‘Middle-class’ Africans in Australia: choosing Hillsong as a global home

ABSTRACT

Much of the literature on Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (Pc/C) and African diasporas in the Global North has focused upon African-Majority or -Initiated churches that are either branches of African churches or were created in the diaspora. This focus often frames the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in terms of: a) its emphasis upon the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ offering a path not only to salvation, but also to earthly riches; b) its opportunities for achieving status among church hierarchies, which is attractive to socially marginalised groups, and; c) the practical assistance it provides to support settlement. However, African diasporas have diverse histories of migration, and settlement experiences. This article considers the appeal of Pc/C to a group of professional African migrants in Australia, who self-identify as ‘middle-class’. It argues that professional African migrants have consciously favoured the Australian megachurch Hillsong over Australia’s African-Initiated churches. They have done so in pursuit of a process of an imagined class-mobility, and as a result, their choice of church can be understood as largely strategic.

KEYWORDS:

• African diasporas
• Hillsong
• African-Australians
• middle-class aspirationalism
• racism

In July 2020, we spoke over Zoom with Janette, a Ugandan-born woman who had moved to Australia in 2016 for her PhD studies at a prominent Australian university. She had recently secured a three-year contract as a researcher at the same university. Given the high levels of casualisation in Australian academia, this was an impressive feat, and a sign of Janette’s upward social trajectory. Janette’s father had been a civil servant in Uganda, and her mother a teacher. Janette had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics at Makerere University in Kampala in 2003. Afterwards, she had moved to the UK under a scheme run by her Pentecostal church in Uganda, Watoto, that sends missionaries to assist international churches ‘in need’. After returning home, she worked in a bank, but became dissatisfied, as she wanted to have more of a social impact. Looking for a way to use her economics degree for social justice purposes, she applied, and was accepted, for a course in health economics at the World Bank. Later, she was accepted for a two-year master’s degree at the prestigious French School of Public Health. Upon returning to Kampala, she worked for several NGOs. One of these sent her to Australia for a three-month fellowship to study HIV/AIDS in 2014. The experience made her realise that health economics was where her passion really lay: ‘So I decided to search for PhDs. And I found this PhD being advertised by the research institute where I did my fellowship. I wrote to them, and they remembered me and offered me an interview’. And this is how she came to hold a PhD, and to be married to an Anglo-Australian, at the time of our interview with her, a few years later.

For the moment, let us return to the period of Janette’s arrival in Australia for her fellowship in 2014. During our interview, her enthusiasm became palpable as she told us of her first visit to the Australian megachurch Hillsong. She had known Hillsong for a long time. At her own church in Uganda, Watoto, Hillsong sponsors some outreach programs, and sends pastors to preach there, and Watoto congregations sing Hillsong songs in their services. So in Australia, Janette booked her visit as a ‘first-timer’ on the Hillsong website, and received instructions of where to board the shuttle bus that would take her to the church service. She told us:

It was amazing! When I arrived at the shuttle bus, they [church volunteers] already had my name on a sign. They had saved seats for me. So, it was really welcoming. And when I arrived at Hillsong Church and I told them I’m from Watoto, they were all like, ‘Oh yeah, we know Watoto. Oh, Watoto is family’. So, I quickly fitted in. And during the service, they mentioned [me]: ‘We have Janette visiting us from Watoto church’. You sort of feel like, ‘I’m so welcome!’ And [being offered] coffee after church, everybody knowing about Watoto and Uganda, where I come from, and just [offering me] the biggest welcome. I cried.

Janette was emotional not only because she had felt welcomed at the church. Like many other migrants from the African continent whom we interviewed, at Hillsong she had felt the novelty of being in a new church in Australia, but also the familiarity of her church in Uganda. She was also excited at seeing the celebrity pastors and ‘worship leaders’ she had met at her own church and had followed online. She went on to tell us:

You feel you are home, even if it’s your first time. [That’s] because you know their songs; you probably know their worship leaders because you see them in Uganda. [Hillsong] is so famous! Growing up, I knew all the worship leaders at Hillsong. Even when I had never been there. It was on … YouTube videos.

For Janette and many others, being at Hillsong for the first time evoked a strong mix of emotions. They felt at home, loved, starstruck and welcomed, in a country where they otherwise experienced frequent racism and rejection.

