Last night on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Chris Pratt opened up about his spiritual side — but Ellen Page wasn’t having it. Last week, Page went on Colbert and vehemently denounced Mike Pence’s conservative stance on gay marriage. This week, Page continued her streak of no-bullshit, this time calling out Pratt for attending a church that is notoriously anti-LGBTQ+.
On Colbert’s show last week, she called out Pence’s support for conversion therapy — a practice that Hillsong, a church closely to linked to Pratt’s own, also reportedly supports. (Pratt has been associated with Zoe Church, which founding pastor Chad Veach says he modeled after Hillsong.)
Leaders of the megachurch have been outspoken in the past about their lack of “affirmation for the gay lifestyle.” One of the head pastors, Carl Lentz, is open in his belief that being gay is a sin. And while everyone is “welcome” at Hillsong, the church does not “affirm a gay lifestyle,” or allow openly gay people to hold positions of leadership within the church.
Hillsong has been in the headlines for years. In 2015, it was revealed that the founder of the church actively covered up sexual crimes committed by his father, who was also a high-level church leader, including failing to report his father’s abuse of young boys to police. In 2016, a Daily Beast investigation outlined the church’s tangled history with sex abuse and conversion therapy. And as recently as November 2018, the 2015 scandal surfaced again when one of the victims of the founder’s father waived his anonymity to publicly demand an answer about the cover-up from founder Brian Houston.
Hillsong Church was started in Australia in the early ’80s, but became a popular destination for millennial American worshippers when it opened in New York in 2010 and Los Angeles in 2014. The church’s services use contemporary Christian music and draw a reported 100,000 people per weekend worldwide.
Other famous Hillsong parishioners include Pratt’s fiancée Katherine Schwarzenegger, Hailey Baldwin and Justin Bieber, and Kevin Durant.
