What if I told you I had a Justin Bieber story that would break your heart? Or at the very least, put an asterisk on what you think of him? No, listen: About five years ago, Pastor Carl got a phone call. Carl is one of the lead pastors at Hillsong NYC, a mega-church so reputedly, mystifyingly cool that cable-news outlets cover its services like they’re Kardashian birthday bashes at 1 Oak. On the other end of the line was one of Carl’s best friends, Judah Smith, another mega-pastor who also happens to be the chaplain for the Seattle Seahawks. “I need you to help me with a young man,” Pastor Judah said, and Pastor Carl rushed to agree, because helping is Carl’s thing, and the young man was, yes, Justin Bieber.
In general, people are critical of Justin Bieber for his many alleged human-rights abuses—I heard he once used a wheelchair to cut in line at Disneyland—and this upsets Pastor Carl, because Justin “lives his life on Front Street,” which is a southern way of saying that we can see all that he does, while we get to conduct our sins in relative anonymity. But no Christian, no person, could live under the scrutiny that Justin faces, says Pastor Carl. “This boy is 21. He’s in a horribly toxic world. He is trying to do his best to figure this out. He has never been anybody but who he has professed to be, which is a work in progress.”
Last year, Justin moved in with Carl and his family for a month and a half, and they worked through stuff. During that time, Carl says, he saw tabloid reports about horrible things Justin was supposedly doing, when meanwhile Justin had been sitting there in his kitchen the whole time.
It is helpful to think of Justin Bieber here, at this point in his life, as a biblical character at the very bottom of a Jobian well of his own making. He had been caught being monstrous to just about everyone around him. He seemed to be spending more time with drugs than with Jesus. His music was bad. There was a petition circulating online to deport him back to Canada. I may have signed it. But one day, according to Carl, Justin looked in the mirror and he was ravaged by feelings of loss. He got on his knees and he cried. “I want to know Jesus,” Justin Bieber sobbed to Pastor Carl. And so together they prayed. Suddenly, Justin was overcome by the Gospel, and he said, “Baptize me.” And Pastor Carl said, “Yes, buckaroo”—he really does call Bieber buckaroo, and now you should, too—“let’s do this. Let’s schedule a time.” But Justin Bieber couldn’t be Justin Bieber for one minute longer. “No, I want to do it now.” And Pastor Carl saw salvation in Justin’s eyes, and knew that his baptism couldn’t come quickly enough.
Hillsong, which began in Australia, has outposts all over the globe, from Kiev to Paris to Buenos Aires. The church landed in New York City in 2010, with a branch at the Manhattan nightclub Irving Plaza, a branch at a theater in Times Square, and a branch in an auditorium at Montclair State University. On any given Sunday, Hillsong NYC salves the souls of 8,000 people, and what souls: Justin Bieber, yes, but also Kendall Jenner and Selena Gomez and Kevin Durant and Bono. “People say we cater to celebrities,” Pastor Carl tells me. “And I say, yes, we do. Celebrities deserve a relationship with God. Celebrities deserve a place to pray.” So do all of God’s children, he says. And so they save seats in a special section for celebrities, but also for people in wheelchairs and single mothers who were running late. But it’s easier for God’s children to find a peaceful home in which to pray than it is for, say, Damon Dash.
Anyway, I wasn’t done with the Justin Bieber story. So Justin wanted/needed a baptism posthaste, and Pastor Carl and Pastor Judah and Justin Bieber got into a car, and one of the church’s body men drove them in one of the church’s Suburbans to the Manhattan hotel where Hillsong rents the pool for baptisms. But when they got there, hundreds of people stood waiting—someone had tipped off the tabloids. Pastor Carl called a friend whose apartment complex has a pool, but when they arrived, dozens of people were waiting there, too.