***

In recent years there has been a vast expansion of scholarly interest in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (P/cC) in Africa, and among African diasporic communities (e.g. Adogame 2013; Adogame and Spickard 2010; Aechtner 2015; Burgess 2011). A particular focus of this work has been upon those forms of P/cC that have emerged within African diasporas themselves, and upon the contribution of Pentecostalism to processes of identity formation among those same diasporas. This newer body of research on P/cC and African diasporas has developed a wide range of concerns. These include the ways in which the doctrines and ritual practices of P/cC may assist African migrants to make sense of their experiences of migration (Daswani 2010; Aechtner 2015); may play an important role in processes of place-making (and ‘settlement’) (Adogame 2013); may give migrants agency in their pursuit of ‘reverse missionisation’ (Burgess 2011); may sustain gender inequalities (Pasura 2008), and; may become even implicated in the formal, legal processes through which host states engage with those communities (although as Van Dijk 2004 work with Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the Netherlands has shown, this is by no means a straightforward process).¹

Important though all these contributions have been, it is also the case that much of the recent literature on Pc/C and African diasporas has been animated by a general construction of the African diasporic subject in terms of what Robbins (2013) has elsewhere referred to – albeit not without criticism – as ‘the suffering subject’. In other words, this literature has been generally focused upon those African migrants who are economically deprived (vis-à-vis the wider ‘host’ society), and/or are socially marginalised, and/or are of precarious citizenship. This is especially the case with studies of African communities which are of predominantly refugee- and asylum seeker- background (see, for example, the insightful article by Maguire and Murphy 2016). Moreover, this focus is then taken to frame the appeal of Pc/C, as a religious form which emphasises the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ as, not only a path to salvation, but also a route to earthly riches. This generally eschews formal institutional hierarchies, including for socially marginalised groups, and especially for women, and; whose churches may be even thought of as projects that support settlement, including as vehicles for empowering their members as agents for ‘reverse missionisation’ (both of which may be especially true for African-Initiated and -Majority Pc/C churches).

However, there is an increasing number of African-born Australians who regard themselves as of ‘middle-class’ status in their countries of birth, and who continue to perceive themselves as such after their arrival in Australia. Certainly, there is a growing body of literature looking at middle-class identities in Sub-Saharan Africa itself (Coe and Pauli 2020; Melber 2017; Ncube and Lufumpa 2014), and at the relationship between these, and shifting constructs of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ on the continent within contexts of neo-liberalism (Adeboye 2007; Hasu 2012; Kauppinen 2020; Van De Kamp 2016). A particular focus for this literature has been upon the emergent ‘Black middle classes’ in post-apartheid South Africa (Abraham 2022; Burchardt 2020; James 2019; Kgatle 2020; Rollock et al. 2013). Yet to date, very little scholarly attention has been paid to these same middle-class identities as they pertain to Africans living in diasporic communities, in general, and to African Pentecostals living outside the continent, in particular. Certainly, there are some important exceptions to this. For example, Fesenmyer’s work (2020, 2022) stands out for its consideration of how predominantly middle-class Kenyans in London are drawn to Pentecostalism in part as a response to their being re-cast, in the UK, as racialised migrants. So too does a growing body of work that considers the rapid global spread of Nigerian Pentecostalism – specifically the Redeemed Christian Church of God – through its largely middle-class migrant congregations (Hunt 2002; Coleman and Maier 2010; Openshaw 2014). Nevertheless, further work is required for us to theorise these initial case studies more adequately.

The main purpose of this article is to consider the appeal of Pc/C to not some generally imagined African diaspora (as it were) but to instead a specific cohort of African-Australians: all of whom self-identified as ‘middle-class’ and cosmopolitan, before they migrated to Australia, and all of whom remain comparatively ‘better off’ – financially, and in terms of educational attainment, and (professional) employment outcomes – vis-à-vis other African-Australians (and especially vis-à-vis most African-Australians of refugee background). The article’s central argument is that, for these individuals, the appeal of Pc/C lies precisely in its promise for them to enact an (imagined) process of class-mobility, in which engagement with non-Africans may be crucial. For this reason, their choice of precisely which Pc/C church or churches to attend in Australia can be understood as largely strategic. Although these individuals have not abandoned Australia’s (many) African-Initiated and -Majority churches – and/or their associated social networks – they all nevertheless consciously favour an Australia-founded, and now global, Pc/C megachurch called Hillsong.

As we document below, for all of our respondents, Hillsong is perceived to offer several advantages over any African-Initiated or -Majority church. Hillsong offers a commitment to an (imagined) socially-mobile congregation. As an Australian-founded church with a global reach, Hillsong is perceived to offer networking opportunities with educated Australians and other skilled migrants, affording both new friendships, as well as business opportunities. And with its rhetorical emphasis upon excellence, leadership and love, rather than spiritual battle and deliverance, Hillsong also resonates with these individuals’ social and professional sensibilities (even allowing those who do not strongly self-identify as ‘Pentecostals’ to still join it). In addition, Hillsong’s emphasis upon entertainment and excitement attracted these migrants’ children, who otherwise were not inclined to go to church. Perhaps most importantly, though, our respondents described how this megachurch offered a racially safer space than others that were available to them on a daily basis in Australian cities. They also spoke favourably about the ways in which Hillsong downplays intra-African differences (e.g. those of country-of-origin, ethnicity, etc.) in its quest to constitute a neutral, multicultural territory. Moreover, Hillsong’s adoption of the Australian multicultural model, through its smaller continent- or country-based ‘connect groups’ within the impersonal megachurch, offers this cohort a sense of belonging. Finally, our respondents also described how Hillsong had featured in their spiritual imaginations even before arrival in Australia; a reflection of the global reach of this particular church’s music, and media presence.

