Christian megachurch founder Brian Houston shared adult content on social media. Again.
After reposting a scandalous video on X/Twitter, the Hillsong founder scrambled to explain why it totally wasn’t him
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A well-known Christian pastor has ONCE AGAIN been caught publicly sharing adult content on social media, leading him to make up wild excuses for why that couldn’t possibly have been his fault.
Is this the most important story in the world? Not even close.
Is it hilarious? Absolutely. And we all deserve some joy. So let’s dig in.
In the early hours on Thursday morning, Pastor Brian Houston reposted a video on X/Twitter from an account called “The Classic Pornostar Era 80/90/2000.”
The actual NSFW image can be seen here if you dare to click. Writer David Farrier, who documented all of this, described the incident this way:
The latest incident happened in the early hours of this morning [on] X, where Brian has 544,000 followers.
… he shared 8 minutes and 23 seconds of hardcore porn, featuring two French porn stars from the 70s. I counted six different positions, and saw a lot of semen – which is what I imagine Houston also saw at 2am when he accidentally hit the "share" button…
Chef’s kiss.
Maybe he deserves some credit. The guy wants to turn the clock back so badly, he only shares porn that’s five decades old.
The issue, of course, isn’t that the man is watching adult content. Or even that he accidentally pushed a share button (though, I would just point out, on the X/Twitter app, you need to click TWICE to repost anything). The issue is that Houston is one of those holier-than-thou Christians who would normally condemn this sort of thing as a sin.
But this isn’t even the first time this has happened.
In 2024, Houston was called out after he posted a bizarre tweet reading simply “Ladies and girls kissing.”
It might have gone unnoticed if Houston wasn’t the sort of person with over half a million followers. He’s the founder and former global senior pastor of Hillsong Church—an evangelical megachurch that began in Australia and has a number of affiliates worldwide. It’s also extremely controversial.
There were the “moral failures” of hipster pastor Carl Lentz of their New York affiliate. And the financial and leadership failures of Reed and Jess Bogard of their Dallas affiliate. And the COVID-related death of a church member who happened to be an anti-vaxxer. And the 60 Minutes Australia segment that documented even more allegations of sexual abuse by Hillsong leaders so egregious that reporter Tom Steinfort said the church was guilty of “indifference to the victims’ suffering so heartless it would surely make Jesus weep.”
In 2021, Houston was arrested on charges that he concealed child sexual abuse that he supposedly knew about... because the alleged culprit was his own father. In 2023, however, he was acquitted of those charges.
Anyway. Back to “Ladies and girls kissing.”
That tweet remained up for about 16 minutes before it was deleted and Houston tweeted that his account had been broken into:
(If the timestamps looks strange, it’s because those screenshots are coming from different sources, but the actual time difference was 16 minutes between tweets.)
That was later followed up by a different statement from one of his assistants clarifying that, yes, Internet Haters, this was totally a hack:
“Please disregard anything that seems out of the normal” was a very strange request when so much of Houston’s behavior had been abnormal.
With all that in mind, though, did anyone really believe this was a hack? Who goes through all the trouble to hack someone’s account, only to post those four words? Why not change the password? Why not post a more scandalous image? (If you wanted to make a prominent pastor look bad, there are far more troubling things you could do.)
And who recovers from a hack in 16 minutes? I’ve been hacked before. It took days to full regain access to my account.
And why was he allegedly following a salacious account on Instagram?
And why, when he attempted to “prove” he was hacked, did this (now-deleted) tweet point to a totally different account?
The alternative theory here was that Houston was doing an online search late at night… without realizing he was making it public. (In a very Ed Balls sort of way.) It was certainly plausible. Houston was 70 at the time. No one was accusing the guy of being tech-savvy. He wouldn’t be the first person who didn’t realize his private thoughts were actually public—Ted Cruz beat him to it. Hell, a former Australian politician used the same excuse in the very same month.
Also, you’re far more likely to be careless when you’re typing with one hand.
But even if we assumed Houston was performing a search, it raised more disturbing questions. Like: What the hell sort of search is that?! If you’re searching for two women kissing, why would you search for “ladies and girls”? Is that overly formal or just plain weird? Should we have been more disturbed by the inclusion of “girls”? Was this the sort of guy who visited PornHub and searched for “boob”?
His style was almost as awkward as trying to sext someone by saying “I’d like to kiss and cuddle you”… which happened to be exactly what Brian Houston once texted to a staff member:
The Hillsong Global Board on Friday afternoon sent a letter to church members, leaked to the ABC, about complaints made about Mr Houston’s conduct in 2013 and 2019.
…
The first incident, detailed in the letter and by Pastor Dooley, involved “inappropriate text messages” sent to a female staffer which led to her resigning.
Pastor Dooley, in an emotional video conference, said the texts were along the lines of: “’If I was with you, I’d like to kiss and cuddle you,’ words of that nature”.
The Hillsong Global Board said Mr Houston at the time was “under the influence of sleeping tablets, upon which he had developed a dependence”.
“He immediately apologised to the person. We also worked with Pastor Brian to ensure he received professional help to eliminate his dependency on this medication, and this was achieved successfully.”
Beyond the words themselves, that whole incident was even more jarring because Houston is openly bigoted against LGBTQ people. In 2015, he said of his church, “we do not affirm a gay lifestyle” and that Hillsong did not “knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership.” His church also advocated “conversion therapy.”
Houston didn’t think it was okay to act on one’s homosexuality. Unless, I guess, you were a lady (or girl) and wanted to kiss another lady (or girl)… in which case Houston was not only okay with it, he wanted to watch.
(Allegedly.)
He shouldn’t have used the hacking excuse. It would have been so much easier to just tell everyone he pressed “tweet” too soon when what he meant to write was “Ladies and girls kissing… is a sin.” (See? So much cleaner.)
Anyway, back to present day.
The morning after Houston was caught sharing that adult video, he posted (and then soon deleted) his latest excuse—”This account was compromised overnight. Any odd posts, links or messages shared earlier were not legitimate and have been reported and deleted”—which was even funnier because he posted that without deleting the adult content.
People were quick to point out the problem:
By Thursday afternoon, after someone asked how he overcame his latest hacking so quickly, Houston insisted he wasn’t hacked at all. Someone had just gotten onto his account. Somehow.
So Houston’s argument here is that someone with access to his phone (no passcode?!) got onto X/Twitter, shared a very specific kind of adult video, and did nothing else whatsoever.
Make it make sense.
At this point, the excuses are so much worse than just admitting the truth. A wiser person would just laugh this off and move on, but Houston is a Christian hypocrite who thinks acting on homosexuality is a sin and presumably believes pornography is a scourge… unless he’s the one privately enjoying it. And then publicly sharing.
If he had a healthier outlook on sex, this wouldn’t be nearly as embarrassing for him.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
I guess someone on his team told him "Houston, we have a problem".
When the pastor saw this inapropriate content he wanted to report it. It is not his fault that the words "Report" and "Repost" look so similar.