Chris Pratt’s Fans Aren’t Fans of His Homophobic Church

As you probably know if you’re a fan of Chris Pratt, he’s been getting more and more Jesus-ey in public lately. That in and of itself is fine because even though religiosity is on the decline in the United States, most people have religious friends and family and aren’t very bothered by it. In fact, while most Americans don’t regularly attend church services, about 75% consider themselves members of a religion to some extent.

The problem people have with Chris Pratt is that the church he goes to is homophobic. I mean, more than usual, since most of them are at least a little bit homophobic. But Pratt is a member of the Hillsong Church, which, while it isn’t the Westboro Baptist Church it’s still pretty bad.

GQ profiled the church a few years back when Justin Bieber became a member. One of the notable things about the Australian-based church is their attempt to make Christianity cool, like that episode of King of the Hill where Bobby hangs out with the skateboarding preacher who Hank rightly thinks is a jackass.

The book on Hillsong, however—the other book, lowercase b—is that they’re the real article: the world’s first genuinely cool church. “The music! The lights! The crowds!” begins an incredulous woman narrating a CNN segment on Hillsong NYC in smarmy CNNese. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.” The chyron reads “Hipster preacher smashes stereotypes.” They call Pastor Carl a hipster—ABC actually said “hipster heartthrob”—and Carl says he doesn’t know what that means, and he wears a motorcycle jacket when he says this.

The cool church with the modern ideas like gay conversion therapy works and that gay people shouldn’t have leadership positions in the church, even if it’s on the choir, as if there’s any straight choir directors anywhere in the world.

“These two men in particular are amazing human beings,” Carl continued, and he starts to cry at this, at how painful this was for everyone involved. He is an easy crier, and the memories are hard for him. “And they are going through a really amazing journey called life. Yes, their sexuality is involved with it, but it’s not as cut-and-dry as you think it is. And if they make a decision to live as gay men, they are going to get married, our stance in this church is there’s going to be a limited involvement when it comes to leadership, because you don’t believe what I believe. This would create friction that wouldn’t be fair to the people that we’re serving. If you believe that homosexuality is God’s will for your life, and I disagree, well, what if you’re a leader and, you know, a young man comes up to you, and he has questions about his sexuality? What are you going to tell him? What I believe or what you believe?”

The thing I personally found the most insulting was this sentence: “But, Carl begs me, don’t miss the point: It’s important to him that we know that everyone is welcome at his church—that homosexuality isn’t a different kind of sin to him than, say, tithing at 9 percent instead of 10 percent, or gossiping or telling a lie.” Isn’t that refreshing? “Yeah, you’re a sinner, but it’s not any worse than not giving me enough money.”

Basically, people don’t like Chris Pratt being a member of a church that thinks that, and people are somehow relating this to his recent engagement, possibly because his fiancee called Chris Evans the number one Chris a while back.

What I don’t understand, though, is that people are only talking about Chris Pratt here and not Kendall Jenner or Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber or Kevin Durant who all also attend the Hillsong Church. I think it’s either because Pratt is always talking about Jesus and the others aren’t or because people actually like Chris Pratt. I do too. He seems like a super nice guy who dresses up in his Starlord costume and visits kids in the hospital. He’s also a great actor and he was in shows we loved like Park and Recreation.

No one is perfect, and it gets irritating watching social media act like they should be. Yes, Pratt’s church has some bad beliefs, but if you don’t like them, you should hear about every other church.