The Shiny, Happy Secrets of Hillsong
“Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward”
—Soren Kierkegaard—
In the last couple of weeks, I watched two documentary series that should have come with a trigger warning. I told someone close to me who did not grow up in an Evangelical world – if you want to understand the first 20 years of my life, watch “Shiny, Happy People.” If you want to understand the next 20 to 30 years, watch, “The Secrets of Hillsong.”
Shiny, Happy People
No, I wasn’t home schooled. And I never went to any of the work camps. And luckily, I wasn’t a blonde-haired teenage girl. But if the church I grew up in wasn’t full “Bill Gothard” and IBLP, we were VERY Bill Gothard and IBLP friendly. I went to three church-sponsored IBLP Seminars as a teenager and our church danced precariously on the “cult” borderline.[1] Nothing in the documentary surprised me. It was all very familiar: the female voices tone and cadence as quiet, infantile, passive, and submissive, the silencing of abuse, the creepy control of father’s over their daughters “purity”, the unconditional support of authority figures, the anti-education undertones…[the list could go on].
One gift to me of “Shiny, Happy People” was that as a teenager when I realized that some of the Gothard stuff was bullshit, I was ostracized as a “rebellious” teenager. With 40 years of hindsight, I can now be grateful that I followed what I knew to be true rather than being bullied into that world like the unfortunate survivors I saw on Prime Video.
What HAS surprised me is the pearl clutchers I know on Facebook who are aghast at the documentary but are unable to see how their own churches were also complicit in this kind of abuse.
The Secrets of Hillsong
For the next 20-30 years of my life, I left the ultra-conservative world and entered the corporate megachurch model of having a veneer of progressiveness and “cool” but selling a lot of the same recycled conservative crap.
I have met a couple of church leaders in the Hillsong documentary. Additionally, a close friend of mine’s daughter made an appearance in the documentary as a whistle blower to sexual misconduct. But it was more the “feel” of the megachurch model that was the biggest flashback for me. Again, knowing what I know now, not a single thing in The Secrets of Hillsong surprised me.
I felt a lot of empathy for Carl Lentz. Yeah, I know he made some bad decisions. And I still don’t agree with some of his theology. But I know what it is like to be in way over your head as a young leader. I also know what it is like to learn to ignore your feelings and never tell the truth about what you really think or feel. And what it is like to plant a church and work like crazy and never, ever feel like you can take a breath. And what it is like to be so emotionally depleted that you have nothing left to give but you push on because it is “God’s work.” And I know what it is like to risk it all for a church that in the end will do what it must do to you to protect the institution. And I know what it is like to interview for a non-church job for the very first time and say, “If I can sell Jesus to Millennials, I can sell anything.”
I’m about 40 pages into my next book. It’s about deconstruction and finding spirituality after church. I wrote this paragraph in the Introduction that seems fitting after watching these two documentaries:
But things changed. Or maybe I changed, I’m not 100% sure. All I know is that at some point I hit a tipping point and realized that not only was the American church not very helpful in making the world a better place, often the church is actively making the world much worse. In this regard, my story is like countless others – we left the church because of our fidelity to what is good, true, and beautiful; not because of our abandonment of it. I found freedom in reading Richard Rohr’s observation, “God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting those boxes.”[2]
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[1] In graduate school, I did a fair amount of study on cults and sects in America. The definition of a “cult” in most Christian circles is based on fidelity to theological orthodoxy. But most sociologists define cults in terms of their affect on adherents. For example, groups that are authoritarian, isolated, exclusive, opposed to independent thinking, and control people through guilt and shame. THAT was my heritage.
[2] Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999), p. 25.