For these reasons, many of our respondents spoke of Hillsong not so much as a church, but as a ‘fellowship’. However, as this article will go on to also describe, for at least some of these individuals their initial, favourable perceptions of Hillsong became tempered over time, as areas of friction emerged as they were expected to adapt to the ‘Hillsong style’. Others became disillusioned by the realities of the church’s structures, or by having to ask for small changes to make it more amenable for their children. Yet of greatest significance is the fact that, if the initial appeal of Hillsong lay precisely in its promise of providing an ideal venue for African-Australians to enact an (imagined) ‘middle-class aspirationalism’, then so too elements of Hillsong’s service style, of its approach to Christian mores, and even of its political stance, over time disrupted this – forcing our respondents to rethink their very ideas of what it even means to be ‘middle-class’ and ‘cosmopolitan’.

The article is based on in-depth life history interviews with 15 African-Australians − 7 men and 8 women, all between 25 and 45 years old, and living in Sydney and Melbourne – conducted mostly over Zoom during 2020, in the context of various Covid-19 lockdowns. We used a snowballing method in which interviewees would suggest others who might be willing to talk to us. Interviews took around 1.5 hours, and were transcribed and analysed thematically. None of the authors were born in Australia (but in Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom, respectively) and although none of us identify as persons of colour, our own migrant histories, and transnational familial relations, all helped us develop some degree of rapport with our interviewees. For example, we commiserated together on being unable to meet in person with our relations overseas, and we shared our own experiences of ‘culture shock’ upon arrival in Australia. In addition, some of our respondents were simply ‘glad to chat’ after having been locked-down on their own for a period of time. For these reasons, interviews conducted over Zoom turned out to be a much more fruitful method of research than we had anticipated at the outset (and for more on ethnography and Zoom, see Vokes and Atukunda 2021; Lo Iacono, Symonds, and Brown 2016). The research was also informed at all stages by the authors’ various areas of existing expertise: transnational Christianity and Hillsong; African diasporic communities in the Global North, and; African expressions of Christianity, respectively.

African diasporic communities in Australia

Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of people from Sub-Saharan Africa have immigrated to Australia. Following changes to Australian government policy, in particular the adoption of the Pacific Solution in 2001, throughout the 2000s, an increasing number of people from African conflict zones – especially that of South Sudan – were resettled under Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Programme (i.e. as ‘quota refugees’). During the 2000s, Australia resettled over 48,000 Africans under this programme (Molla 2020, 2).

More recently, a growing number of people from Sub-Saharan Africa have arrived in Australia through the country’s ‘Skilled and Family Reunion Programme’, many of whom are working in professions such as tertiary education, health, and mining. An increasing number of African-born people living in Australia have arrived as international students. In total, the 2021 census showed that approximately 372,151 people born in Sub-Saharan Africa are now living in Australia (ABS 2022). And most significantly, for our purposes, in the same census, 233,011 of these people identified as Christian.

Reflecting these different immigration ‘pathways’, African communities in Australia are extremely diverse, in relation to everything from ethnicity, to language, religion, and educational levels, etc. However, public discourse continues to often cast them as an homogeneous group, and in terms that do not recognise the many positive contributions they make to Australian society. Indeed, scholars have begun to address the complexity of how Africans in Australia are described by others and themselves. In her work with entrants from southern Sudan, Phillips (2011) writes how the use of the term ‘African-Australia’ acts to Other and erase the multifariousness nature of African communities in Australia. Fozdar, Quicke, and Mickler (2022) note that Africans in Australia continue to be referred to as a ‘diaspora’ in the singular, and they ask whether and in what ways they actually constitute a diaspora? These authors note the complexity of internal diversity and simultaneous pan-African consciousness (largely resulting from forces of exclusion), as well as their varied contributions to Australia and to their countries of origin, and the complexities of identity formation. They conclude that greater research is required to understand the multifaceted transnational contributions of African-background peoples in Australia (Fozdar, Quicke, and Mickler 2022). Hiruy and Hutton (2020) also problematise the notion that Africans in Australia may constitute a single community. Instead, they invoke the concept of the ‘New African Diaspora’ (NAD), which refers to all kinds of post-colonial emigration from the African continent (and as such, is sensitive to cultural and social diversity), yet which may be held together by a collective sense of common ‘African-ness’. This is a shared, albeit dynamic, transnational identity based upon shared aspirations and concerns.

