He Was the Most Famous Pastor in America. Then He Cheated On His Wife. His Next Act Should Upset Women Everywhere.

Faith-based The Hillsong Pastor Wrote a Book About Overcoming His Flaws. It Revealed a Major New One. Carl and Laura Lentz want to teach you how to fix your marriage after adultery. Hmm. Toby Zerna/Newspix/Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Until his assistant discovered explicit texts on his computer, Carl Lentz had lived high on the celebrity-pastor hog. He and his pricey kicks were regulars on the old “PreachersNSneakers” Instagram account. He baptized Justin Bieber in a New York Knicks player’s bathtub. For a pastor (or really anyone who owns more than one shirt), he frame-mogged topless with surprising frequency. Lentz and his wife, Laura, were friends with the Kardashians. Their church, Hillsong NYC, swarmed with thousands of hipsters drawn by live music, Jesus, and celebrities, for whom seats were reserved up front. Lentz was their tattooed emissary from God. He had also been leading a double life. In October 2020, Laura learned that her husband had “been unfaithful.” In turn, Carl and Laura, a co-pastor herself, were fired by Hillsong NYC. After the firing, the family’s life unraveled. The paparazzi became a nuisance. Trusted friends distanced themselves. The Lentz family had been staying with the Biebers; someone “from Justin’s team” asked them to move out. With few other options for where to go, a good pal helped out: Tyler Perry reportedly paid their $16,000 monthly rent in Manhattan Beach, California. In Overcoming Infidelity, the couple’s new, jointly written memoir-driven guidebook for marital healing after an affair, relatable moments of strife often get undone by surreal details like these. It’s almost as if, in writing a book about overcoming deep personality flaws (and, for Laura’s part, trying to forgive and live with them in her spouse), the couple inadvertently turned a spotlight on a remaining failing: a regard for the limelight that in evangelical celebrity culture confuses charisma with God’s gifts and where a platform equals spiritual authority. Their book ultimately offers a sort of affluence gospel for relationships, one that makes the Lentzes’ recovered marriage aspirational. “No matter what unfaithfulness undoes, God can redo,” they write, with the understanding that it would be “selfish” to keep the golden lessons God gave them to themselves. They give the performance of being humbled while retaking the stage. It’s a sad, old trick. Carl and Laura Lentz’s firing marked the beginning of a cascade of disclosures: In addition to his affair with designer Ranin Karim (Carl writes that this was not the first time he was unfaithful to Laura), he had a “history with a female staff member I had suspected,” Laura writes. At least a dozen states (although not New York) have laws against clergy engaging in sexual misconduct with adults in their spiritual care, given the power dynamics. At the time, the Lentzes’ lawyer refuted the claims. But a subsequent, leaked internal Hillsong investigation alleged that Lentz admitted to engaging in between 20 and 100 sexual acts with the couple’s former nanny Leona Kimes; he claims that the acts were consensual. Further reports surfaced of complaints of “inappropriate sexual behavior amongst staff/interns” at Hillsong, exploitation of believers’ labor, and Hillsong founder Brian Houston’s failure to report sexual abuse of children. Overcoming Infidelity is written as if Lentz’s affair with the designer (and previous, unnamed women) was the singular crisis the family needed to process. To his credit, Carl Lentz does own up to “a growing set of lies I’d learned to manage like a second job” and taking on the job of ministry, for which “I wasn’t prepared … mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.” He writes that for years, “I followed a pattern of avoidance, escape, addiction, dishonesty, and self-protection that I had rinsed and repeated more times than I could count.” Less to his credit, some scenes in the book are striking if only for Lentz’s obliviousness to the impact of his own actions. He describes telling their teen daughter that he had been “unfaithful” to her mother. The girl’s hands fidgeted, fingers flexing and releasing, he recalls. He writes how he watched her try to be strong for him. Only then was the moment, Lentz writes, that he realized his affairs would affect his children for the rest of their lives. In the Biebers’ living room, he said the words to Ava that “landed like a bomb,” and though their daughter cried and shook, she also tried to comfort her father, saying, “It’s okay, Dad … I love you … I know you’ll make it right … Are you okay?” Lentz’s takeaway was that his daughter was trying to assure him while expressing love. He