Endless Thread - God Is A Capitalist

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Hillsong is an Australian megachurch famous for its hipster vibe, multi-platinum house band, and connections to celebrities like Justin Bieber, Chris Pratt, and Kevin Durant. But behind the flashing lights and thick-rimmed glasses is an ultra-conservative church with a dark past.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Hey, just a heads up, this episode mentions sexual assault and pedophilia. Amory, we both know why we're here. Yep. To do our jobs. But I want to start by asking you to watch this video, because I think it encapsulates our reasons for tackling this particular episode. Okay. Hey, guys, welcome back. We're Here at Hillsong Conference 2017. Can you describe this scene a bit here?

Like, what are we looking at? Okay, we're looking at a bunch of dudes on a couch together. There are three guys. They're all very chill. They're kind of broin around, dressed very casually. There's someone interviewing them. So this to me looks a little bit like backstage at a tech conference or something. Yeah.

Or like backstage at Coachella. Yeah, yeah. or something. The surroundings are modern. The lighting is super nightclub-ish. Two of these guys I didn't recognize. And one, I'm not too, too old to recognize. Justin Bieber.

The Beeps. Baby, babe. And what is weird to me or a little weird is that both of these guys being interviewed. When I first saw them, I thought they were just part of Bieber's entourage, these guys on either side of him. Like they're wearing famous,

hip person outfits, cool sneakers, tight jeans. Oh, yeah, slicked back hair. Yeah, those like stringy metal necklaces. They almost look like they're filming a music video. Yeah. But the less famous guys rolling around on the couch here are not part of Justin's entourage. They're not pop stars. They're pastors of the Hillsong Church, Carl Lentz from New York City,

and Chad Veach from Los Angeles. And Justin Bieber's kind of sandwiched in the middle. answering the interviewer's softball questions about what he liked best about the youth part of the Hillsong Conference. I just enjoy seeing people worship. Praise in God. Youth-focused Christian megachurches that try to show how cool they are are not new. But in recent years, Hill Song's been getting a lot of attention, partly because the church has been associated with a bunch of celebrities,

from Chris Pratt to Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Bono, NBA stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. Also partly because of the church's crazy popular music, which has reached far beyond the usual Christian music charts and moved into the regular pop music mainstream. Their latest album debuted at number two on the Billboard Top 200, and they performed live on ABC's Good Morning America. You're excited about this one. We are back now with one of the biggest Christian bands in the world, Hillsong United, an estimated 50 million people sing their songs in church every Sunday. I do every Sunday. They're one of my favorite groups. They're new album, people. The Hillsong Church has been described as a money-making machine, pulling in millions upon millions of dollars from around the world.

And since Amory and I are not necessarily any of Bieber's believers, are we Amory, are you Belieber? I am not, I confess. We didn't really know much about Hillsong until we found a Reddit post with a title that is also the title of today's episode. Amory say it with me, God is a good. Capitalist. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit.

We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Right near the end of this bubbly, Brodown-Song video that we have been watching, the interviewer does the thing that any good interviewer at a big annual tech conference does, right? They promote next year's big conference. He says, you know, for all the people already talking about next year, for considering whether or not they want to pay their way into Hillsong's 2018 conference. But why do you think it's important for people to take time to be in moments like this? Hillsong's New York pastor, Carl Lentz, says this. I think anything that you invest in, and there's a return.

So there's a lot of people investing in different things. We all chose to let's go invest in this. And our return has been supernatural. Invest in the Hillsong Conference and your return on investment will be supernatural. That's a big promise. It is, and it is part of what inspired an incredibly in-depth Reddit post about the Hillsong Church that went viral. The post was 4,352 words long. The post title in full was God is a capitalist in introduction to Hillsong, the evangelical Christian church running pop.