To be African-born or of African-heritage in Australia is to exist in a complicated matrix of success and struggle. Australia may offer relative safety, stability and opportunity that is not always available in people’s country of origin. However, relocation is always a challenging process, and multidimensional in character, and for people of refugee background, further complicated by histories of displacement and trauma. For all black African-Australians, these difficulties may be further compounded by the their racial difference (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo 2017).

For Africans who have arrived on professional or educational immigration ‘pathways’, they may often start their migration journeys from a position of relative privilege. However, as Gatwiri, Mwanri, and McPherson (2021) have showed, this cohort may still experience significant challenges upon arrival in Australia. These may include systemic barriers to integration, loss of community and kin supports, and downward mobility. However, it is racism that often emerges as the most significant challenge faced, especially in relation to labour market interactions (Kalemba 2021). These individuals are often on the receiving end of negative assumptions made by potential employers about their competency and capacity (Udah, Singh, and Chamberlain 2019), and they experience racial microaggressions in the workplace (Gatwiri 2021). As this article will demonstrate, it is in this context that Hillsong’s adoption of a multicultural model that privileges ethnicity as a way of establishing smaller communities within an impersonal megachurch, becomes especially appealing, and enables some African-Australians, at least, to ‘feel at home’.

Hillsong as a global church

Established in Sydney, Australia, in 1983, in the past two decades Hillsong has become a global religious phenomenon (Goh 2008; Klaver 2021; Riches and Wagner 2017; Rocha 2017, 2020, 2021; Wagner 2020). Until the late 2020, when sex and money scandals engulfed the church in the US and Australia, Hillsong had American celebrities among its followers. Although they have left the church, the music of its award-winning worship bands is still sung weekly by an estimated 50 million people in 60 languages and many of its pastors are celebrities in their own right. Hillsong has an enormous presence on social media with 3 million Instagram followers, while its worship band Hillsong United has 4.3 million YouTube subscribers. This does not include the millions of followers on every digital platform for its other bands, celebrity pastors, and global campuses located in most global cities (Sassen 2005) – from New York City to London to Tokyo. Its worship bands go on global tours and pastors travel locally and globally to preach at other campuses and as guests at other churches.

Hillsong can be categorised as a ‘seeker church’. According to Sargeant (2000, 2), seeker churches ‘tailor their programs and services to attract people who are not church attenders’. Thus, they adopt secular methods of entertainment and marketing. Their services are informal and exciting (featuring live bands, professional lighting and sound, large screens), and focus on people’s everyday lives with messages on practical matters. There is also no public display of glossolalia, exorcism, and explicit references to spiritual battle, Satan, hell or sin. Rather, they focus on God’s love and acceptance of everyone no matter how ‘broken’ they are. At Hillsong, the motto ‘Come as you are’ encapsulates this openness.

Sargeant (2000, 19) has identified their congregation as typically middle class, white and university educated, although some congregants may be people of colour, or working class. Hillsong and its global campuses appeal to globally mobile professionals, creatives and international students (Porter 2017; Rocha 2017, 2020). Furthermore, these churches have excellent facilities that look more like the corporate buildings where many in the congregation work. At Hillsong, as in many other megachurches, the reception area contains a front desk, a café and a shop. Sargent (2020, 31) summarised seeker churches with these words:

[They] present a more plausible model of Christianity – a model that fits with pervasive cultural understandings about choice, individualism, autonomy, the importance of the self, therapeutic sensibilities and an anti-institutional inclination common today.

It is this model that has made Hillsong successful among the aspirational middle classes globally, including African migrants in Australia. Our respondents elaborated on several of the characteristics mentioned above to explain why they chose Hillsong. We now turn to the ways in which they reflected on how the megachurch fit their new lives in Australia.

Business networking at Hillsong

Seeker churches like Hillsong grow through a process of encroaching in the secular domain and ‘enclaving’ it (Coleman and Chattoo 2019). One of the secular areas they have appropriated is the world of business through a focus on leadership, excellence, marketing and success. Hillsong offers courses in finance and leadership, many age- and gender-appropriate programmes and meetings, and small groups that meet fortnightly at someone’s home called ‘connect groups’. These groups can be organised around a continent or country of origin, a suburb, or for businesspeople to network. They offer a more intimate environment and community-building opportunities that the large services with thousands of people are not able to do. Thus, they are invaluable for migrants.

Take, for instance, Daniel and his family. While living in Uganda, Daniel worked for KPMG, and his wife was a nurse. The family received their skilled visas to Australia in 2015, and in that same year travelled to Sydney and Melbourne spending four weeks in each city to choose where they would settle. They opted for Sydney, where they arrived in 2017, because of better chances of finding a job. According to Daniel, they had a good life in Uganda, but he wanted to give his children better opportunities so that they would become ‘competitive’ in ‘the west’.