“So I called my boy,” Carl says. Carl has many boys, but in this case his boy was Tyson Chandler, who was then on the New York Knicks. It was 2 A.M. by now. The Knicks had beaten the Miami Heat earlier that night. He knew Tyson lived in a fancy Upper West Side building with a pool. “I said, ‘Bro, I’m in a jam here. I have JB with me, he wants to get baptized.’ He’s like, ‘Done. Easy.’ ” But they arrive and there’s no access to the pool; it’s too late. Then Tyson realizes he might have another solution. He reminds Carl that he’s seven feet tall and that his bathtub was built to spec. Justin Bieber is slightly tinier than that, and so they go upstairs to Tyson’s place, and Tyson’s wife makes some food and lays down some towels and Justin gets into the tub, and down Justin Bieber goes, and he comes out of the water, and he is reborn.
And that is an image that will stick with you, let me tell you: Justin Bieber, on his knees in Tyson Chandler’s bathtub, wet and sobbing against Pastor Carl’s chest, so unable to cope with being himself that he has to be born anew, he has to be declared someone entirely different, in order to make it through the night.
So there’s this hat.If you show up for a Sunday service at Hillsong NYC, it’ll be the first thing you notice about the audience, or at least it was the first thing I noticed, which is: They’re all wearing this hat. Consider how unusual it is for people to wear the same hat if they aren’t, say, working at Wendy’s, or on a baseball team.
The style of the hat is hard to describe. There’s maybe a hint of a cowboy hat? And a dose of porkpie? From some angles it looks like a plain old mall fedora, but “normally you have a more oval brim that should curve down in the front and snap up at the back,” says a friend of mine, a milliner, when I send her a picture of the hat. “This is just nothing.”
But it’s not nothing. It’s what they’re all wearing, like a badge or a uniform.
“What is with the hat?” I asked someone in the audience near me during my first visit. “What do you mean?” answered the man, who was wearing the hat. I looked at his eyes hard and waited.
According to the results of my exhaustive investigation, the hat first appeared five or six years ago when Pastor Joel wore it. In his American press clippings, which begin around 2010, the year Pastor Joel (Houston) and Pastor Carl (Lentz) established Hillsong’s first American branch, Pastor Joel is basically never not with the hat. And at some point you have to acknowledge that a large group of people in New York City adopting the fashiony choices of their spiritual leaders is a peculiar thing, but also an indication that whatever these leaders are doing, they are doing it very effectively. They are leading. They are influencing.
Onstage the music began and a unisex band of Christian genetic marvels materialized, buoyant and shiny with salvation. Some had guitars and man buns, some had sidecocked beanies. All with microphones, all with very shiny hair, all with expressions of serenity as they swayed and sang the songs of Hillsong Music, which has sold through its various arms tens of millions of CDs about salvation and shame and bathing in the mercy of Jesus’s blood, and whose music is the only music you will hear inside a Hillsong church. When they moved, they raised their hands to the heavens, but also they stood with their palms open, wrist side up, a rhythmic and patient explaining, as if to say: What are you gonna do?
The music of Hillsong is a catalog of Selena Gomez-grade ballads, with melodies that all resemble one another, pleasingly, like spa music. They call to mind deeply sincere love songs, if it were appropriate to put phrases like my savior on that cursed tree and furious love laid waste to my sin and suffered violence healed my blindness and facedown where mercy finds me first in a love song. Tonally and tunefully, it’s a Jonas Brothers song. Lyrically, it’s a hymn, and yet the singing is hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones. It made my body feel confused.
I was witnessing the logical conclusion of an evolutionary convergence between coolness and Christianity that began at the dawn of the millennium, when progressive-minded Christians, terrified of a faithless future, desperately rended their garments and replaced them with skinny jeans and flannel shirts and piercings in the cartilage of their ears, in a very ostentatious effort to be more modern and more relatable. Which is why, today, you can find ironically bespectacled evangelicals in Seattle and graphic designers soliciting tithes with hand-drawn Helvetica flyers in San Diego. You can walk into mega-churches all over the country where the pastor will slap on a pair of leather pants and drop the F-bomb BOOM how do you like me now??
But doesn’t it always feel like they’re trying too hard? Those guys make me think of Starman, when Jeff Bridges is trying to say “Yo, what’s up?” to Karen Allen but he says “I send greetings” instead.