doesn’t seem to clock that she might have had a fawning response or that she was parenting her reckless father. Laura writes painfully about how, in the wake of the affair, she wanted to be close to Carl, to feel like “he needed me and no one else,” but if he would touch her hand or put his hand on her back, “I would start shaking. Not slightly, but visibly, like I was shivering from a bitter cold.” Over time, as the couple moved stepwise through stages of forgiveness and improved communication, they learned to touch again. Sometimes she’d let him hold her hand despite the shaking. Even as his touch produced a fight-or-flight response, Carl writes, there were “hundreds of tiny moments of trust,” including “moments where I had to learn to hear no without pouting and pressuring.” Overcoming old habits of cajoling his wife, I suppose, passes as a win in an evangelical subculture where women are regularly coached to give their husbands as much sex as the men want in order to keep them from straying. But in the backdrop of a recovery book alleging to offer “wisdom,” there’s fairly unequal progress in a man learning not to hound his wife for sex versus his wife overcoming regular and physical signs of trauma due to his betrayals to her, their family, their church. Later in the book, Lentz describes how he and Laura developed a new version of intimacy earned through open communication. He described a recent date night: a flirtatious dinner out, during which “I offered ninety-seven hints about how much I ‘can’t wait to get home.’ ” Then, once in bed, she was tired and said, “I’d love to just sleep right now if that’s cool.” Lentz describes how that was “more than cool” with him, and it was one of their most intimate nights because “for her to feel safe enough to say no without overthinking it, without worrying I’d sulk or spiral, was not just progress. It was a miracle.” As a reader, one can’t help but wonder what premiracle life was like. Back before the firing, when Laura was noticing how Lentz, using prescribed Adderall, took later and later appointments, suspiciously withdrew cash at ATMs, and had a location pin that didn’t match the stories he told about his whereabouts. Their book depicts Lentz’s infidelity (more than the whole of his behavior) as having “torpedoed our previous marriage” but opening the door to a more honest version of their marriage today that’s “less image-driven and less performative.” On their podcast Lights On, the couple recently sat in a vast white studio, promoting the book, shilling their improved marriage. Lentz, with cutoff sleeves, joshed, “Buy 30 copies!” The episode included an ad, voiced by Lentz, for Meta Performance Institute, a training platform for “elite coaches,” which he has also advertised on his Instagram account, with a reel featuring his daughters gathered around a table discussing transformational thinking, “mental engineering” (as typical families so often do), with microphones set before them, multiple cameras catching all the angles. It has the hallmarks of a gauzy comeback. It all feels a little like a frying pan infomercial headed by a chef turned pitchman best known for burning down his old kitchen. Toward the end of the book, Lentz complains that we love putting people on pedestals “so we can feel inspired—until we don’t. More than we love watching people rise, we love watching them fall.” He claims that we love the scandal, the takedowns. “That’s one of the reasons we can find hundreds of stories about fallen pastors online.” In the book, Lentz comes off, somehow, as even less a sympathetic character than he did during his turn in the tabloids. A caricature of “Christian cool” is one thing, but a man six years out from betraying his family, hawking a book (plus podcast!), thirsting for attention and promising “wisdom” is worse than a cartoon. It’s a symptom of an evangelical celebrity culture that treats elevation as so near to godliness that those addicted to the faith’s fame machine often don’t know how to step away, even when their own sins have erased their credibility. And sadly, it often works, because Christian forgiveness narratives are so easy to exploit. See the many examples of pastors admitting to past sexual misdeeds or assaults, weeping for forgiveness before a congregation, and sometimes, ever so humbly, accepting a standing ovation in return. See Joshua Harris, the author of purity culture guidebook I Kissed Dating Goodbye, learning about the generation of harm caused by his book and (briefly) thinking it was a good idea for him to offer his own deconstruction course. The Lentzes end on a trite note. “God is not done with your story,” they write. It’s a shame that they interpret that not-doneness with an obligation to wade, half baked, back into public life. Books Marriage Religion Podcasts