As a businessman, all his choices pre- and post-migration were aimed at improving his family’s chances of prosperity and success, and therefore recovering what he saw as his ‘middle-class status’ in Uganda. For instance, when they first arrived, they went to live in a lower socio-economic suburb in Western Sydney because he knew someone from Uganda there. Once there, he realised it was ‘socially unsafe’ for his kids because of the large number of jobless people, and drug addicts. He then moved his family to the northwest of the city where his colleagues from work lived. He told us:

What drove us more significantly was the fact that there are good schools focused on middle-class families. It is a safe place to be. We looked at the demographics, generally young families, mostly migrant families, a good mix of guys from the UK, from South Africa.

It was also close to Hillsong, which was a bonus. He disapproves of African migrants in Australia joining African churches because it ‘keeps them in a bubble’. For Daniel, this is an obstacle to ‘be able to make meaningful networks, which can serve you better ahead in life’. He told us he wants to help all Africans to succeed so that Australians realise that not all Africans are poor, uneducated and/or ‘troublemakers’. He is keen for Australians to be aware not only of the diversity of cultures in Africa, but also that there are class differences in the African diaspora in Australia. Daniel told a story of how during a school time discussion of refugees who had come to Australia via boat, the teacher singled out his child as an example of such refugees. Having come to Australia on a skilled visa, Daniel was outraged at this incident because it homogenised all Africans under a singular story of the traumatised refugee. It was the confidence that came with his relatively higher status that allowed Daniel to challenge this, with the school principal and the teacher apologising to his kid during class time. He noted: ‘Every time you’re talking about Africa, you’re talking about refugees … . Some of us are actually skilled migrants’. This is clear when Daniel strives to distinguish himself from other Africans who may be poor, uneducated, ‘troublemakers’ or ‘just refugees’. Here race, social class and migrant status all play a part in establishing social distinction.

Daniel and his family tried a few churches before settling on Hillsong. Once again, engaging in social distinction, he placed himself apart from the lower socio-economic churches that may incorporate ‘magic’, when he told us, ‘I’m not a kind of a guy who is going to a church because I believe I’m going to get a miracle’.² He was pleased that Hillsong was pragmatic and supported him in finding a job:

The pastor is like, ‘I’ll try to help you. What’s your profession?’ And then he connects me to a CFO of Hillsong church to see if there are any job opportunities. [He said] ‘Right now, we don’t have anything at church, but I’m going to talk to a couple of financial guys in my network to see what happens’. There was proactiveness, coffees, lunches, teas.

Equally important were the opportunities to network and meet ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’ people:

When I went to Hillsong church, I got two things. I found other Ugandans who have become my friends. I also connected with non-Ugandans… Through connect groups, I’ve made relevant friends who have been useful. I attend regular business connect meetings … . It’s beyond just the spiritual battle – you’re also meeting people.

Thus, Hillsong offered a place where he could be among Ugandans and connect to his homeland as members of migrant churches do, and at the same time make friends with non-Ugandans, particularly businesspeople, who could support him in the settlement process and in his project of upward mobility. The same is true for his wife, who joined the ‘sisterhood’ meetings (i.e. a women’s group), and his children, who go to the kids’ groups activities.

Hillsong as fellowship

Many of our respondents told us that one of the reasons that they joined Hillsong was that it made their children excited to go to church. Growing up in Australia, their children felt that services at African diasporic churches were boring. They did not understand the language spoken, or the songs and rituals that were so significant for their parents. As the children resisted going to church, the parents became worried that they would ‘lose their way’ and fall into lifestyles involving alcohol and drugs. In contrast to African diasporic churches, Hillsong’s services were perceived as exciting and fun, with a band that plays world-famous Hillsong music, and pastors who preach informally and deal with practical issues. They were also devoid of the more ‘challenging’ (for Catholic and Anglican parents) Pentecostal traits, such as glossolalia and exorcism. It also pleased them that the megachurch was a ‘total social institution’ (Wade 2016) and provided programmes for the whole family where they could make friends outside the African diaspora communities. All these features made them think of Hillsong as a ‘fellowship’, a neutral place where they could all worship no matter what kind of Christianity they had been exposed to growing up.

A South Sudanese couple who has four children are a good example of this. Peter and Martha came to Australia in 2004 as refugees because Peter, who had a degree in environmental science, had been working for an international company of which the government was suspicious. Martha was also university educated, having majored in psychology and early childhood education. Being refugees and university educated, the case of Peter and Martha shows that Daniel’s assumption that refugees depended on government assistance, and did not therefore contribute to Australian society, is flawed.

Peter is Anglican, Martha is Catholic. When they got married they had agreed that they would not have conflicts about their denominational differences, and that they would baptise half of their children into each church. Once they were settled in Australia, they first went to a Sudanese Anglican church on Sundays, although Martha would go a Catholic church before the Anglican service. Peter praised the Sudanese Anglican church but explained that for the new generation who grew up in Australia, it posed a problem: ‘To worship in your own language is fantastic. Church is something that connects you with your own country. The traditional songs make that connection continue. But for the younger generation it is different’. He went on to explain how that was an issue for his children:

[Hillsong] accommodates to all of us. Our teenagers love it. It’s more Pentecostal-oriented. It is just like a fellowship. Neither Catholic nor Protestant. For the kids, it is more accommodating for them compared with traditional churches [which] are more boring [and don’t] help the younger generation because their teaching is very traditional, and they don’t learn much. [At Hillsong] the worship is more targeted, more focused on key messages. Some of our churches don’t have straightforward messages. We need churches that address our contemporary type of life. Traditional churches don’t.

For him, as a local church, Hillsong is much more suitable to his children’s new lives in Australia. Martha smiled broadly when she told us what happened when they first went to Hillsong, on Good Friday:

The children had never been in that kind of environment. My son accepted God on the same day! By the time the lights were on, I found him in tears. I was like: ‘Oh, okay, now this is home. This is church’. Now the children are the ones who say: ‘Let’s go to church’.

When the family was taken to a welcoming lunch on that first day, she asked other congregants whether the church was Anglican. They replied simply: ‘We’re Christian’. That was when she felt that all of her family could become part of the congregation. Martha then joined Sisterhood, Hillsong women’s programme, and the children joined Hillsong Kids. Peter is happy that he made ‘so many friends who [we]re connecting me with my workplace. My connections at the church have expanded outside [the Sudanese community], which for me is very important because without connections here in Australia you don’t go anywhere’. Many others told us similar stories. For them, the children’s excitement about going to church, the preaching on contemporary issues, the opportunity to meet people outside the migrant community, and the neutrality of the church, were all significant factors which had made them feel that Hillsong was ‘home’, as Martha put it.

Hillsong as a refuge in white Australia

Since arriving in Australia all of our respondents have experienced some form of racial discrimination in their everyday lives. They are surprised and outraged that their perceived middle-class status does not shield them from racism. Racism was a common discussion point across all of our interviews. Following the dismantling of the last vestiges of the notorious ‘White Australia policy’ – actually a body of policies that restricted non-European immigration into the country – by the Whitlam Government in 1973, Australia has been officially regarded as a ‘multicultural’ society. However, as academic commentators have long pointed out, successive versions of Australian multicultural policy continued to be racially inflected, in that they continued to construct Anglo-Australians as the legitimate custodians of the country’s social, economic, educational, legal, and political structures that govern everyday life, whilst relegating culture of racialised migrants to folklore (Castles et al. 1990). In what remains the seminal anthropological critique of Australian multiculturalism, Hage (1998) goes further, by analysing the micro-politics of how some working-class ‘Anglo-Australians’ obtain and enforce power over ‘third-world looking people’. He exposes the discourse that is premised on positioning white nationalists as the legitimate managers of the nation. For him (1998, 174), this nationalist discourse is ‘not necessarily about excluding/destroying otherness but about regulating the modality of its inclusion’. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and symbolic capital and fields of power, Hage argues that those who ‘naturally’ belong to the nation are able to an exercise more governmentality than ‘non-Anglos’. Thus, political power remains inherently racist, in that: white Australians’ aspirations and ideals become the nations’ aspirations and ideals, because they are supported by public institutions and public discourse. A more recent example of the way these logics may become manifest in practice is provided by the so-called ‘African gangs’ affair, which generated a media-fuelled ‘moral panic’ in Melbourne in 2016 (Benier, Wickes, and Moran 2021). Incidents such as this, and other episodes of anti-African sentiment, have led Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo (2017, 2) to argue that in Australia, ‘black embodiment imposes a burden that those with black phenotype cannot escape’.

Afiya’s story illustrates how racism has affected her life in Australia, and how she felt that Hillsong provides a haven from this abuse. Afiya is a Ugandan professional who is married to a white Australian. The family attends their local Hillsong church. She told us that when she was making the decision to move to Australia, she thought that it would be easy to become part of the community given it was a ‘multicultural society’. This turned out not to be the case: ‘I thought Australia was very multicultural, but this is the place where I think a lot about being black, like blackness. All of a sudden, I have to think about the fact that I’m black’.

In Australia, Afiya feels that she is being constantly judged on the colour of her skin. She gave an example of how, whenever she is in a store without her (white) husband, she is followed by staff who are monitoring her for theft. Afiya explained that she also feels dismissed by Australians ‘as just another immigrant coming to live on our taxpayer’s money’. This frustration at being viewed as merely passive receivers of Australia’s good grace and social security rather than as active contributors to Australia’s economic prosperity was articulated by most of those we spoke to, as we demonstrated in Daniel’s story above. In Afiya’s case, it is also her mixed-marriage to a white man that draws racists’ attention, and her reasons for being in a relationship with an Anglo-Australian are treated with suspicion:

All those misconceptions! When they see me with my husband, you can already tell people are thinking that, ‘Oh, there is a black woman with a white man. She probably got married to him just for citizenship’. It’s very draining sometimes.