The book on Hillsong, however—the other book, lowercase b—is that they’re the real article: the world’s first genuinely cool church. “The music! The lights! The crowds!” begins an incredulous woman narrating a CNN segment on Hillsong NYC in smarmy CNNese. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.” The chyron reads “Hipster preacher smashes stereotypes.” They call Pastor Carl a hipster—ABC actually said “hipster heartthrob”—and Carl says he doesn’t know what that means, and he wears a motorcycle jacket when he says this.
Like everyone else at Hillsong, Pastor Joel is unwilling to acknowledge that there’s something going on here, vis-à-vis the hat, vis-à-vis the entire fashion-forward, Disney Channel teen, aggressively accessorized aesthetic of the place. It is a non-issue to him. Yes, he tells me, sure, he likes clothes. But that’s the end of it. What he means to say is that lots of people like clothes…and anyway, why am I asking him? I should ask Pastor Carl about the clothes, he tells me. What Pastor Carl does, he says—that’s intentional, and then he laughs. So I did, I asked Pastor Carl, and he said he really doesn’t think about it, okay maybe he does sometimes, but hey, he asked, turning it around, what about me? Aren’t I thinking about it when I show up to an interview in my whole head-to-toe Gap thing? My whole neutrally attired thing? That was a decision, too, Carl pointed out, wasn’t it?
Before the service had begun that day, a woman in her early twenties who was saving the entire row for latecomer friends told me she had been coming to Hillsong for two years, that every week she brings more and more friends because where else in New York can you find such a spiritual place? She used to go to a Greek Orthodox church—every single person I met at Hillsong was a churchgoer somewhere else before he or she began going to church at Hillsong—but it was long and boring there and she was doing it out of family obligation. I told her I could relate. She told me she liked that the pastors here sounded like her. “And they encourage me to be better.” I asked her what that meant, and she told me that I had to understand that it wasn’t easy out there. That her job was stressful and that holding these seats for her friends, who are always late, was stressful. When her gang showed up, three songs in, five of them were wearing the hat.
And all around the church, that is the story the congregation tells from beneath their hats: that finally there are clergymen who look familiar, who offer messages that relate to their actual lives, who accept that they’ve lived in New York long enough to know it won’t fly to smear gay people, or tell women to go home and have kids, or expect young, bright, beautiful, maybe-cool people to dress humbly and plainly and ignore the thrills of modern life in a mega-city. This church is the one, finally, that really is different. All are welcome here in their rubber pants. All are welcome here in their funny, nothing hats.
Pastor Carl’s sermon on this day was part of a several-week series he has been doing called “Dig a Little Deeper.” He tells us that we all have headlines in our lives, but that we’re not living an authentic life unless we dig a little deeper and find our stories. “You are divorced” is maybe your headline, but the story is that you are searching for a better life. “You are an addict” is maybe your headline, but your story is that you have survived a lot and have chosen to walk with Jesus.
After the service, Pastor Carl’s driver-slash-right-hand, Joe Termini—yet another beautiful human, with eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean, shellacked hair like a superhero, and a sparkle-smile with thousands of teeth, all pointed just at me—says he wants to bring me over to Carl. I say that’s very nice of him, and he says, “People tell me they can’t believe how nice we all are, like is it for real? And I say, yes, we’re nice people. We’re happy people. Why is that so hard to believe?”
In the greenroom, I join Carl and Joel and Carl’s wife, Laura. The three of them met at Hillsong International Leadership College in Australia. Joel’s father had started Hillsong in Australia, and it merged with Joel’s grandfather’s church. That’s a tough subject, though, since it was revealed in 1999 that Joel’s grandfather, Frank, had molested a 7-year-old boy. Frank resigned from the church and spent his last years in a dementia salad, a raving lunatic by all accounts. There’s a story that no one will confirm for me that before he lost his wits, he asked to meet with the boy at a McDonald’s in Australia, at which he offered him $10,000 and said he needed to be forgiven, please please forgive him so he could get into heaven. Frank died after having a stroke in the shower, and maybe Joel and his family and all of Australia sighed with relief then, but still that seems like way too good a death for that guy.
