“I’m tired of this damage,” Carl Lentz announces in the new FX docuseries The Secrets of Hillsong. Speaking for the first time about his public fall from grace three years ago—when he was ousted from his position as the titular church’s celebrity pastor and his extramarital affairs came to light—Lentz looks back on his rock-bottom realizations. “I’m tired of putting people I love through pain. The decisions that I made, the pain that was caused, the betrayals involved…I take responsibility for those.”
Lentz speaks with surprising candor in the four-part investigative docuseries, premiering May 19, which advances Dan Adler and Alex French’s definitive reporting of the Hillsong scandals for Vanity Fair. His life looks much different than it did about 10 years ago, when Lentz was the charismatic figurehead of New York City’s fast-growing Hillsong outpost—lording over rock-concert-like sermons, serving as spiritual adviser to Hillsong’s most famous disciple, Justin Bieber, and sitting for interviews with the likes of Oprah Winfrey.
When The Secrets of Hillsong director Stacey Lee filmed Lentz with his family for the docuseries this year, the ex-pastor was living an under-the-radar existence in Sarasota, Florida, reporting to a run-of-the-mill advertising job in a nondescript office.
“When I talked to Carl at his new job, I think being someone that wasn’t the boss, the lead, or responsible for a bunch of other humans was little bit of a respite,” Lee tells VF in a Zoom call. “He genuinely had never seen the world from the middle-management perspective, and I think that was incredibly humbling for him.”
In the docuseries, Lentz says that the mounting pressures of his role as Hillsong ambassador contributed to his downfall. He had gone from doing two services a day to up to five or six, becoming a public figure thanks to his friendship with Bieber and other celebrity congregants. “If you have issues in your life, influence and power and position will exacerbate all of them,” he says, before revealing that he began liberally using prescribed ADHD medication to keep up with the frantic pace of his life. “Any sort of drug mixed with any sort of sexual addictions mixed with any sort of pressure is going to create a storm of problems.”
In her conversation with VF, Lee says that talks with Lentz and his wife, Laura Lentz, about participating in The Secrets of Hillsong progressed slowly.
“It had been almost two years since they were very abruptly fired,” explains the filmmaker. “Rather than come out and give their perspective on every accusation, they disappeared. They figured out their own personal dynamics, their family, what was going to happen with them and their kids.” When she approached the family members, she says, “they were trying to think about what the next part of their life would look like.”
When pitching the couple on the docuseries, “we wanted to make it clear that they would have to walk through the fire and [that Carl would have to] answer for a lot of the accusations from that 10-year period that were problematic,” says Lee—like the allegation that Carl sexually abused his family’s nanny, who was also a member of the Hillsong community. “We are talking about incredibly damning accusations…not things that you can just walk back.” (Lentz was not charged with a crime over the allegations.)
The filmmaker asks Carl point-blank about those particular allegations in the docuseries’ second episode. “I am responsible for allowing an inappropriate relationship to develop in my house with someone that worked for us,” he replies. “Any notion of abuse is categorically false. They were mutual adult decisions by two people who lied profusely, mainly to my wife.” He also admits, “I’m responsible for that power dynamic…and I failed absolutely miserably.”
Courtesy of FX.
Lee was surprised by how forthcoming Laura was willing to be on camera. “This is a woman who has been betrayed on so many levels,” says Lee. “I did not know if she was going be defensive,” or shut down entirely. “This is very raw material she’s talking about, and it’s not exactly flattering or awesome to hear that your husband’s having an affair and the whole world knows. But she was really willing to go there.”
Lee notes that it isn’t common to get such truthful testimony from a betrayed party. “Carl’s the glittery, shiny one—the person that everyone wants to hear from,” the filmmaker says. “But I think the loneliest person in a church is quite often the pastor’s wife. They see everything, they’re at the heart of it, but they have so little of a platform to express themselves. I wanted to empower her side of the story, and for there to be a sense of strength in what she’d walked through and experienced. The journey you go on with Laura as to whether she’s going to stay with Carl, her thought-making process about what a healthy relationship looks like—this guy’s cheated on me, who’s to say he’s not going to do it again—felt like fresh insight.”
The docuseries proves why Carl was so compelling to the masses. Footage from his sermons, which seemed to resemble arena rock concerts more than church services, capture the pastor’s charisma.
“You can be from any walk of life or spiritual belief set, and listen to [his] sermon and feel a human connection,” says Lee. “He really was magnetic and charismatic. His way of real-talking church in a way that felt like he was talking to you specifically was very powerful. But it’s like, [how do you separate] the performance versus who you are the rest of the week? Was this just a façade? That was a large part of the journey we went on with Carl. The reality is, none of us would be talking about this story if it didn’t have Carl Lentz at the center of it.”
When Lee sat down with Carl, she says that both she and her subject had to break through that façade.
“I had to ask questions over and over again in different ways, because Carl’s had press training…he had to break down some of those kind of innate, automatic responses and defense systems,” she says. During the interview, Carl reveals that he was sexually abused as a child, and discusses some of the work he’s done to untangle his own trauma. He’s open about his affairs and their impact on his family. He’s willing to take accountability for his actions. But there were two subjects that repeatedly caused Carl to bristle.
“He was very adamant that he did not like the title ‘celebrity pastor,’ because that [overshadowed] the other things he was doing. His legacy—what everyone knows him for now—is he is a celebrity pastor that fell from grace. He doesn’t like that,” Lee explains.
Carl was also reluctant to discuss Bieber. “Even directing conversation toward Justin Bieber, you could see the tension. He did not want to talk about it. I think they did have a very close relationship. [Bieber] lived at the Lentz family’s house for months during some of the darkest times of Bieber’s life. They traveled the world together and I think that it’s a real pain point for Carl—what ultimately happened with their relationship.”
Shortly after Hillsong fired Lentz, Bieber and his wife, Hailey, unfollowed the pastor on Instagram. Several months later, Bieber announced that he was affiliated with a new church.
“I would say that Bieber saw Carl as a father figure,” says Lee. “I don’t think you need to look very far to see that Justin doesn’t have many role models, especially at that time, of people he could trust that were modeling a life of stability. To hear those revelations [about Lentz’s affairs], it doesn’t just put a chink in Carl’s armor. It also puts a chink in Justin’s own credibility, [especially] when he’s reinventing himself within the Christian landscape. It doesn’t bode well for anyone.”
As Vanity Fair previously reported, Lentz was not the only source of Hillsong scandal. In 1999, Frank Houston, the father of Hillsong founder Brian Houston, confessed that he had committed child sex abuse. He was ultimately accused of abusing nine young boys at his ministries, though he was never charged with a crime, and he died in 2004. Brian is currently awaiting his fate in his native Australia in a criminal case surrounding his alleged concealment of his father Frank’s predatory behavior. The Secrets of Hillsong tracks both Frank’s and Brian’s histories.
“What we began to learn retrospectively is there were people who were questioning things happening within this church…particularly among the leadership, that didn’t feel right,” says Lee. “We began to notice a pattern over and over of people willing to look the other way. Because the voice of anybody who criticized was a voice that was going against God.”
Lee says her conversations with Carl give the docuseries a unique behind-the-curtain perspective on an organization during this kind of scandal.
“What we valued so much in the conversations we had with Carl was being able to understand the mechanisms of church versus the business of church, and where the lines begin to be crossed,” the filmmaker says. “We have seen so many pastors fall from grace. One of the goals I had going into this [was to learn] why this keeps happening. To actually speak to someone who had that full trajectory, and speak about the things that were incredibly ugly—his own abuse accusations—and be able to understand the power mechanisms that are enabling these behaviors within a church environment.”
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