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.

Whilst the government refuses to identify the ministers responsible for docking, in thinly veiled hopes the incident will somehow blow over, sources have grown frustrated with the negligence and reached out to journalists. Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a source names the man responsible as Assistant Defence Minister Alex Hawke — the Liberal member for Mitchell. Allegedly the in-laws of Hawke were on board the ship, along with other passengers from the Hillsong church that his family are a part of.

Hawke has frequently been identified as Prime Minister Morrison’s ‘Right Hand Man’ and was influential in the leadership spill that saw Morrison replace Malcom Turnbull as the country’s leader in 2018. The source’s tip adds up with Hawke working as Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s assistant and with the Prime Minster in Hawke’s debt after acting as his“spear thrower” for being “brutally effective at marshalling numbers” for the leadership ballot.

𝕤𝕒𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕒 𝕞𝕒𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕟 on Twitter

@BLShiv @c_s_wallace I have checked out the Alex Hawke rumour - claim his in laws were on board and it's complete baloney. The fact it was allowed to dock is bizarre but Hawke rumour is a twitter fantasy

Edit April 3rd 6:26 PM : Since the publishing of the post, journalist Samantha Maiden has refuted these claims as rumours. I am open to further investigations and will happily retract and apologise for any incorrect information should further evidence surface. However, I find it difficult to believe any current dismissals of these accusations from the government — especially when no alternative explanation for the Ruby Princess debacle is put forward — after the Liberal party previously dismissed Scott Morrison in Hawaii (published by Samantha Maiden), the invitation to Brian Houston at the White House, and Morrison’s children not being in school as “rumours” also.

Morrison and Hawke also share a common faith through their relationship with the Hillsong Church. Hawke has been a member since at least 2005 whilst Morrison has been outspoken about his Pentecostal beliefs throughout his Prime Ministership. Morrison brought cameras inside his family’s church for their Easter service last year. In July, 2019 Scott Morrison attended a Hillsong convention as a guest to pray to ‘break the curse of suicide’. Morrison has also come under fire for attempting to invite Hillsong Pastor Brian Houston to a function held in the White House last year. The criticism is drawn, not only from the interference between Australia’s separation of church and state, but also the fact Houston remains under investigation by NSW Police in regards to his father’s sexual abuse within the church. During this time NSW Police have refused to confirm or deny whether Scott Morrison has attempted to interfere with these investigations.

Allowing a boat with Hillsong members to dock wouldn’t be the first time that Morrison has granted favour to his church during the COVID pandemic. On Friday, March 13, the Prime Minister announced a ban on gatherings of 500 people, however the ban would not actually start until Monday. No reason was explicitly given for the delay between the announcement and the commencement of the ban, but Hillsong’s Colour Conference in Sydney’s North East was attended by over 3000 people on Saturday, March14th. As the crisis has continued to escalate the government has been forced to take stricter measures in regards to lockdowns. The NSW Police have been granted extra powers to enforce a mandatory lockdown where people can no longer leave the house for non-essential reasons. These restrictions are set to be lifted on July 1, which is conveniently one week before Hillsong’s next scheduled mega conference to be held at Qudos Bank Arena over 4 days. [Personal note: The conference is ironically titled ‘Breathe Again’ whilst we’re in the middle of an epidemic that attacks the respiratory system.]

As the revelation of Hillsong’s insidious role in our country’s government becomes clearer by the day, the mainstream Australian media has remained mostly silent on the organisation. One can’t help but wonder how the Murdoch press would have reacted if Kevin Rudd’s response to the GFC was somehow influenced by an outside group, or if any other Labor ministers were wilfully endangering the nation’s safety for the sake of their church buddies. When recently messaging a journalist from The Guardian, I asked why they hadn’t covered Hillsong in any of their recent articles and they reluctantly admitted to trying to work around an apparent gag order.

Most recently Scott Morrison took part in a 25-hour prayer marathon held over Zoom last weekend. Scott Morrison begins his prayer with “heavenly father, we just commit our nation to you in this terrible time of great need” — A gross violation of the separation between church and state. Morrison is free to engage in prayer in his personal life, but to commit our country to his God whilst acting as our country’s leader and sitting in his parliamentary office is crossing a line.

Footage was initially uploaded by Eternity News before being deleted. A phone recording of the footage was then uploaded by Queensland Parents for Secular State Schools before their clip was also deleted. An edited version of the clip can be found on Guardian’s Youtube. The organisation believed to be responsible for organising the prayer call is Canberra Declaration. Canberra Declaration’s official website published a post on March 19 detailing the ‘Call to Prayer’ and including the Zoom link, written by the Australian Christian Churches National President, and leading Hillsong contributor, Wayne Alcorn.

Additional blog posts can be found on the Canberra Declaration website where COVD19 is compared to abortion and abortion is described as a ‘plague’, the virus is claimed to be part of God’s ‘much greater plan’, and claiming the droughts, summer bushfires and COVID19 are ‘God’s teachings’.

