in the 1950s, when a young Salvation Army officer named Frank Houston suffered a nervous breakdown and was reborn as a Pentecostalist. After rising through the ranks of New Zealand’s Assemblies of God church, Houston moved his family to Australia in 1976, and established a church called the Sydney Christian Life Centre. 

It was Frank’s son Brian who turned his father’s operation into a megachurch. Brian was a visionary. In 1983, he founded a branch of the CLC in Sydney’s Hills district. After a mind-expanding visit to America in the late 1980s, he wrote a mission statement called The Church I See. He dreamed of creating “a Church of influence … A Church growing so quickly that buildings struggle to contain the increase.”

Over the next decade, Houston made his vision come true. To accommodate his burgeoning flock, larger and larger venues were required – first school halls, then warehouses, and finally a purpose-built 3,000-seat auditorium resembling a scaled-down version of the Sydney Entertainment Centre. 

This was fitting, because by now Houston’s services had the ambience and production values of a rock concert. There was an in-house electric band to facilitate the dancing, singing and hand-clapping that are hallmarks of Pentecostal worship. Having “planted” branches of his church around the world, Houston tapped a gusher of revenue by licensing the band’s songs for international use. As a nod to the success of the music division, the whole church was renamed Hillsong in 2001.

“I’m not sure a church can be too big,” Houston once said. As Hillsong went mega, Houston acquired the political influence he craved. In his maiden speech to parliament, Scott Morrison credited him as a spiritual mentor. As Prime Minister, Morrison wangled Houston an invite to the White House, where Houston boasted of embracing “the chance to pray for President Trump.”

By that time, Hillsong needed as much praying for as Trump did. The church’s past was starting to catch up with it. The scandals of Hillsong are so various that the documentaries, to fit them all in, have to apply a kind of reverse triaging process, dealing briskly with the misdemeanours first, and saving the worst stuff for last.  

The smaller Hillsong scandals are mostly about money. For years the students at Hillsong’s Bible Colleges were used as unpaid – indeed, fee-paying – janitors and labourers. They were taught an inspirational mantra – “Do you believe we get to do this?” – to encourage the notion that they were doing God’s work, as opposed to Hillsong’s.

Hillsong also pushed the envelope on the tradition of tithing, which mandates that all worshippers, rich and poor, must divert 10 percent of their earnings to the church. In the Book of Malachi, there is a handy verse proclaiming that anyone who skimps on this obligation is picking the pocket of God Himself. Hillsong’s pastors seem to have been awfully fond of quoting this verse on stage. 

But these financial shenanigans seem trivial compared with the fact that Frank Houston was a serial child abuser. In New Zealand, Frank acquired a reputation for preying on young boys – a reputation that appears to have prompted his sudden departure from that country in the 1970s. 

In 1999, the mother of an Australian victim reported Frank’s abuse to the church. The victim was given $10,000 as a token of Frank’s regret. In return, the victim agreed to grant Frank his formal “forgiveness”, so that when the ageing pederast went to meet his maker – as he finally did in 2004 – he could stay out of Hell on a technicality.

Brian wasn’t implicated in any of his father’s crimes. But in 2021, he was charged with having concealed the Australian offence from police. He pleaded not guilty, arguing that the victim had explicitly asked him not to bring the incident to the attention of the authorities. Houston’s trial began in December last year; closing arguments will be heard later this month. 

In The Kingdom, Marc Fennell offers a personal take on the Hillsong story. As a youngster, Fennell was a member of the Hillsong congregation. He knows the church has destroyed lives, but he’s seen it improve lives too. Tainted as the bathwater is, Fennell wants to remind us there is a baby in there. “I remember feeling loved” in the church, he says. It was “really intoxicating.”

Intoxicating is a good word. As Fennell explains, Pentecostalism is “a faith designed to be felt.” Pentekoste is Greek for 50th. According to the New Testament, 50 days after Christ’s resurrection, on the feast of the Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them,” says the Book of Acts.

Speaking in tongues has always been a staple of Pentecostal practice. There are videos online of Brian Houston doing it. To the untrained ear, it sounds like he’s uttering meaningless babble. It sounds like that to the trained ear too. Modern linguists have established that the random yodels emitted by Pentecostalists don’t have the pattern of a language – not even an “unknown” one.  

Whether those doing the babbling understand that is another question. Near the end of The Kingdom, Fennell movingly recalls how lonely he used to feel in the jiving stalls of his megachurch. Everyone around him seemed to be feeling something profound, while he felt nothing. This seemed to mean one of two things. Either everyone else was “lying and putting on an act”, or God was granting them an experience that He was actively withholding from Fennell.

There’s a third possibility, though. Maybe Fennell’s fellow worshippers sincerely believed the Holy Spirit was coursing through them, because they’d been mentally softened up by all the singing and dancing, and by the supposedly charismatic antics of the resident preacher. 

This is another hallmark of Pentecostalism – its reliance on the personality of the charismatic minister. But charisma is a hard quality to define. It’s been said that Frank Houston had charisma. If he did, it doesn’t show up in the archival videos of his sermons. He comes across as a kind of charismatic black hole, a walking negation of vibrancy and charm. 

