The disgraced pastor said his X/Twitter account was hacked. No one seems to believe him.

On Tuesday night, Christian pastor Brian Houston posted something rather… interesting on X/Twitter: “Ladies and girls kissing.”

(Follow above article link to view PDFs/photos that accompany this article.)

It might have gone unnoticed if Houston wasn’t the sort of person with 577,000 followers. Houston is 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. Last August, 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” is a very strange request when so much of Houston’s behavior has been abnormal.

With all that in mind, does 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 got hacked once. 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 is 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’s certainly plausible. Houston is 70. No one’s 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, Craig Kelly, used the same excuse earlier this month.

Also, you’re far more likely to be careless when you’re typing with one hand.

But even if we assume Houston was performing a search, it raises more 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 be more disturbed by the inclusion of “girls”? Does this guy also log into PornHub and type “boob”?

His style is almost as awkward as trying to sext someone by saying “I'd like to kiss and cuddle you”… which happens 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, this whole incident is 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 advocated “conversion therapy.”

Houston doesn’t think it’s okay to act on one’s homosexuality. Unless, I guess, you’re a lady or girl and want to kiss another lady or girl… in which case Houston is not only okay with it, he wants 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.)

The problem, obviously, isn’t the search. It’s the utter hypocrisy of someone like Houston, who thinks acting on homosexuality is a sin, privately enjoying it. If he had a healthier outlook on sex, this wouldn’t be nearly as embarrassing for him.

It would be a great topic of discussion in his upcoming memoir, which he promises will be “authentic and transparent” and would no doubt require him to spend countless late nights in front of a computer screen.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy these words of wisdom from the lover of ladies and girls: