Carl Lentz, pastor of Hillsong Church in New York City, said last week during an interview with “The Breakfast Club” that he believes “pornography is destructive” and that we have a “culture that can’t pick which direction we want to go.”
But it was his comments about disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and now-deceased Playboy founder Hugh Hefner that sparked the most attention and on-air controversy.
According to The Christian Post, Lentz essentially said that it’s hypocritical for people to vilify Weinstein while giving Hefner a total pass.
The pastor said that he wasn’t at all comparing the two situations, as Weinstein has been accused of rape and Hefner was a peddler of smut, but he attempted to draw a broader point about how society and culture are handling sexual ethics.
“It’s interesting — on one hand we honor Hugh Hefner when he passes away — the dude was a pornographer,” Lentz said. “But yet Harvey Weinstein is this demon in culture right now and I said, we’ve got to pick our poison.”
That’s when host Charlamagne stepped in and said, “I can’t let you do that, Pastor Carl” and proceeded to explain the difference between Weinstein and Hefner: mainly the fact that Hefner’s Playboy Playmates wanted to be where they were, while Weinstein’s purported victims did not.
Lentz repeatedly said that he wasn’t comparing the two, but was, instead, attempting to speak to a broader cultural problem when it comes to sex and morality.
“I’m not likening what they said. I’m saying what they represent,” he said. “So, we’re mad on one hand about what Harvey Weinstein has done, but the culture that created it we also honor.”
When he was pressed to explain what, exactly, this “culture” represents, the conversation turned to porn.
“I think, ‘How could one thing be acceptable and then we not expect things like what Harvey Weinstein thing to be accepted for so long,'” Lentz said. “In no way am I likening these two things together. … I’m saying we have a culture that can’t pick which direction we want to go. Is Playboy — is Hugh Hefner worthy of honor right now?”
In the end, Lentz said that culture has “very, very murky water right now with morality.”
Watch the conversation unfold at the 22:00-min mark below:
In the end, Lentz said that he believes pornography is “destructive” for those involved in it.
“Now, if someone has better research, please tell me. From what I’ve seen and from what I know, I don’t think it’s helping anybody,” he said. “I think it definitely devalues what is right and what is holy. I think you can get to a point in culture where you’re so ingrained to think things are right, you know, we start to lose our sensitivity.”