Pop as in pop music. This post was on the Pophead subreddit, where people nerd out about pop music, and the post was written by a woman named Kiki. I'm an American. I'm from Austin, Texas, but I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, to go to university here. I'm a third-year law student. It sort of makes sense that Kiki is studying law. Her Reddit post is heavily researched with footnotes, links, separate sections on the church's beliefs, music, fundraising scandals, it is carefully constructed. It's like a legal brief written by somebody who loves pop music.

Somebody whose Reddit handle is Go West Young Kanye. I really like puns. And at the time, I really loved Kanye West. Kiki is very active in the pop heads community, where fans go to talk about the music and sometimes to talk about the gossip surrounding the music. And Kiki stays up on all the latest goss. by following insider accounts.

Insider accounts are this kind of weird mix of actual insiders, people close to pop stars who are sources and gossip stories, and fakers. People who post a ton of gossip hoping some of it ends up being true and then delete everything they get wrong. Pretty genius. Evil genius. And often these accounts will kind of pop up out of nowhere

and they'll have no followers, but then you'll see like a street. of correct predictions, and then you're like, oh, shit, this is an insider. A few years ago, one of the accounts Kiki follows got something right. They were talking about how Hilsong was going to start using Selena as kind of their public advocate. And that made me go, wait, so who are Hilsong and what is this? What Kiki found was a church that in recent years seems to have been riding a tsunami

of success and influence. with no small amount of help from celebrities and pop stars, including Selena Gomez, and rock star pastors that in their public profiles look a lot like those celebrities and pop stars. Media outlets like ABC News have developed a favorite phrase. And the pastor is a hipster heartthrob. You can pull up their Instagrams. They're just constantly flexing private jets and crazy holidays and designer clothing, which is yet another way that they sell that image of cool church.

Like, if your pastor's wearing Gucci, you're like, oh, that's really cool. Kiki put her palms together, raised those prayer-like hands above her head, and dove in to Hillsong's history, which actually goes back decades. The story goes like this. Hillsong's grandfather of sorts was a man named Frank Houston. Frank grew up extremely poor in New Zealand. Eventually he made it to Australia and started a family in the 1970s. He also became the protege of a Pentecostal minister.

He built up his preaching skill set, started a church, and started finding some success. And as Sydney, Australia has become more of a globally recognized metropolis, the Houston family's church has also grown. In the last three decades, that church has built a global reach. Here's a CBS This Morning report from 2014. Every week in 12 countries, 7.5. But 75,000 faithful Bill Hillsong churches. 10 million people follow Hillsong on social media, including Justin Bieber.

But along with its history of financial growth, along with its cachet of coolness and celebrity participation, along with its promises to followers that it will help them reach prosperity and positivity, Hillsong has a darker history. One that involves alleged pedophilia and a history of homophobia and religious conservatism that might, surprise the people getting drawn to Hill Song. Hillsong's history of LGBTQ intolerance and its sex scandals have been covered by a few reporters here in the U.S., so we called one up. My name's Brandy Zedrosny. I'm from New York, and I'm a reporter at NBC News. How did you first get interested in Hillsong? So I was personally interested in Hillong. I grew up as a Southern Baptist, which has a very restrictive evangelical religion and it has a lot in common with hill song so i wanted to write sort of

a definitive piece on the history of hill song and you know their true core beliefs and how very you know uncool how very ultra-conservative their their underlying beliefs are you've been to a hill song service right yeah what was that like it was great um it was really fun and people were really nice, you know, a bunch of leather-clad parishioners and ushers, you know, waved you in with a hearty welcome to church and there were goldfish crackers. And, you know, this is the best part of church is the people in it. And you really do feel like it's a second family. So they have got that part down. Do you think that the goldfish thing was a play on Jesus fish? I don't know, actually, but I think it was like a communion thing. Or maybe it was just a snack. I don't

know. It was Sunday. So a lot of people seemed like mildly hung over. I was at the afternoon service. There were a lot of sluggish hipsters for sure. Kiki made this point too. Hillsong services don't feel all that well churchy. It's basically a rock concert on Sunday and you can see Justin Bieber in the audience. So it doesn't come across as like a lot of proselytizing and like it's not a very aggressive place. And I think that appeals to all people, not just celebrities. I mean, it's interesting here in Boston, the place where they have these Hillsong services is like literally, I think, essentially a nightclub. Yeah. Well, when I was in London, I was staying in an Airbnb and I passed the church where Hillsong has there. It's literally on the west end of London, which is like the Broadway of London.