Even her husband’s family judged her:

They thought, ‘Oh, here comes someone who wants to use our son to probably get citizenship’. So, when I got married to my husband, I told him, ‘I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure I do not get my visa through a partner visa’. And I was so determined. I must show them that I’m not in this just for citizenship. I love my country, and had it not been for love, I would have [gone] back home.

Afiya’s experiences in Australian society illustrate how racialised people may continue to occupy a precarious position in contemporary Australia. However, she tells us that she has never encountered discrimination at Hillsong. This, she reasoned, ‘was because people [at Hillsong] have this value system of God that says we are all one and we are made equal in God’s image’, that ‘at church they are all brothers and sisters’. According to her, their Christian identity and shared humanity is what is emphasised in the church not her race. Importantly too for Afiya, Hillsong also provides the sense of family that she is missing being so far away from her own in Uganda, and given her in-laws have not accepted her: ‘Even when I haven’t felt connected to my husband’s family, knowing that I’ve got this family at church is something to really to hold onto’.

Mukisa, another professional African man, echoed Afiya’s sentiment and emphasised that, for him, Hillsong was a good community to start life in Australia. This was particularly so for his children:

In Africa, we have issues of tribalism. Here, we have issues of racism and profiling of individuals and certain groups of people, so you need to make sure that you prepare kids for such in life. Generally, church is a safe environment for you to start up life. The kids haven’t felt any racism from other kids in church … We joined Hillsong… and, for us, that was an equaliser because you come in, you’re welcome, you are loved, you’re checked in on.

As we mentioned before, the megachurch has a strong focus on ‘love’. At each service teams of volunteers are set to welcome newcomers. Some will carry ‘Welcome home’ signs at the carpark; others will be at the reception to greet people arriving by saying ‘Welcome to Church’; and after the service some will be giving away bibles styled as glossy magazines or offering newcomers coffee and a chat as we saw in the vignette that opened this article. During the week, volunteers will call newcomers to see how they are doing, and to offer assistance. For migrants, such warm welcome makes a world of difference, particularly when they face a hostile context outside church. Indeed, for our respondents, Hillsong’s motto ‘Welcome home’ felt like more than lip service. It made them feel a part of the Hillsong’s (global) family. In addition, connect groups for Africans also convey this sense of family. For instance, Lorraine, a Rwandan medical doctor and connect group leader, hosts regular group get-togethers at her home, and personally welcomes new African congregants at church. During the most severe periods of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in Sydney, she would send biblical messages of encouragement and check in to see if their material needs were being met.

The challenges of home

However, against these positive perceptions and experiences, our respondents nevertheless experienced challenges with the ‘Hillsong style’. For example, for many of them, Hillsong’s relaxed approach to dress and alcohol consumption was somewhat of a church ‘culture shock’. In other words, in order to make Hillsong home, they need to adapt to its more typically Anglo-dominant Australian practices and attitudes. Lorraine told us that many newcomers to her African connect group experience these things as a challenge and feel that they then had to teach the megachurch itself how to be more culturally competent. She recalled her surprised at alcohol being offered at the very first Christmas party she attended:

When we got there, the tables were full of beers and wine. We would see all those people who we praise [with] together at church. And everyone had a glass or a bottle of alcohol. We got shocked.

She told us how in Rwanda, drinking alcohol is generally regarded as sinful and ‘no one will drink if he calls himself a Godly person’. Lorraine noted that, although she was at that Christmas party for six hours and people were drinking alcohol, no one got drunk. She herself still does not drink alcohol. Nevertheless, this made her question whether she had been deceived by her previous religious community, and that drinking the occasional beer does not prevent someone from also being a person of faith.

Church dress codes were another challenge for our respondents. Anglo-Australian society is often very informal regarding dress codes, and reflecting this, congregants at Hillsong are encouraged to ‘come as you are’. In the hot and humid Sydney summers this often means shorts and sandals. Our interlocutors told us repeatedly that this is generally not the case in Africa, where people may typically dress up to go to church, and at which a particular style of personal presentation is expected. Kwesi, a Ghanaian PhD candidate studying in Australia, explained how ‘dressing matters in Ghanaian churches … you have to look the part’. For men, this means good quality suits, ties and matching boots, and a particular kind of haircut. He explained that this was about appearing ‘decent in front of God’. But he acknowledged that the investment in ‘Sunday dress’ can put a lot of stress on people’s budgets. Kwesi has embraced the more relaxed approach to church dress in Australia. For Lorraine the ‘chilled’ dress at Hillsong was a little strange to start with, but she now finds that people are more genuine because ‘they are being themselves’.

