“You do not want to be in this chair,” Carl Lentz tells director Stacey Lee in the new trailer for Vanity Fair and FX’s forthcoming docuseries, The Secrets of Hillsong. “I cannot stress it enough.”
Lentz was for years the New York pastor and face of Hillsong, a global megachurch that counted Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez among its followers at the peak of its cultural power. That came to a halt for Lentz in 2020 when his extramarital affairs came to light and the church’s image was thrown into disarray.
As Vanity Fair contributing editor Alex French and staff writer Dan Adler reported in their 2021 Hillsong feature for the magazine, Lentz’s misdeeds were symptomatic of a church culture that often covered up its leaders’ transgressions while leaning hard on its congregants for financial support and free labor.
The Secrets of Hillsong—which will feature the first interviews with Lentz and his wife, Laura, since their public ouster—picks up from there, as the church faces a growing series of scandals involving its founder and Lentz’s mentor, Brian Houston. Through conversations with former leaders, victims, and experts including ex-worship pastor Geoff Bullock, author Tanya Levin, congregants Ashley and Mary Jones and Janice Lagata, Frank Houston survivor David Cowdrey, onetime Hillsong NYC choir director Josh Canfield, and Australian senator David Shoebridge, the four-part investigative docuseries presents the most comprehensive study yet of an institution in crisis—and the faithful who are left to suffer the consequences.
Directed by Lee (Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U; Underplayed), the series, produced in partnership with Scout Productions, will premiere on Friday, May 19, exclusively on FX at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
Matthew Lynch
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