Joel was just a teenager when that happened and he’ll answer any question about his grandfather. He tells me that he considered changing his last name, that he wanted nothing to do with him or any of it, and also that he believes Jesus probably eventually forgave old Frank, because that’s what Jesus does. What is striking about this is how admirable it is to answer questions about something so ugly, but it is also inherent to Joel’s Christianity: People sin. We all sin. But time went on, and Joel found his calling, writing most of Hillsong’s music and shepherding it into global success.
One day Joel was in Manhattan and there was a rainstorm. He sought refuge under the canopy of what happened to be the Salvation Army headquarters, which was maybe a sign. He was struck by the idea that Hillsong might make a go of it in a city like this, that a city like this—picture him surveying the miscreants walking by under their umbrellas—might really need Hillsong, and he walked around for the next few days and all he saw were signs confirming his sign. He called up Carl, who was now living in Virginia with Laura, now his wife, and he said, “What if we were to start a Hillsong in New York?” And now it’s five years later and here they are, surrounded by 8,000 congregants every Sunday.
There in the greenroom we talked about faith for a few minutes, about how the media sometimes make fun of people who have faith, how they had a good feeling about me. I told them I wouldn’t make fun of them, least of all for having faith. I told them I was, in fact, now running late to get home in time for Sukkot, which was beginning that evening.
“You know,” Carl said. He had taken off his T-shirt and now was just wearing a tank top and gold chain and drinking water, and every tattoo on his arms saluted me. “People always forget that Jesus was Jewish.” Joel and Laura nodded.
“Jews don’t,” I told them, and I laughed, but I was the only one.
And I came back the next week and the week after, and one Sunday morning after what I had thought would be my last time in church, I woke up and felt a strange and unexpected bodily need to put my hands in the air, this need to be in a room where people frantically worried about the soul, to hear from Carl that he most definitely had answers to all the questions. I told my husband I was short some reporting and I headed out to Montclair.
The first time I went to church, I was 14 and I went with my father, who had begun accompanying his girlfriend. It was a Catholic service, and so we were asked to kneel, which I knew from attending an actual Orthodox yeshiva on weekdays was not a thing that Jews were really supposed to do. My father whispered to me that he eased his guilt by saying the Aleinu under his breath, and maybe I should try this, too. He also whispered that perhaps my mother should never know about this. Years later, I mentioned this in casual conversation with a Hasidic rabbi I knew, and he told me that this was the easiest explanation for why I had continued to resist religion: I had let my soul become infected by a place that I was not supposed to go, and which had made it so that I would not submit to laws that alternately bored and appalled me. Makes sense, I nodded.
What that rabbi didn’t know was that my soul had already been infiltrated prior to that day in church with my father. Just the year before, I’d been in the parking lot of a Bob’s Big Boy on a Saturday night after a movie, about six of us waiting for one of our parents to pick us up in a minivan. We sat on the turtarriers in the empty lot, and a woman in her twenties approached us. She crouched down at our level, and I remember not a single detail of her appearance, only that she was squarely appropriate for 1988 in a Long Island parking lot. She told us that she saw what a good time we were having, and it made her feel so good to see us having a good time. She told us that, hey, it might be that we don’t always feel this way. And she wanted us to know that when that happened, there was God, and we could reach out to him and he would be there. We nodded the polite nod of eighth graders and we tried not to smile or laugh until she left, which she did, as soon as she’d told us her message. That was it. There was no pamphlet, no address, no follow-up. No hat. But now, in my memory, I recognize her as warm and guileless in that Hillsong way. Only years later did I realize she was a Christian. But there in the dark, once she finally walked away, we laughed at what a loser she was.
I have been to an ultra-Orthodox camp. I attended a Hasidic high school for a year before everyone agreed that it was a terrible idea. I did the remainder of my sentence at a Modern Orthodox high school. I have immersed in a mikvah. I have climbed Masada more than once. I have stuck notes into the cracks of the Western Wall. I have fasted on Yom Kippur. In the throes of postpartum depression, I sat on a bathroom floor and begged God for peace, not quietly but loudly, my husband on the other side of the door holding our baby and asking if he should call someone, if maybe we needed to get some help. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in that parking lot, I was having the most religious experience I would ever have in my life. I think about that woman all the time.