Scott Morrison and the Liberal party need to decide whether he is going to serve his God or our country, because it is becoming apparently clear that he cannot serve both.

Edit April 3, 6:46PM: The response to this post has been overwhelming with over 68,000 views, along with trending on Australian reddit and twitter, all within less than 24 hours (I have spent the day under my bed covers half expecting the AFP to bust down the door). This post was intended as a way for me to process all the information that has been circling in my head since Morrison made the decision to announce to ban 500 people gatherings on a Friday but enact the ban on Monday after the Hillsong conference had happened. In the following weeks since I became increasingly frustrated by the growing connection between the government’s decisions and the Pentecostal church along with the lack of reporting or investigative journalism being done about this.

To make this as clear as possible — I am not a journalist. I have never been employed by the media and my degree is a Bachelor is in Social Science (with no journalism units taken). I consider this post to be a blog post rather than an article and I have done my best to include linked citations to a majority of my claims — with the obvious exception of an anonymous source who shall continue to remain nameless.

My hope for writing this was to push the friends I have, who are real journalists, into investigating more and exposing the complete truth. Seeing Samantha Maiden — the journalist who broke the Scott Morrison in Hawaii photos — joining in this discussion now is far more than I had hoped for. I sincerely hope someone with her experience and credentials, along with any other journalists who are now following this story, are now able to push through with a real investigation that exposes the whole truth, more than just the fragments I have been able to piece together here.

I have made no personal gain from this post. There was no monetisation. I have no linked social media accounts to try and acquire a following or career with. My only interest is the greater good for the Australian population.

I am an Australian citizen concerned for my country. I am autistic woman confined to my house indefinitely with a pre-existing lung condition. I am hopeful that the wide spread circulation of this post will inspire other “quiet Australians” to demand the truth of the government who is meant to represent us and not a religious sect.

Hunter Schwarz on Twitter

I had no idea how political BTS got in their music https://t.co/DxkHekNwTz

Hunter Schwarz tweeted a link to ‘BTS Are on the Front Line of South Korea’s Generational Warfare’ with the caption “I had no idea how political BTS got in their music” and the replies are full of praises and links to their lyrics, performances and articles that seek to validate BTS as revolutionary leaders. Naturally the tweets in the replies are full of factually incorrect claims. One person thinks that BTS were blacklisted by the government for their performance of Spring Day.

Ravina⁷ on Twitter

@MrsTOH2O @hunterschwarz @Twt_for_Healing @BTS_twt They were blacklisted by the last SK president because of Spring Day correct?

Spring Day was released in 2017. The conservative government responsible for running the blacklist was in the process of an impeachment that had begun in 2016. Furthermore when the blacklist was actually revealed only one Kpop — 24K — group was named.

Funnily enough, no one seems interested in linking band leader Namjoon’s own words “BTS doesn’t talk about big issues like war or peace, or global poverty or starvation or things like that,” instead choosing to emphasise that group’s message is “loving yourself, as well as to look at the small things”. The quote comes from an interview with The Hollywood Reporter (released on the one year anniversary of Saudi journalist Khashoggi’s murder at the hands of the kingdom) where BTS justified their performance, at the request of a government responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in the modern world. Whilst some fans bury their head in the sand and maintain denial that the concert was “just for fans!”, South Korean president Moon Jae-In has officially gone on record saying that Prince Mohammad Bin Salman petitioned him to send BTS for a concert. Saudi Arabia has recently been using the arts and social media influencers, in an attempt to try and whitewash their atrocious human rights record and boost tourism. On the Korean government’s end, their benefit is an 8.3 billion dollar deal. By agreeing to perform BTS complied with being used as political pawns by their own government in order to help a genocidal kingdom try and boost their image.

In the lead up to the concert a section of the fandom who actually did believe in the socially conscious message BTS used to have, petitioned against the Saudi performance through the hashtag #BTSDontGo, but were met with silence from the mainstream media (who seemed only interested in criticising the performance after it happened), no response from Bighit or BTS, and cyber bullying on a mass scale from the remainder of the fandom. People were encouraged to be doxed, attacked, mass reported into suspension through abusing twitter’s poorly made reporting platform. Attempts to highlight how devastating a concert in Saudi Arabia would be for supporting human rights, were instead buried by propaganda that the country was becoming more progressive — The exact reason the regime wanted the band to perform, knowing the fandom of millions would help spread their agenda.

In the lead up to the concert ARMY’s widely spread pictures of homosexual Saudi social media star, Suhail al-Jameel, in an attempt to showcase the country as being progressive.