And I was like, what is this? Jesus? What's going on? Hill Song might feel like a brand new church stylistically and in terms of visibility, but like Brandy says, it's not. You know, Hilsong was first started. It wasn't known as Hilsong, but a church was started in Australia by this guy named Frank Houston in the 70s. And he had a son named Brian Houston who married a woman named Bobby Houston. And they, in the 80s, went off and started their own. own church. And they called it a Hills Christian Life Center. And then Brian Houston merged his father's church with his own. That became the Hill song that we know today. What Brian Houston did that was really smart was that he combined, you know, typical megachurch preaching with a wildly popular

music ministry. They sold, you know, millions of dollars worth of CDs and, you know, expanded, expanded, expanded. It's hard to calculate an exact dollar amount, but the latest album we mentioned, the one that debuted at number two on the Billboard Top 200 charts, sold more than 100,000 units in its first week. And it was the top-selling album in the U.S. across all genres. Here's Hillsong United on Good Morning America again, performing their big single, Good Grace. Do you feel like the music part of it was almost a platform for the church itself to grow? Oh, absolutely. I mean, religion isn't fun. Nobody wants to go and read from a Bible that says, like, your fire and brimstone and terror. So you've always needed, especially for like a religion like this, that is so authoritative. It's always helpful to put a rock and beat to it. And like, that's how you get, you know, the kids. You said you grew up in a Southern Baptist church. How was your Hillsong experience different from that?

Hill Song would have, to my church, been seen as unbiblical. They would be too liberal. And that really is only because of the music and maybe the celebrity sort of chasing. That would be seen as worldly secular. And in my religion and in Southern Baptists, we believed that pop music and all of that stuff was sort of of the devil, that everything should be all about Jesus all the time. our Redditor Kiki says that the way Hill Song has embedded itself in pop

music goes beyond even chart-topping albums. When artists like Selena and Justin are successful, it gives them the opportunity to talk about Hill Song and kind of signal their faith and

make it more, their beliefs more mainstream. Beliefs that feel incongruous with leather jacket donning hipster pastors. Hilsong has this image of being trendy and progressive Instagram church. But it's also hiding this huge homophobia, and they've had sexual abuse issues,

and then they have the financial issues as well, which I haven't even mentioned. We're going to get to all of that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into it. to other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab. Adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Spire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So we've heard the ways in which Hillsong is reimagining what church can look and sound like. But reporter Brandy Zedrosny says there's one big glaring similarity between a

Hillsong service and the Southern Baptist services that she grew up attending. And that's, you know, a literal reading of the text and that, you know, the Bible is the literal word of God. And so, you know, you can't change that. That's why there's no way that they can change their stance on something like, for instance, their anti-LGBQ ideology, you know, that being gay is a sin and that can never change. So that's put them in sort of a pickle because they want to be progressive and, you know, woo the millennials. But having a stance like that is not cool. Kiki, who is one of those millennials, finds the church's stance on the LGBTQ community particularly uncool. They say they're gay accepting, but not gay affirming. And they say being gay is a lifestyle.

And as a non-straight person, to kind of phrase it like that, like, we'll let gay people into our church, but we're not going to make them feel that it's okay to be gay. That was really problematic to me. So how does Hillsong dance around this? Here's their founder and senior pastor Brian Houston talking to ABC. I can't unwrite the Bible. But in the other hand, we're not a church that can just make big blanket sweeping statements that dismissed people. If a gay couple came to Hilsong, would you want them to change?

