FX
Over the past few decades, pious profiteering has become so commonplace that it’s a cliché, such that Steve Martin was lampooning it back in 1992 with Leap of Faith and Danny McBride is still using it as fodder for HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. Thus, it’s no revelation that making money was the prime directive of Hillsong, a megachurch that was founded in Australia in the early 1980s and became a recent American sensation courtesy of its New York branch run by Carl Lentz, an unconventional and charismatic pastor who made Christianity cool for younger generations. Carl was a superstar on the fast track until scandal derailed his career. As it turns out, though, his missteps were the least of Hillsong’s problems, what with its own closeted skeletons involving alleged financial malfeasance and pedophilic sexual abuse.
Produced and directed by Stacey Lee, FX’s four-part The Secrets of Hillsong (May 19) tells a story full of disgusting elements that are now routine in conversations about religious organizations, much of them centering, in this instance, around Hillsong bigwig Brian Houston. Nonetheless, its main selling points are the first on-camera interviews with Brian’s hand-picked protégé Carl and his wife Laura, whom Carl was revealed to have cheated on in 2020, thus outing him as a hypocrite and ending his tenure with Hillsong. Considering his public profile as a rising celebrity phenom who served as Justin Bieber’s spiritual advisor (he even baptized him) and befriended Selena Gomez, Kevin Durant, and Oprah Winfrey, Carl’s infidelity was headline news, undercutting his reputation with his flock, destroying his marriage, and compelling Brian to let him go.
Carl is now an advertising executive in Sarasota, Florida, and in The Secrets of Hillsong’s late bombshell, he’s still with Laura, who despite her spouse’s betrayal has chosen to take him back. That’s certainly the biggest Carl-centric surprise to be found in Lee’s docuseries, given that otherwise, his downfall was brought about by a fairly standard mixture of unchecked hubris and horniness. The thing that truly made Carl unique—and successful—was that he didn’t resemble a pastor in the first place. With NSYNC hair (as he himself describes it), arms full of tattoos, a ripped body, and a wardrobe of leather jackets and tight jeans, he more closely resembled a pop star or model—or a particularly attractive hipster from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the location of his NYC headquarters—than a stereotypical man of the cloth.