Pastor Carl and I met at The Corner, a café in Montclair where he is a regular presence. Carl wore a black tank top, a gray sweatshirt worn Flashdance-style (collar chopped, tank-top straps exposed), the gold chain, some silver wrist cuffs, a gold Rolex passed down by his grandfather. His sweatpants were pushed up to just below his knee. It was raining, but it wasn’t cold. He walked in and spent a few minutes talking to the servers about their lives. Over the course of my time with Carl, what was most striking to witness was how grateful people were simply to be asked how a struggle is going, how good it feels to have someone to share in the pain of the answer.
So let’s get to it: Abortion breaks his heart. He had just seen the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag—women on Twitter sharing the circumstances of past abortions and their refusal to feel badly or be quiet about it—and he was thinking that he’d like to meet the woman who started it, because he wanted to understand why she would campaign for such a thing. I told him that it wasn’t a celebration of abortions—that it was a campaign for rights, that women shouldn’t feel shamed for choosing what to do with their bodies.
He said, “If you sit down with me and you say, ‘Carl, I’m having an abortion,’ I’m going to say, ‘I think that you can have this child. I don’t know how hard it’s going to be. I could never imagine. I do know that my prayer is that God will give you peace to stand on this side with me. Should you choose another option, I will not turn my back on you. I will not vilify you. I will not hate you. I will not, I cannot, live your life. I love you regardless, but my prayer is that somehow, some way, you will see my view on this.’ ”
Pastor Carl doesn’t like that he’s considered a bigot simply because he doesn’t share the views you tend to find in blue-state big cities—that you can be gay, you can abort your fetus, you can do whatever you’d like with your body, really. He’s happy to discuss about it, but he doesn’t like being challenged on this by people who don’t believe in the God of the Bible, because how could they possibly understand why he’s reached these conclusions if you’re not starting from the same place? He says that if he could just show a person how to walk with Jesus, really walk with him every day, it would be easy to resist the temptation of loving someone of your own gender. But, Carl begs me, don’t miss the point: It’s important to him that we know that everyone is welcome at his church—that homosexuality isn’t a different kind of sin to him than, say, tithing at 9 percent instead of 10 percent, or gossiping or telling a lie. Everyone should feel welcome at Hillsong.
And everyone is, but with footnotes. Earlier in the year it came out that a male leader of the New York choir was in a committed Christian relationship with a male singer in the choir. Whether or not this was an open secret within the church is not completely clear, but when it came out publicly, Joel’s father, Pastor Brian, was forced to clarify out loud that, yes, the church is against two men in a relationship.
“These two men in particular are amazing human beings,” Carl continued, and he starts to cry at this, at how painful this was for everyone involved. He is an easy crier, and the memories are hard for him. “And they are going through a really amazing journey called life. Yes, their sexuality is involved with it, but it’s not as cut-and-dry as you think it is. And if they make a decision to live as gay men, they are going to get married, our stance in this church is there’s going to be a limited involvement when it comes to leadership, because you don’t believe what I believe. This would create friction that wouldn’t be fair to the people that we’re serving. If you believe that homosexuality is God’s will for your life, and I disagree, well, what if you’re a leader and, you know, a young man comes up to you, and he has questions about his sexuality? What are you going to tell him? What I believe or what you believe?” He paused to make a quick phone call, and he told whoever was on the other end that his phone was running out of juice and also that he wanted a Diet Mountain Dew. Within 15 seconds, a pastor named Diego delivered the soda, plus a phone charger, from a black Suburban a few feet away that I hadn’t even realized was there and idling for the hours of our interview. His phone rang again, and it was his wife, he knew, because her special ringtone is “Hotline Bling.”
Welcome to the Justin Bieber 2015 Approval Chart.
While he and Laura spoke, I tried to reconcile the man with genuine love for humanity with the man who believed that it would be dangerous for a faithful Christian to head the choir he loved because he also happened to love another man.
When he hung up, I asked about my grandmother, who was the most wonderful woman in the world, who escaped from Kiev minutes before the massacre of Babi Yar and who became a successful architect. I asked if she is in heaven, because she was Jewish. I asked about Gandhi, if he is in heaven. I asked about Frank Houston, if he is forgiven. And the answer is yes, so long as they accepted Jesus, because Carl has to believe that Jesus appeared to each of them at the end of their lives and that in those final minutes, they were saved.
