When former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz first sits down in the chair to be interviewed for FX’s docuseries “The Secrets of Hillsong,” he lingers in silence for a long moment. Nearly imperceptible tears well up in his eyes. “I really don’t want to mess up my TV makeup,” he says.
The four-part docuseries details the downfall of the megachurch and, particularly, Lentz, who serves as one of the main focal points for the first two episodes. Produced by Scout Productions and Vanity Fair Studios, “The Secrets of Hillsong” is the second doc to focus on Hillsong — but the first to land interviews with Lentz and his wife, Laura.
Lentz, whose charisma and force of personality charmed thousands of churchgoers during his time at Hillsong — including celebrities like Justin Bieber — was ousted from his post as lead pastor in 2021 after Ranin Karim, a jewelry designer, announced that she and Lentz had been having an affair. Lentz’s downfall precipitated closer examinations at the seemingly glamorous megachurch, which had been long shielding its superstars from criticism — much of which came internally from volunteers, who witnessed what they call abuses of power from leadership.
“He hadn’t worn TV makeup since he was last at Hillsong,” explains director Stacey Lee on Variety’s “Doc Dreams,” presented by National Geographic. “That moment of him sitting in that chair was not only a flashback, the first flashback he had to his former life. But it’s also the flash forward, too, like what’s he going to say in order to start to walk back all of these things that he’s done and been a part of that were really not great. And I think that’s what that moment really signifies in the documentary.”
Besides the Lentzes, Lee interviewed over 50 people for the series, including former members of Hillsong who recounted their often-traumatizing experiences in the church and with Lentz. Facilitating those interviews required a lot of trust between the subjects and the interviewers. “Anybody that speaks up against Hillsong or has an alternative narrative to the image that’s presented have been really shut down and isolated,” she says.
The process of getting Carl and Laura Lentz into the interview chairs was also a tricky task, one that started with a cold text message.
Executive producer of “The Secrets of Hillsong,” David Collins, tells Variety that he reached out to Lentz with a text that was “a mile long,” in which the “Queer Eye” creator unpacked his own personal experience with Hillsong. Collins, who identifies as gay and grew up Southern Baptist in Ohio, regularly attended the Los Angeles location for a year and a half, often bringing his children and his partner with him. But one Mother’s Day, after Collins told the Sunday school teacher that his daughters were conceived via egg donor, the other man responded: “Well, you know we teach the Bible here.”
“I felt the blood just drain from my body,” Collins says. “I remember taking my hands of my daughters and walking out of the room and walking out of that church, just broken, devastated.
“I didn’t ask the hard questions. ‘What’s the core belief at this church? What is this church built on? What is the foundation that you’re teaching?’ And it wasn’t even a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. It was all are welcome, except not all of you, not all of this family that I was in.”
Collins recounted his story in his text message to Lentz, who responded within minutes: “Want to grab lunch?”
The two ate oysters in downtown Los Angeles, swapping stories about fatherhood, recovery and their experiences in the church, but Lentz was reluctant to participate in the docuseries. Over half a year after the initial interaction, he finally agreed.
“It was an opportunity for us to ask the questions that so many congregants are still wondering and continue to wonder about the church,” Lee says of interviewing Lentz. She states that her goal as a documentarian is to break down the façade that celebrities and other public figures often project when they’re being interviewed. “With Carl, that took multiple, multiple, multiple interviews.”
Former Hillsong members in the series attested to Lentz’s power as a performer, going so far as to say that Lentz could, seemingly, cry on command. So does Lee feel like Lentz was truthful in his responses to her?
“It’s a tough question,” Lee says. “That’s a really tough question. A lot of criticism about Carl is how charming he is, how magnetic he is…He was an incredible preacher.
“I would ask questions often — and Carl will tell you this himself — over and over again because people, when you work with celebrities, when you work with people who are media trained, they know how to answer things a certain way. They have their beautiful, well-rounded answers.”
Still, she tried to push where she could. The Hillsong story was still developing as she and her team filmed and edited, and as continued revelations about the church’s shady dealings continued to come out, Lee says that she would ask the Lentzes about any new information that had just surfaced. “I would go back to them and confront them about the things that we were learning in the reporting and ask again and again as well because this is a live story.”
The docuseries makes it clear, however, that the Lentzes’ story was just one part of the overarching narrative involving the church as a whole. If the first two episodes focus on Lentz, the second two examine the system of Hillsong and alleged abuses — and cover-up — committed by the people integral to the church’s founding: Frank Houston and his son, Brian Houston.
“We are dealing with multiple levels of abuse,” Lee says. “There is just so much to wade through with this story…As we talked about it on screen, and even as we edited it, we revisited it over and over again to ensure that, that vulnerability, that trust was on it.”
“It continues to unravel even as we locked our cut,” she adds. “It was important until the pencils were finally down that we continued and we pushed as far as we could and as hard as we could. And we certainly, I feel like the end result is incredibly well-balanced and thorough and deeply, deeply human.”
“The Secrets of Hillsong” premieres tonight on FX.