The short answer is, I think all of us need to be changing. If sidestepping a question was an Olympic sport, Brian Houston would be in contention for gold. Hilsong's position on LGBTQ has slightly changed, but only in its messaging. So they have always said that if you are gay, you are welcome in Hilsong Church. And that is true.

You are welcome to sit in the pews. You cannot hold leadership roles. And they believe and they preach openly and actively that being gay is a sin. Now, Carl has now sort of said, well, it's just like any other sin. And I don't really feel like talking about it. Jesus didn't really talk about it that much. So you see a distancing there. But it's still clear that their position is that if you are LGBTQ, you're welcome to sit in the seat,

but you are in effect a second class citizen. You really do have to take a seat sort of at the back of the bus. order to worship there. This has become a problem for people who have benefited from Hillsong's support. People like Guy Sebastian, the 2003 winner of Australian Idol. Sebastian wasn't a Hillsong parishioner. He was a member of another Pentecostal church that would eventually be subsumed by Hillsong as a, quote, Hillsong family church. But Sebastian got a taste of Hillsong's growing influence via Australian Idol's online voting. Members of the church started supporting him because he identified himself as a Christian and a virgin. In fact, there was a kind of reality TV singing contest

scandal, with Hillsong being accused of flooding the voting system and unfairly skewing it in Sebastian's favor. After initially being excited by the support, Sebastian said that he couldn't get behind the way the church treated people who were gay. He publicly parted ways. Here in the U.S., earlier this year, actor Ellen Page called for another person to do the same for similar reasons. She was calling out actor Chris Pratt, who has attended Hillsong Services. A lot of this played out on Twitter, but Paige also made comments on Hillsong's treatment of gay people on Stephen Colbert. I am lucky to have this time and the privilege to say this. This needs to stop.

For the people who criticize it, Hill Song's power as an organization is tied up with celebrity and with using that celebrity to help it pull in money. As Kiki continued her law student who's also a pop music fan style research, she learned that in recent years the church, with help from celebrities, has been raising millions of dollars in a way that has some people comparing it to Scientology. Hillsong Pastor Carl Lentz pushed back against that comparison in a 2017 interview with Vice. Apples and oranges. Because Scientology is so out there, they're like, you're the guy. So if we can get you indoctrinated quick enough, we're going to make new the spokesman.

We've never done that. Justin's never set foot on stage. That's no longer true, and we'll get to that. But suffice it to say, some of Hillsong's money-making prowess comes from its connection to celebrities. Kiki's obsession with pop music comes through again here with a comment another celebrity made about Justin Bieber. Post Malone, who's a rapper. Rapper is a strong word for him. A hitmaker.

I don't know what Post Malone is. Post Malone, who was like he's friends with Justin Bieber or something, he said in a profile of himself for GQ that Justin gave $10 million to Hillsong. And Justin Bieber's representative denied that, but at the same time, it sounded totally plausible to me. The reason that this figure sounds plausible to Kiki is that Hillsong engages in tithing, asking parishioners to donate 10% of their income to the church. This would include celebrities. The church only has about 100,000 members, a number that sounds big, but is pretty small compared with a lot of religious groups. But it has a big reach. It currently has

operations in 15 to 20 countries. Its services and materials are found in 150 languages, and it has, in recent years, managed to raise close to $100 million. That's like if every single member of the church gave $1,000 in one year. And that figure is from the church itself, from an annual report. So that may be on the low end. Because it's a church, Hilsong as an organization doesn't have to abide by the same rules of taxation and financial disclosure as other businesses. Can you tell us about Hilsong's emphasis on prosperity and making money? Sure.