Nor is it easy for an outsider to understand what the Hillsong congregation ever saw in Brian Houston. Despite his lifetime of preaching, he has no discernible way with words. (Sample Houston aphorism: “How awesome is God?”) As for his physical appearance, Houston has tried a kaleidoscopic succession of looks over the years, without ever managing to land on a satisfactory image.

Early on he had glasses and a moustache. Both vanished in the 1990s. There was a leather jacket period, and a Seinfeldian jeans-with-sneakers period. A ponytail made a brief appearance. At one point he fully shaved his head. These days he attends his frequent legal appointments wearing an Ocean’s 11-style suit and open-necked shirt combo. The documentaries offer a time-lapse portrait of a man with an unlimited wardrobe budget but an uncertain sense of self.

Carl Lentz, the American preacher who became the frontman of Hillsong’s New York franchise in the 2010s, could never be accused of lacking charisma. When Lentz came to Hillsong’s Sydney Bible college in the late ’90s, Houston identified him as a future star, and handpicked him to spearhead Hillsong’s expansion into America.

In New York, Lentz became known for his chiselled physique, his lairy spectacle frames, his $10,000 Louis Vuitton hoodies, and his provision of spiritual guidance to Justin Bieber. In 2020 he was caught having an extra-marital affair, and Houston sacked him. Lentz now works in advertising. Even he has cracked a few jokes about the irony of this career move.

Brian Houston has denounced the current spate of Hillsong podcasts and docos as “mockumentaries.” “We’re under assault,” he says. It’s “the devil’s efforts.” 

But who is “we”? Houston’s flock is dwindling. This is the heartening thing about the documentaries. The most eloquent testimony in them comes from decent former congregants who quit the church when they noticed a certain discrepancy between the ethics it preached and the ethics it practiced.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Houston’s one-time praying partner, continues to run his own thriving megachurch – one whose leader can never fall from grace, since grace is something he’s never even pretended to have. At Trump’s rallies, the Pentecostal overtones are palpable. There is rock music, and plenty of gibberish. As for charisma, it can’t be denied that Trump is a hard man to look away from, even if you hate what you see. 

You’d say that Trump has found a way to use Hillsong methods for earthly ends, if it wasn’t so obvious that Hillsong’s ends were always earthly too.

At the end of The Kingdom, an American preacher explains why he’s left the Hillsong network. “When secular corporations are more transparent than the church,” he says, “and when secular boards hold their employees and directors to a higher standard of accountability, we have failed.”

He sounds like a man who has learnt a lesson. But he’s only learnt half a lesson at best, if he still finds it strange and surprising when a church turns out to have looser moral standards than the dreaded secular world. 

Do evangelists behave worse than other people? Not necessarily, perhaps. But the idea that they behave any better has been in tatters for a while. You don’t need multiple documentaries to tell you that. 

Read the Room: A Mantra for Moral Hacks

Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 6, 2023

When Barry Humphries died in April, the ABC kicked off the 7pm news with his obituary. It was a generally fitting tribute. Nevertheless, I braced myself for the part where it would be made clear that as illustrious as the decedent’s achievements had been, a couple of things he said late in his life did not meet the exacting moral standards of the national broadcaster. 

The reprimand was duly delivered at the obituary’s end, courtesy of a young comedian who gravely told the camera that it was a pity that Humphries, in his declining years, had “lost his ability to read the room.”

What exactly does it mean to “read the room”? People seem to think it’s an awfully clever thing to say. And they’re beginning to aim this directive not just at public figures like Humphries, but at the rest of us too. We’re all expected to read the room now. So how do we go about doing it? 

First, notice that we’re talking about the room. The definite article seems important. Nobody has accused Humphries of forgetting how to read a room. Comedians prize the ability to read the rooms they perform in. To lose that knack would indeed be a calamity.

But unless they’re abject hacks, comedians don’t read a room so they can overhaul their entire act on the spot, and tell the room exactly what it wants to hear. All good performers give audiences part of what they want, but push back against them too. Only by challenging an audience can you make it think, and maybe even change a few minds.

The injunction to read the room is more sweeping, and less negotiable. It implies that the whole world is one big room now. There are no walls any more, no discrete theatres or intimate audiences. Apparently we’re now meant to gauge the mood of the entire planet before venturing a joke or opinion about anything.

This sounds tricky. But the people who instruct us to read the room don’t see it as a problem. According to them, there’s only ever one opinion in this giant global room that’s acceptable – which happens to be the opinion they hold themselves.

So to read the room correctly, all we need to do is find out what these helpful wowsers think, then repeat their views. On the off chance we disagree with them, we’re always perfectly free to say nothing.

In other words, read the room, then heed it. Soothe it, flatter it, obey it. Toe the line. Lick your finger, hold it up, establish which way the wind is blowing, and adjust your verbal output accordingly.

This is a pretty presumptuous demand to make of anyone. It’s an astounding demand to make of an artist, and doubly astounding when the people making it purport to be artists themselves. 

And it’s triply outrageous to pretend that Humphries, when he committed his recent sins against orthodoxy, did so because he’d lost touch with the room-reading instincts that had previously been the cornerstone of his comedy. 