Less than two days after the concert al-Jameel was arrested for nudity after uploading a photo of himself in shorts. The Saudi government has a known history of using twitter to spy on citizens and it is not unrealistic to link increased web traffic, from BTS fans using al-Jameel as a “gotcha!” card, and his arrest less than 48 hours after the concert had ended. Funnily enough all of the people who had been trying to advertise the concert as helping Saudi Arabia become more progressive were too busy sharing false articles about a sold out concert (it didn’t sell out, it sold less than half the capacity), to bother caring about a gay man now being tortured in prison (where he currently remains). Somehow LGBTQI+ fans are meant to feel represented by a group that has never explicitly offered their support, and whose fans are indirectly responsible for a gay man being tortured in Saudi prison.

But facts don’t matter in the purple heart world of ARMY twitter. Valid criticism is decried as “Xenophobic!”. Pitchfork’s 6.3 review of Map of the Soul 7? “Racist!”. A Korean translator criticising BIGHIT’s twitter account endorsing a thinly veiled racist article that reinforces offensive stereotypes against Asian artists to promote BTS as a model minority? Bully her off the platform! Meanwhile the fandom regularly targets all other Korean pop acts and fans (known derogatorily as “kpoppies”) with racist stereotypes of ‘machines’ and ‘robots’. Artists such as NCT, SuperM , MonstaX and BLACKPINK have all been accused of using artificial methods to buy their success, whilst BTS are supposedly ‘organic’. Because apparently a western country is only capable of liking one Asian act at a time and BTS are the only acceptable option because all those other Koreans are fake… so actual xenophobia.

The methods being used to push this BTS agenda of ‘socially conscious’ are scarily comparable to Trump. Much like Trump’s stranglehold over Fox News, ARMYs have begun infiltrating actual journalism spaces. Through biased fan opinions being published under official outlets such as Rolling Stone or WallStreet Journal, other fans are then using this to claim that as the standard for reporting. The “journalists” regularly use their platforms to slander other groups. Ikran Dahir and Ellie Bate, both ARMY accounts on twitter, used their platform on Buzzfeed to falsely accuse SuperM of artificially inflating album sales to chart on Billboard.

Even after Billboard released an official statement with their Nielsen statistics, proving Super M’s chart position as legitimate, neither writer has issued an apology and the article still remains up on Buzzfeed — now with three corrections

On March 12, Pauline DeLeon wrote a piece for HypeBae that was supposed to be a translation of the Korean website’s post on BIGBANG renewing their recording contracts with label YG. In her original article DeLeon claims “fans don’t seem to be taking the news [of the contract renewal] well”, links a false accusation against band member, Daesung, which has been legally cleared, and quotes ‘one social media user’ (like that’s a legitimate source for anything) calling the group “a unique group of ex-convicts”. DeLeon goes on to refer to ex-band mate Seungri’s criminal accusations of prostitution and rape as a “mishap”, before ending with a link to BTS’ latest music video.

The article has since been edited to a straightforward translation of the Korean version, removing the links to the BTS music video, Daesung, and replacing the allusion to Seungri with a proper sourced article that acknowledges his removal from the group. However, much like the aforementioned Buzzfeed article, no apology has been made to the respective group who was slandered, and no disciplinary actions taken against the reporter.

In an era of clickbait journalism where fandom slander is treated like gospel, all other journalists or facts that go against these ARMY narratives are decried as “fake news”. Gate keeping accounts exist on twitter to monitor all things that are written about BTS and tell fans whether it is acceptable to click on the article or not. “Receipt” accounts keep track of all dissenting members of the fandom, posting out of context screenshots to target them for mass harassment. Furthermore when a gay Arab man by the name of Enzo dared criticise a BTS fan journalist of not covering the Saudi concert, he was then targeted for harassment and bullied off the platform.

Activism isn’t a badge you can pin on and take off whenever you feel like it. You can’t perform for a regime responsible for the worst oppression of women in the modern world and then claim to care about ending violence. You can’t have a fandom full of conservative Republicans and still claim to be socially conscious. People who actually care about a progressive future are not interested in fostering a pleasant environment for people of the opposite view. Uniting people with music does not exist. I do not wish to be “united” with people who believe that gay people do not deserve to live, that one race is superior to another, or that women should be beaten the way they are in Saudi Arabia. The reality is if BTS wish to be considered socially aware they need to take a consistent stand, but Namjoon himself said he’s not interested in doing that. “BTS don’t talk about big issues like war or peace”. So with that it mind the fact of the matter is they’re apolitical. They don’t actually care about a genuine message, they just perform for the highest bidder.

Update, March 16 2020:

Twitter response to this post has been an interesting insight into how hypocritical the fandom is.

Telling fans to mass report an article that talks about the fandom mass reporting and bullying dissenting thoughts… (even with screenshots and citations provided for all claims)

Criticising this article for being an unsavoury portrayal of the band – claims the members to be philanthropists… Next tweet gleefully imagining the members violently assaulting someone and being bailed out.

And yet people wonder why I wrote this.

Update, March 17 2020:

BTS performing at the request of the Saudi government is somehow comparable to soldiers invading Nazi Germany to free Jewish prisoners