So again, a basis for the religion is as hell is punishment for sin. but that's not a very marketable lesson, right? So instead, you know, what a lot of evangelical preachers do and what Hillsong also does is they preach a kind of prosperity gospel. And prosperity gospel, you know, in a nutshell, is that God wants you to be really rich. So if you believe in Jesus, he's going to, you know, reward you here on Earth. Got to spend money to make money, right?

But even setting aside the church's massive, proverbial collection plate, the celebrity affiliation does something else. It's the kind of low-key, high-profile marketing campaign that works in all kinds of industries. Basically, you just associate someone super famous with a product or an idea, and the super fans will glom on without you even having to ask them to outright. You just have to project that these celebrities are having a good time with that product or idea. So you might too. You'll notice if you read Selena Gomez profiles about faith, she doesn't really mention Hillsong. They mentioned Hillsong for her.

I'm looking at Selena Gomez's Instagram account right now. Yeah. And it says, light space, zest, that's God. With him on my side, I'm fearless, all caps, afraid of no one and nothing. Even if the celebrities aren't saying Hill Song all over their Instagram accounts, the fans make the connection, which is in part because the celebrity, Celebrity-focused media just fills in the blanks without the church having to ask. And this is a problem for people like Kiki who think that this cool church vibe belies Hillsong's real belief structure, which is connected to Hillsong leader Brian Houston.

And its history of sexual assault allegations, which are connected to his father, Frank Houston. Back to Brandy. So in 2014, you know, Australia called a sort of royal commission to look into the testimony of nine boys. who said that Frank Houston had abused them, had sexually molested them. And this is in the 60s and the 70s. Now, when this happened, allegedly there is one boy. His name was AHA. And he testified that starting out at seven years old, Frank would stay with his family

and molest him after church meetings, come into his room at night. And he said the abuse went on for several years until he hit puberty. and then Frank seemed no longer interested. AHA came forward and identified himself last year for the first time. His name is Brett Sangstock. Here he is talking on 60 Minutes Australia. I could not speak. I couldn't scream.

I couldn't push back. I just went rigid and I couldn't breathe. I was petrified. Did he say anything to you? You know, you're my golden boy and you're special to me and all these sort of things, which as an adult now I look back at, it makes me one of your phone. So he told his mother about this in the 70s, and, you know, she said, don't challenge the church leaders. They are, you know, like royalty. And then he said that, you know, several years later,

his mother changed her mind by the late 90s. Those allegations had come to Brian himself. And so Brian has said before the commission that he fired, confronted his father, fired him, and, you know, heard his confession. But, you know, what happened was that Frank was allowed to quietly resign. He took out a pension until the day he died, and he got to die without ever having publicly atoned for the sins that he allegedly made against these boys. Brandy points out that nobody in the church brought the allegations to the authorities, including Brian Houston, who is now reportedly under investigation, part of which came out in a Royal Commission report in Australia in 2015. All of this is unfortunately a familiar theme

to anyone who has followed the scandals in the Catholic Church, for instance. The website Church Watch Central has a post detailing the allegations against Frank Houston, coupled with audio of a sermon that he supposedly gave in 2004. Some of that audio, given the larger context, is chilling. Here's a few samples. But what a fantastic girl he is. Curly hair, sort of, good-looking. How old are you, son? Ten. How old are you?

Eight. Ten, eight? I'm eight too, but it's 82. This is especially chilling since, according to some of the survivors of Frank's alleged abuse, the church has never really answered for it, or been really held accountable by the authorities in Australia. We should point out that, Brian Houston says his dad was a bad apple and that it doesn't mean that the whole

Hillsong tree is rotten. The church has been criticized by other Christians for putting money-making schemes over substance and by people who are generally skeptical of organized religion, for, you know, building a culture around literal interpretations of the Bible, for separating people from their money, and for the past sex scandals that you were talking about. But the church has basically maintained this idea. that they're growing their flock in an era when Christianity itself is struggling, you know, when church attendance is down. So is it possible that the organization's motivations are actually

pure? Oh, sure. I think it's totally possible that they are pure-hearted and believe this. Again, these are my people. You know, I went to church with them every Sunday and Wednesday and Friday nights. I don't think that they're, and this is just my personal opinion. So I think that these are, They seem like nice folks and they are running a family business. And that business is incredibly lucrative. And I go in, it's a fun experience. There's great music. I'm getting a positive message in neon lights from a cool guy that likes me.

