![]() MCCAMMON: At the same time, most of the labor that made Hillsong function was coming from volunteers. And for years and years, you know - Alex can speak to this as well, but - incredibly hard for journalists to understand or see because there are no checks and balances, not in Australia and certainly not in America, that tell us where this money might be going and ensures that the money is going to the places it's saying it's going to. I mean, this was one of the big challenges with the documentary because, you know, even though Hillsong are incredibly good at telling us the numbers of how many people are attending and how many people are listening to our records, like, statistics were very, very, very big, the numbers about money were incredibly vague. What do we know, Stacey, about how Hillsong made money from churchgoers and where that money was going? These leaders you've mentioned, Brian Houston and Carl Lentz and others, they were apparently getting very rich. MCCAMMON: And what was the goal of that sort of disguise, as you describe it?įRENCH: I mean, Brian Houston, Hillsong, it is a prosperity gospel church. The other thing that I think Hillsong did really well was it disguised traditional Pentecostal conservative values underneath all of that cool window dressing. And they put out these incredibly charismatic pastors. It's a - it sounds a lot like Coldplay or, you know, like U2, sort of like big anthem-y, chills inducing, heart-swaying melodies. It's like a rock concert, right? Like, you know, Hillsong music is famous worldwide. ![]() And Hillsong's thing is it's like - it's an experience. Weekly, they had about 150,000 congregants. So at its height, Hillsong had branches - or I guess they're almost like franchises - in 31 countries. Just describe Hillsong a little bit more for me if you would, Alex.įRENCH: Sure. And even for a megachurch, it's huge, I mean, churches all over the world. MCCAMMON: But this story happens at a church. I really wanted this to be a deeper exploration of not just how this happens, but why it happens. And I didn't want this to be a takedown of religion by any sense. For me, you know, I wasn't a religious person kind of going into this. LEE: Really, the driving force for me is that we hear this kind of narrative over and over and again, you know, these - whether it's church or whether it's Washington or Hollywood, you know, there's this societal kind of trend of, you know, putting these people up on pedestals and really putting so much trust and faith and power in their hands. Rather, he was a symptom of a larger sort of toxic culture that was rooted in the the main Hillsong Church in Sydney and disseminated throughout the world. And as we sort of started reporting around the edges, it became really clear to us that, you know, while a lot of Carl's behavior was incredibly problematic, he wasn't the problem. And my partner, Dan Adler, and I were sort of left wondering what to do next. What happened, though, was Carl disappeared. The sort of initial story was going to be a profile of Carl and an examination of how he was going to turn the page and sort of go on with his life in the wake of the affair. ![]() How did you and your Vanity Fair colleague, Dan Adler, first come across the story of Hillsong? And what was it that interested you?įRENCH: I was first put on the case by my editor, Matt Lynch. ![]() Here to talk about this new documentary series are director Stacey Lee and Alex French, one of the Vanity Fair journalists who broke the story that laid the foundation for this documentary. FX just dropped the first two episodes in a new four-part documentary series titled "The Secrets Of Hillsong." It examines the church's fall from grace over the last decade. Then in late 2020, the church publicly fired Lentz and his wife over what they cited as, quote, "moral failings." The ousting of that lead pastor was just the tip of the iceberg for years of accusations of misconduct by leaders of the church. After celebrities like Justin Bieber joined the congregation, its popularity exploded. operation in New York in 2010, led by soon-to-be-celebrity pastor Carl Lentz, who you just heard. MCCAMMON: The international evangelical megachurch set up their first U.S. He is protecting you from forces that you cannot fight on your own. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE SECRETS OF HILLSONG")ĬARL LENTZ: And you can rest a little bit easier tonight knowing that God is protecting you from things you have not seen yet. Hillsong Church set out to make church cool.
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