Escape from Hillsong: 3 years growing up inside a cult
With Scott Morrison’s connection to Brian Houston, the government funding $247 million in school chaplains, and trying to push through religious discrimination laws, I would like to tell my own story of being recruited for a Hillsong church through public school when I was 12 (where I then stayed for 3 years).
In primary school I attended had a program where troubled kids were offered guidance and support. I was invited to that group and found it to be a comforting experience with a space to talk about my cases of bullying and other issues. In retrospect, and now with a late adult diagnosis of autism, I am furious that the support method being offered in a Liberal government public school was a church, and not a proper psychologist who could have potentially identified my symptoms and given me a much needed diagnosis far earlier in life.
When the term ended and I was no longer getting that support from the program at school, my mum did some research and found that it was run through a church so she asked if I wanted to try their youth group on Fridays.
The Friday youth group was run from 4–6pm for kids and 7–9pm for teens. I initially joined the kids group and it was a fun place where I met other kids, we all played games and just had fun. Occasionally there was a reference to some bible verses, but it was all positive stuff like “for God so loves the world that he gave his only son. And anyone who believes in him shall not perish but be granted eternal life” (something I can still recall word for word to this day). When I moved into high school the next year, I was moved up to the teen youth group. I soon learned that the teen youth group leaders would come to my high school during lunch once a week and hold games with prizes to try and recruit more kids to join our church.
The youth group would start out fun every week with games and prizes, occasionally with VERY large prizes. One week after winning a contest, a kid was given the choice between $50 or the mystery box. They chose to keep the money. It was later revealed that the item inside the mystery box was a larger prize worth around $250RRP (that I won’t specify out of fear of being identified) with the ‘moral’ being to “take a leap of faith and trust God” (hooray for fostering gambling addictions in 13 year olds).
Probably not much of a surprise but this church was in an affluent area (Mum needed to drive 30 minutes to get me there), most of the kids came from well off families, the leaders (18-early 20s) were all pretty/handsome/cute, there was a church band that played modern Hillsong gospel poprock, and it was the kind of community that socially-awkward-gangly-hand-me-downs-wearing-me wished to fit in.
But after the fun and the games would come the sermon. Some weeks were about fostering relationships to God or preaching about the charitable nature of Jesus (which I’m fine with, cause Jesus seems like a pretty cool guy with all the healing the sick, giving to the poor, loving everyone messages) but other weeks were things that can only be identified as cult like when reflecting back on them.
One occasion was bringing in a casket as a very physical representation of the inevitability of death. Nothing like scare tactics to frighten children into faith. Another week a preacher stood on stage and told us all about his “nightmare”. He dreamt he was at the gates of heaven, living his eternal bliss and loving all of it except he could see outside the gates his family and friends screaming to be let in. However because those people didn’t believe in Jesus they were rejected and sent to hell to suffer for all eternity. His moral being we all had to go out and recruit as many of our friends to save them from painful damnation. We told a story about a girl who hired a bus for her birthday so she could bring all of her friends from school to the church and all her friends supposedly pledged their lives to God. One preacher talked about a poor child who donated the last 50 cents she had to a church and because she didn’t have any money to feed herself but gave it all to the church then God loved her even more.
Outside of the weekly youth group the church also had “life groups” where 8–10 people of the same age would do activities together. I stopped being invited along to mine the more I started to ask questions. “How am I meant to live in paradise knowing people I love are being tortured? Wouldn’t still being able to feel happy about your paradise despite knowing your loved ones are in eternal suffering make you a sociopath? If Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth doesn’t that make the human race a product of incest?” Autism means I have trouble filtering out questions that are ‘appropriate’, so I’m probably a bit harder to brainwash.
My mother is a Christian in the sense she believes in Jesus and has visited a church a few times but she’s not practising. My father is a staunch atheist after a strict upbringing. My dad is a man of few words and the only things he said about my youth group were derogatory (snidely remarking “off to go bash Satan” when mum and I left the house on a Friday afternoon for her to drive me). Overall my relationship with my dad isn’t that great (even now as an adult) but no matter how much we fought or the times I could have sworn I hated him in our fights, I have never been able to commit myself to any church that tries to tell me he deserves a tortured eternity for not believing in their God.
I continued to attend the church for a while, mainly out of a horrendous fear of death (no doubt fostered by that exact environment) and praying one week I would be granted this divine sense of healing and knowledge they always promised would be found in their walls. But the final straw for me came in 2007 before the Australian election. We were told to all pray that the “right party would win”. I asked who that party was and was scoffed at like it was obvious. Liberal of course, because Labor would bring in sin! They would allow gays to get married! (Which is now quite funny given it was later the Libs to bring that in anyway, albeit kicking and screaming).
At the age of 15 I left the church, but the scars from my experience would be much longer lasting on my psyche. I required years of therapy to deal with my irrational phobia of death that the church had preyed on and exacerbated to try and guilt trip me into compliance. Pentecostal Christianity is a cult. It prays on the vulnerable and seeks to recruit them at impressionable ages. They lure the young in with the guise of acceptance and community and then weigh them down with guilt and peer pressure to enforce their conservative political views and eventually churn out Liberal voting adults who deludedly believe their hateful rhetoric is loving concern to save us all.
This has no place even being allowed in our schools, let alone being funded by $247 million dollars of tax payer money. It is now even more concerning seeing my country’s Prime Minister — a man supposed to be representing the whole population and not a sect of slightly more than 1% — dedicating our country to his God. Faith as an individual is not a problem (I have close friends where I have seen first hand how having a strong faith in God has helped them in their lives — one friend through cancer treatment, another after the loss of her son), but when a religion is acting like an insidious cult where leaders are committing sexual assault and the police refuse to confirm or deny if the Prime Minister is interfering in an investigation, then it needs to be called out.