And that's what you take away. Oh, and Jesus. But that's what you take away. And so of course their numbers are increasing. That sounds great. But for anybody who's willing to do the homework, it doesn't take that long to see that underneath, there's a problematic ideology or is ultra-conservative. And just you have to be up front about that.

The kicker in your story for The Daily Beast is good. Thanks. Those are my favorite part. You're talking about being at the service with Carl Lentz, the New York City pastor. He's talking about a group of people from the Bible than Nicolations. That's right. Yeah. Okay.

And Lentz says God actually hated this. group because this group in the Bible is trying to kind of accommodate the culture of its time instead of changing that culture? Yeah. So, you know, he points that out and I really got chills because I find it insidious that they're seemingly representing the culture that we live in now with Instagram and with, you know, the clothes and with the celebrities. But that was very telling to me. And that was almost like, you know, revealing themselves is that they're not trying to accommodate the culture. They're trying to change it. And all of you are here for it. Where do you think Hillsong is going? I have no idea. I mean, I know that religion will always be

with us. We'll always need a reason to explain, you know, why things happen or something to believe in just to get through the day. So I don't think that's going anywhere. And I think that they are packaging it smarter than anybody else is doing. I mean, I think Hillsong has weathered every possible storm of criticism they could have at this point, and people are flocking to it. Hillsong's like fast food for your religious needs, and I don't think it's going anywhere. I think they're here to stay. Brandy, thank you so much for talking to us about this story. My pleasure. Thanks for doing it.

We reached out to Hillsong to ask about the issues reported on by Brandi and researched by Kiki. The church declined to give us an interview. But we did notice something in the news last week. For the very first time, Justin Bieber moved from the backstage couch of the 2017 Hill Song Conference and on to the stage of a Hillsong service where he led worship. After the performance captured by TMZ, Pastor Judah Smith explained Bieber's participation like this. I want to be part of a church where everybody gets a fair shake and using their gift.

to contribute to the community, and so far be it from me, to stand in the way of someone who clearly has a gift to lead worship. With the continued support of people like Justin Bieber, it seems like Brandy's right. Hillsong doesn't seem to be slowing down. More evidence of that came this summer when the church was visited by yet another major public figure. Our freedoms as Christians in this country, and they should be protected. Australia is a free country.

nothing more fundamental than the freedom of belief. Whatever that belief might be. That is Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, speaking to 21,000 Hillsong believers in Sydney at the opening of this year's conference. I mean, he's not the Bebes, but Morrison does plan to introduce national legislation that further protects Hillsong and other churches

from interference by the government. Endless thread is. a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer who would like to see more pups on swings on his Instagram instead of pastors wearing Gucci. Iris Adler is our executive producer and when she found out how much money Hill Song was raking in, she said, That's insane. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus who thinks this is a perfect example of late stage capitalism. Michael Pope is our advisor, Reddit, who thinks that Hill song plays

Music French people might play at a party or just with friends around. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our interns are Magdi Elamata. Maggie's fine. And Noah Boston. It's like Austin with a bee. For photos of what a hill song service looks like and a link to Brandy's Hillsong piece for the Daily Beast, go to our website, wbUR.org slash endless thread.

On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread if you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today. Hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sieverts. I'm senior producer and co-host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out. Hey, it's Ben again. Just wanted to correct a small factual error we noticed after publishing this episode.

We said in the episode that Justin Bieber led worship at a Hillsong church. It was actually a Hillsong family church called Church Home, thanks to the listeners who pointed this out to us. Okay, that's all for now.