In truth, Humphries did not at any point “lose his ability” to echo orthodox opinion. He never wasted a minute of his adult life trying to do that. His whole career was based on being a minority of one. 

One of his earliest conceptual works was the chundering trick. He would board a bus holding a paper bag that he’d pre-emptively filled with custard and pineapple chunks. He would then noisily pretend to regurgitate into the bag. Then he would produce a spoon from his pocket and proceed to eat the custard and pineapple. 

Born into an age of stifling conformity (sound familiar?), Humphries spent his career bridling against Australian groupthink and complacency. Sometimes he retaliated gently, with characters like Edna and Sandy Stone. With characters like Sir Les Patterson he lashed out more savagely. 

In the 1970s he created a dodgy union official named Lance Boyle. “While performing him,” Humphries recalled, “it was amusing to scan the stalls” for scandalised left-wingers. “Their poor little pinched faces always fell most entertainingly when they realised that the odious operator on the boards was one of their own.”

That’s how Barry Humphries read a room. He actively devoted himself to making people’s faces fall. And this was an audience that had paid good money to come and see him! 

But it’s crucial to note that his audience didn’t respond by walking out, or ceasing to attend his shows. Audiences were less brittle in those days. They wanted to feel the frisson that comes when an artist irritates and amuses you simultaneously. 

Frisson is French for shiver, from the Latin frictio, meaning friction. Certain modern comedians seem to be afraid of friction. But friction between a comedian and a room generates surprise, enlightenment, and real laughter, as opposed to the kind of dutiful titters you hear in, say, a lecture hall.

There’s a performance by Bill Burr that’s legendary among stand-up comedians. Burr was headlining a comedy showcase in front of a drunken Philadelphia crowd, which had booed all the preceding acts off the stage. 

So Burr came on and improvised a blistering eleven-minute rant about what a pointless hellhole Philadelphia was. “I hate you people, and I hate this f—ing city,” he said, among other things. Having read the room, he told it to go fuck itself. 

By the end of his tirade, some people were laughing, and some were still booing. Burr didn’t care either way, because he’d said what he wanted to say. 

Read the room? Read a book. The whole history of worthwhile art was made by cussed individuals who followed the promptings of their own talents, and scorned the values of their time.

Did Vincent van Gogh read the room? If he had, he probably would’ve sold more than a single painting in his lifetime. But his paintings would have looked more like everybody else’s, and less like van Goghs.

Did Lenny Bruce read the room? Even when the room was full of undercover cops who were itching for an excuse to arrest him, Bruce followed his conscience, and let the profanities fly. Today’s comedians can say anything they like on stage precisely because courageous individuals like Bruce refused to obey the stultifying verbal restrictions of their era. 

Did Miles Davis read the room? Hardly. He was well known for turning his back to it while he played. 

Did the Beatles read the room? If they had, they’d never have moved beyond playing “She Loves You” to theatres full of screaming teens. Instead they quit touring, and made studio masterpieces like Sergeant Pepper’s and Abbey Road. 

A few days after Barry Humphries died, Jerry Springer fell off the twig too. Now there’s a man you could never accuse of failing to read the room. Springer gave the American public what it wanted; and America became a much worse place as a result.

Barry Humphries was a kamikaze contrarian. He rigged things so that no fan, however devoted, could possibly endorse everything he ever said or did. But to honour his dissident spirit, I think Australia should be the first English-speaking nation to stop saying “read the room.” 

It’s a dictum for moral hacks – a philistine import from the same country that gave the world Jerry Springer. It’s a recipe for dud art, a mantra for people who are afraid to think for themselves, and want the rest of us to stop thinking too.

In memory of the dangerously original Barry Humphries, let’s laugh this sinister, contemptible cliché out of existence. 

Heartburn at 40

Last October, the Daily Mail ran a story with this lengthy yet cryptic headline: “When Harry Met Salad! Olivia Wilde LEANS INTO bombshell revelations about collapse of her relationship by sharing vinaigrette recipe from Nora Ephron’s book about divorce from cheating ex-husband.” 

There was a lot happening in that headline. To make sense of it, and to get every nuance of the Harry-met-salad joke, you had to be familiar with a backstory that spanned four decades and involved five different celebrities, living and dead. 

The backstory was this ... [read more] 

Alone Australia

In 1848, an unfortunate American named Phineas Gage had a nasty accident while overseeing the construction of a railroad in Vermont. Gage was packing explosive into a rock with a pointed metre-long rod called a tamping iron when a stray spark caused the charge to blow prematurely. Shooting out of the rock like a javelin fired by a rocket launcher, the rod speared into Gage’s face, passed through the left frontal lobe of his brain, flew out the top of his skull, and landed point-first in the earth 25 metres away. 

Gage survived the accident, but his personality was drastically altered by the damage to his frontal lobe. This was a stroke of luck for the era’s brain scientists. Long before the days of fMRI, Gage’s injury offered valuable information about which parts of the brain did what. It would have been grossly unethical for medical researchers to obtain this information by ramming a metal rod through somebody’s head. But since that had happened to Gage already, scientists made the most of his misfortune ... [read more]