But he’d still rather not have said any of this. His concept of Jesus is a man who goes after the soul, who changes behavior through leadership and enlightenment. “Religion”—Carl does not like that word—“goes after behavior modification, and then if we get around to it, maybe we’ll talk to your soul. And this is killing people. So I always want to talk about things bigger than sexuality, and in our culture I get why it’s such a huge deal. I get why people want to make us have bold, big statements, but I don’t believe it’s working.”
So make no mistake: He believes being gay, or getting an abortion, is a sin, and he believes Jesus wouldn’t disagree. But more than any of that, he only believes those are the headlines of your life. They are not your story. Your sin is not the biggest part of you, no matter how much it might feel that way.
And here I have to say out loud how much I like Carl. I say it here because I still felt it after this conversation. I like him even though he is ideologically opposed to things that are important to me. I somehow could not fault Carl for his beliefs, because they torment him. I couldn’t fault him for them even though his influence is so vast and all it would take was a word from him to heal the suffering of so many people who feel like they’re without a tether. I couldn’t dislike Carl because in the end his belief is an organism outside reason. It’s Carl who will take my jokes about how Christianity seems so much easier than Judaism and follow them up with 200-word texts in which he tries to use this toehold to tell me his Good News. He is so worried for my soul, and this should annoy me, but instead it touches me, because maybe I’m worried about my soul, too, and Carl wants so badly for me to enjoy heaven with him. How can I fault someone who is more sincere about this one thing than I have ever been about anything in my life? But on the other hand, if there’s one thing that’s true about Christianity, it’s that no matter what couture it’s wearing, no matter what Selena Gomez hymnal it’s singing, it’s still afraid for your soul, it still thinks you’re in for a reckoning. It’s still Christianity. Christianity’s whole jam is remaining Christian.
In late October, Carl and I got into a black Suburban outside his house, en route for Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks’ home-season opener would tip off in a few hours. Carl was dressed in head-to-toe Saint Laurent, and I was still in head-to-toe Gap.
Carl baptized Kevin Durant a few years ago, and obviously there’s Tyson Chandler, and Carl himself played college basketball at NC State. When we got to the Garden, everyone from the food-service people to the Knicks players to their coach, Derek Fisher, to some of the Atlanta Hawks players sought a minute with Carl. They would come over to say hi. Each time, the conversation would start with a shy handshake, perfunctory and awkward. And Carl would face the guy fully and lean his head in a few centimeters, and still the guy would be smiling, and eventually, each time, the guy’s face would collapse ever so slightly as the ministering began. The conversations rarely lasted more than five minutes.
Coach Fisher caught Carl’s eye from the court, where the Knicks were practicing, and the two grabbed a pair of courtside seats. He and Fisher leaned over their legs, their forearms against their thighs, hands folded, staring ahead. They were talking intensely. At this exact moment, Fisher was in the New York tabloids because of a very real drama—a falling-out with his ex-teammate, Matt Barnes, over Barnes’s estranged wife, with whom Fisher was rumored to be involved—but if that was the subject of their conversation, Carl would never tell me. After ten whole minutes they hugged and fist-bumped and parted ways.
Carl sat with me and showed me his phone, a text exchange with a well-known NBA player that went back several weeks. It started with the guy saying how great it was to meet him that night in Florida, and then he asked if maybe Carl wanted to join him later at the club. Carl said thanks and made a joke about Florida women and clubs, and the guy laughed back, not really realizing you shouldn’t ask pastors to clubs. They went back and forth a bit more until Carl managed to get his question in, which was something along the lines of “Where are you at now with your faith?” and the guy answered, and suddenly the text exchange was about this guy and his life and his soul.
“See,” Carl told me. “This is how it works. You take those opportunities.” This is what cool gets you. An audience with people with big audiences of their own.
