THE PSYCHOLOGIST : After the demise of Hillsong, is there a place for the church in modern Australia?

After the demise of Hillsong, is there a place for the church in modern Australia?

There is always great condemnation when prominent Christian leaders and preachers "go off the rails". But that is inevitable. The standards Christians try to live up to are impossibly high, inhumanly high. Take Christ's teachings as recorded in Matthew 5. Excerpt:

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain"

No normal human being could live up to that but insofar as people try we would live in a much kinder and more peaceful world. Let us be thankful for the high standards Christians set for themselves and find no cause for condemnation when their normal human instincts reassert themselves in various ways

Only a few years ago, Hillsong – a Pentecostal church planted in the north-western suburbs of Sydney in the 80s – was one of Australia's biggest and most successful exports.

"It should go iron ore, the Hemsworth Brothers, then Hillsong – it's massive," Marc Fennell told the ABC's The Drum.

His latest documentary for SBS, The Kingdom, charts the rise – and fall – of the megachurch that he was once a member of.

Mr Fennell isn't the only one interested in the subject matter. Earlier this year, American television network FX released a four-part documentary, The Secrets of Hillsong, and the Herald Sun launched its investigative podcast about the church, Faith on Trial.

Yet amid the scandals plaguing Hillsong, the Pentecostal church movement in Australia has survived.

The fall of Hillsong is not a unique story in Christianity

At its height, Hillsong was hosting prime ministers at their church services and conferences, winning multiple Grammys, and counting celebrities like Justin Bieber and Vanessa Hudgens among its members.

In recent years, allegations of trauma, abuse, fraud, cover-ups and exploitation have come to the fore, culminating in the resignation of Hillsong founder Brian Houston earlier this year.

But scandal is not a unique experience for the Christian church – Pentecostal, or otherwise. Director of the Centre for Public Christianity Simon Smart says churches of all denominations have "good moments" and "regrettable ones" as they've evolved, adapted and reformed alongside social and cultural changes.

"Pentecostalism isn't alone in having its imperfections," he told the ABC's The Drum. "On a grand scale, you have the 16th-century Protestant Reformation that was responding to serious corruption within the church," Mr Smart explains.

"In recent times, churches have responded to deep systemic flaws when it came to responding to and taking preventative measures against sexual abuse within its walls.

"What was a terrible chapter in church history led to serious self-assessment and changes to internal practices such that church communities are now much safer places for children than they once were."

Mr Smart also noted that celebrity culture has had a negative influence on the church. "I don't think [celebrity] has any place there," he said on The Drum. "The founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, was everything other than that – he was all about humility, compassion and love, and not about the grand gestures."

Tania Harris is an ordained Pentecostal minister who works in churches across all denominations in Australia and abroad.

"Wherever you find humanity, you'll find flawed humanity," Rev Harris says, "and where there is great success, those flaws can become apparent."

She believes that the rapid growth and success of Australian Pentecostalism contributed to its downfall.

"I've watched churches grapple with this since the pandemic and since the scandals have been exposed," Rev Harris says.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-11/after-the-demise-of-hillsong-is-there-a-place-for-the-church-in-/102465418

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

After the demise of Hillsong, is there a place for the church in modern Australia?

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