Another issue raised by one of our respondents was that of not being able to easily fulfil leadership positions at Hillsong because she was time poor. Natukunda, a Ugandan academic, has been involved in church leadership since she was a child, and as a result was especially frustrated by this:

With Hillsong church, you don’t just lead things, especially if you haven’t been through Hillsong College … so you’ll have to have done some of the training with Hillsong church, which I still haven’t got the opportunity to do.

She would have liked to be part of the leadership but given her busy work life she couldn’t commit to the training required to take up these roles. Significantly, for Natukunda, Hillsong’s dependence on volunteers’ time for its day-to-day functioning, and its focus on producing high quality worship and pastoral services, were a greater barrier to her progression in the church, than was her ethnic background (in a context in which Hillsong has many ethnically-diverse pastors and worship leaders. Indeed, the founder’s daughter is married to a Pasifika pastor).

Weng et al. (2022) note that faith communities in Australia can both actively support those experiencing systemic racism, but also perpetuate it either overtly or through cultural incompetency. Riches and Douglas (2021) consider how congregants who are racialised experience worship within Hillsong church. They found that although these congregants perceived the church to be ‘white’, they formed strategies to educate and change the church they loved. We see this education taking place among our respondents as well. For example, Nhial, the mother of two children, needed to address two issues with a leader of the children’s ministry. The first was the use of the word ‘tribe’ to allocate groupings to the children. She explained that for the South Sudanese who may have experienced ethnic tensions and violence, to be allocated into a ‘tribe’ is a serious business, ‘That’s something I spoke about to Hillsong church already. … a South Sudanese child there will feel it’s real. Because we have tribal wars back home’. Nhial also does not wish for her children to be continuously grouped with only other African children. It is important to Nhial and her husband that their children are part of a multicultural community, so that their children can learn from children of other nationalities. For them, this ran counter to Hillsong’s promise to provide an opportunity for children to explore what it means to live in a multicultural Australia, in a safe environment. Thus, in making Hillsong home they had to challenge the church’s local understanding of multiculturalism to fulfil their cosmopolitan aspirationalism while assimilating into White Australian norms.

Conclusion

In this article, we have focussed on the appeal of Pc/C to African migrants in Australia who perceived themselves to be ‘middle-class’. We chose this cohort to expand the usual focus on African asylum seekers, refugees, and poor migrants, in global Pc/C studies, and to contribute to ongoing scholarly attempts to disaggregate ‘African-Australians’ as a singular cultural and social category. We were interested in whether, and in what ways, these respondents’ perceptions of their class status, and their commitment to an (imagined) cosmopolitanism, shaped their choice of church affiliation in Australia. As we demonstrated, their choice of church can be understood as primarily strategic and motivated by a desire for ‘class recovery’, and by even ‘class mobility’ in Australia. In this regard, Hillsong represented the perfect (imagined) site for enacting this strategy.

First, this megachurch provided a setting to engage with other professionals (be they from Australia or elsewhere) and thus an opportunity to make appropriate new friends, and potential work contacts. Second, Hillsong’s rhetorical emphasis upon success, leadership and contemporary issues attracted aspirational migrants, while its eschewing of Pentecostal features, such as glossolalia during services, allowed for families to feel welcomed (even if they did not previously identify as Pentecostal). Many of our respondents spoke of the church as a fellowship. Equally important was parents’ realisation that their children were keen to go to church once they joined Hillsong. The church’s entertaining style, with its services that resemble clubbing, and the special programmes for kids of different ages reassured parents that their children would not ‘fall in with the wrong crowd’. The lack of racism, such as they encountered during their daily lives in Australia, was another important aspect for their choice of church.

Notably, Hillsong was already known to many of them in their home countries. The global success of its worship bands and celebrity pastors made them feel that they were part of a much bigger global movement and helped nurture and develop their sense of cosmopolitanism. Certainly, there were instances of friction – the consumption of alcohol, the informality in dress, difficulty in reaching leadership positions, and their slotting in discreet ethnic communities and even tribes. While they adapted to most of these issues as part of their new lives in the new country, they pushed back against the latter two because they perceived them as significant obstacles to their aspiration to class mobility and integration. Here again we see strategies of class recovery and aspirationalism.

Ethical statement

WSU Human Research Ethics Committee approved research number RH13639.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP190102911].

Notes

1. This literature builds upon an earlier generation of scholarship on Black Churches in the Global North which began with such seminal contributions as Malcolm Calley’s God’s People: West Indian Pentecostal Sects in England (Calley 1965), and Clifford Hill’s Black Churches: West Indian and African Sects in Britain (Hill 1971).

2. Many churches that serve African communities engage in dramatic displays of spiritual warfare and gifts of the Holy Spirit such as miraculous healing and glossolalia (Maguire and Murphy 2016; Openshaw 2020, 2021).