Carl and I stared straight ahead. I told him that I felt like I was introduced to a very complete version of God as a child and that when that happens, so young, before you can even really think, you can’t ever picture a world without God again. People will tell you you’re an idiot for believing in God, but what they don’t understand is that it’s like trying to imagine the world without air: You can do it for a second, but then the image falls apart. Carl nodded and smiled. Exactly. This was what we had in common, only I was vexed by it, and it gave him life. I wanted to tell him then that I feel lost lately, that sometimes I felt this overwhelming sense that I’m not tethered to anything real, but I didn’t, because I know Carl has just one answer to that question, and I already know what it is.
Maybe at that moment I was close to salvation and was ripped away by the Devil, whispering into my ear about how I’ve already opted in so hard to my own religion, paid my synagogue dues and paid for Hebrew school. And maybe that was the Devil whispering in my ear, telling me not to ask.
Then again, you shouldn’t always ignore the Devil. Sometimes the Devil has valid things to say. What if the Devil whispers in your ear and reminds you that most of current Christian doctrine was decided not by Jesus but at the Council of Nicea almost 300 years after Christ’s death? Or the Devil might point out that if Christ died so we didn’t have to submit to Levitical law, meaning we can shave our heads, we can have tattoos, then maybe that could extend to things that are truly important to a person’s essential happiness and ability to survive in this terrible, lonely world. The Devil might suggest that if you can back down from your doctrine of biblical inerrancy in order to let women pastor at Hillsong—because the Bible does clearly say that women shouldn’t—then surely you could blur your eyes and see that Jesus never actually said anything about gays or abortion.
And if you still thought you had a leg to stand on here, the Devil might even offer to introduce you to some of the wives of “cured homosexuals” and ask you to ask them how they’re doing, if their marriages feel authentic, if their husbands aren’t suicidal. And the Devil will whisper in your ear and tell you to keep your fucking laws off my fucking body, and yes, the Devil is the Devil, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
I took a drive last week, and on the radio I heard that Justin Bieber had walked off a radio show, then walked off the stage of his own concert in Oslo when he became agitated by some liquid on the stage, and later he posted a statement saying he’s human and he’s working on it, which I already knew, and I thought of him on his knees, praying to be reborn, and I hoped his fans forgave him, and also that they got a refund.
The last time I saw Pastor Carl, we stood in the driveway of his home and said our final good-bye, and he put his hand on my shoulder and told me that he just knew the Lord would lead me in the telling of the story of Hillsong. He asked that I get it all right, that I also make sure that the people understand that these were some difficult matters he had difficult opinions on, that he was trusting me to tell everyone the message: that if we all knew Jesus, if we really knew him, we would understand these opinions, too. That no opinion he holds should prevent them from seeking peace at his church, where they are welcome and already loved. But that if we had these same opinions, we could live good lives and we would live here in God’s Kingdom on earth. What could be better than that? he wanted to know. What could be better than the life he had presented to me? I promised him I’d tell the whole story, that I’d do my best, and he told me that his church would be my church and his church family would be my church family, and I pressed my lips together and nodded and didn’t say anything because I was crying then. We hugged, and I wiped my eyes on his motorcycle jacket, which was covering the same chest Justin Bieber had cried into that day, and it made a leather-on-leather sound when he hugged me back.
The next day I attended synagogue for the naming of a friend’s new baby, and I sat while the rabbi was talking, and I wondered what any of us were doing here, what anyone was doing anywhere, why our belief in things we couldn’t see made us superior to people who had faith in different things we couldn’t see. I left the synagogue and went on with my life and I thought that maybe it would be a long time before I ever looked organized religion in the face again. I should have known that my faith was not strong enough to endure examination, that it was too primitive and not sophisticated enough, and I was sad and sorry that I had asked it to withstand what it wasn’t capable of.
And that Sunday, I did not go back to church, because my story was done, and instead I went to soccer games with my children and ordered a pizza, and at the end of the evening I cleaned the kitchen and I bent down to place dinner plates into the dishwasher, and as I did I hummed Hillsong’s music to myself, and then I straightened up suddenly, and I looked out the window into the dark nothing and I realized that I missed them all very much.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a GQ correspondent.
*This story originally ran with the title "What Would Cool Jesus Do?"
