Ellen Page calls out Chris Pratt’s “infamously anti-LGBTQ” church
Chris Pratt loves talking about his Christian faith (and his faith-based diets), but actress Ellen Page, who spit fire over the current administration earlier this month, isn’t having it. To be clear, her issues aren’t with his faith so much as they are his chosen place of worship: Hillsong, the “hipster church” attended by famous people like Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner.
Because behind Hillsong’s “hot” congregation, pop choir, and hip, charismatic pastor lies some regressive beliefs about the LGBTQ population, ones glossed over with cocktail words about everyone being “welcome.” Per this Outline article from a former congregant, no one there is willing to have a real conversation about the church’s pro-life stances, nor its long, sordid history of endorsing gay conversion therapy. “I don’t regret the decision to walk away from a church that cares so much about fame more than faith,” the piece concludes.
All of this was clearly on Page’s mind when she fired off a tweet in the wee hours of Friday, one pegged to Pratt’s recent interview on Colbert. “Oh. K. Um. But his church is infamously anti lgbtq so maybe address that too?” she wrote.
While one might not expect a late-night host to raise tough questions like that to an A-lister, Page’s tweet does speak to the enduring impact of “access culture” that’s plagued modern journalism, resulting in fewer and fewer tough questions being asked to high-profile subjects, presumably out of fear that doing so will limit access to them in the future. One of the reasons Ashley Feinberg’s recent interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made such a splash was because she unapologetically raised the concerns that other journalists were too scared to address. Awareness, acknowledgment, and change only comes with confrontation, after all.