(Scene from Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul)

Last August, the filmmaking sister duo Adamma and Adanne Ebo adapted their acclaimed short film into their first feature-length movie, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. The film is produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, a company known for creating the hottest recent horror movies like Get Out, Candyman, and Nope. Unlike those films, Honk for Jesus is a scathing satire set in the world of Atlanta’s Black megachurches. But Honk for Jesus still elicits its fair share of fear, shock, and disgust as it explores the dark underbelly of megachurch culture.

In the film, the fictional Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs and First Lady Trinitie Childs (played by Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall) attempt to restore their congregation and their reputation following a public scandal. A year before the film’s starting point, Lee-Curtis was accused of sexually abusing poor, underaged male members of Wander to Greater Paths Baptist Church.

The scandal, and Lee-Curtis’s character generally, draw inspiration from the real-life figure of Bishop Eddie Long, the former pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. Like Long, in the film Lee-Curtis and his marriage became the object of national news and public scrutiny in the wake of sexual abuse accusations. Unlike its real-life equivalent, Lee-Curtis’s scandal emptied his five-thousand seat sanctuary to only five people.

Honk for Jesus begins as Lee-Curtis and Trinitie prepare to “reopen” the church. The couple enlists a documentary film crew to record what Trinitie hopes will be a carefully crafted narrative about their resurgence and not, as she suspects, a “mockumentary” that pries into Lee-Curtis’s predatory relationships or their fragile marriage. Lee-Curtis is less credulous. Convinced that the local community is clamoring for his return, and that the documentary will help jumpstart their comeback, he is ready to make a spectacle of himself (and Trinitie). His oblivious egotism and shenanigans—striking cheesy poses in front of the camera, stripping himself nearly naked to be “rebaptized,” and making his wife gospel mime on the side of the road—furnish the film’s awkward comedy.

But despite Lee-Curtis’s enthusiasm and Trinitie’s artificial cheerfulness, the Childses’ “resurrection” faces fresh challenges. Nearby, a rival church run by their former mentees threatens to upstage them. And Lee-Curtis’s scandal and ongoing legal settlements hover over them. His misdeeds continue to follow them, their marriage, and their ministry.

In real-life, megachurch pastors accused of infidelity or sexual misconduct have often maintained their congregations or recouped their images, but in Honk for Jesus, the Childses’ redemption narrative comes with a reckoning.

Honk for Jesus premiered to mixed reviews among clergy and churchgoers. Some viewers enjoyed the film’s commentary on gender and sexual politics in the church, and its critical, but comedic, take on prosperity gospel Christianity, the idea that wealth is a marker of divine favor and that poverty signals spiritual failure. Others argued that it portrays the Black Church in a negative light. Detractors contend that by satirizing the worst aspects of megachurches, the film draws attention away from the good qualities of small and mid-sized Black churches that belong to historically Black protestant denominations, often called “the Black Church.” Black megachurches, on the other hand, are large (over 2,000 members), independent congregations known more for their famed pastors than for their denominational affiliation. Critics of Honk for Jesus note that most Black churches are not megachurches, and that, unlike Lee-Curtis, the majority of Black pastors cannot afford to wear Prada or drive a Bugatti.

The statistics appear to bear out this narrative. In a recent poll by Pew Research Center, 47 percent of Black respondents said they attend churches where the average Sunday crowd is between 51 and 250 people. Almost a third of those polled (32 percent) said less than fifty people attend worship services at their church.

(Image source: David Goldman for the Associated Press)

Church finances are harder to survey, but a study based on a Gallup poll of Black clergy and lay leaders determined that the average annual church income from tithing was between $55,000 and $74,999. By comparison, a New Yorker article on World Changers Church, the Black megachurch pastored by Creflo Dollar, reported that the church had a budget of $80 million, a figure that exceeds the operating budgets of entire mainline Black denominations.

The numerical and financial disparity between megachurches and the average Black congregation suggests that Honk for Jesus’s Wander to Greater Paths Baptist Church reflects an image far removed from the experiences of most Black Christians. It is easy to assume, then, that the film’s commentary does not apply to most Black churches.

However, such an assumption dismisses megachurches’ influence. In an era of declining church attendance among millennial and Gen-Z worshippers, mainline denominations often use megachurches as the model for church growth and “resurrection.” Small and midsize Black churches increasingly take their aesthetic cues from megachurches on matters including worship style, branding, and how the congregational facilities should look. When COVID-19 forced churches to close their sanctuaries, megachurches were ahead of the curve. They already had systems in place for online worship and digital programming. If numbers and money constitute success, it is not surprising that megachurches’ accomplishments have others seeking to follow their lead and reproduce their strategies.

On the one hand, Honk for Jesus parodies the kind of success megachurches represent and their obvious identification with capitalism. Prosperity gospel is the beginning and end of Lee-Curtis’s sermons. He first appears on the screen preaching, “God favors those who favor him.” In one scene, he and Trinitie provide a tour of their walk-in closet filled with color-coded, designer clothes only for Lee-Curtis to declare that he must wear something “completely new” for the church’s reopening. Later, Trinitie tries on a hat with a $2,500 price tag and poses among their collection of luxury cars. These satirical visions of excess might be funny were they not so real. Instead, they call to mind unsettling memories of lavish gifts pastors have given their spouses, or church donations furnishing private jets.

But Honk for Jesus is also about the desire and aspiration for something beyond money. The Childses do not seek to recapture wealth. (They still appear to have plenty of it after years of accumulation.) What they want is to regain power. Their quest is a reminder that power is not contingent on wealth alone. It is an arrangement of factors and social positions that maximize a person’s authority and their ability to assert control over others. As ethicist Miranda Fricker puts it, power is “the socially-situated capacity to control others’ actions.”

In Honk for Jesus, Trinitie and Lee-Curtis are in pursuit of the religious and social dynamics that afford them control, privilege, and validation. When Lee-Curtis refers to himself as “the prophet with the beautiful wife and the gorgeous Bugatti,” he identifies four interrelated sources of power: class, gender, sexuality, and religion. As a “prophet” and pastor, he has the ability to leverage the Bible to influence others’ beliefs, behaviors, and morality, even if in harmful ways. His wealth and celebrity give him a platform to exert spiritual and material sway over his congregation, the public, and his victims. And his presumed heterosexuality and the image of his “good Christian marriage” augment his authority to wield religion as a weapon, especially against queer people. Lee-Curtis’s own attraction to men is as much the cause of the Childses’ fall from grace as his predation on poor young men, reflecting how an abuser’s perceived loss of power through sexual identity often commands more attention than the abuse of power itself.

These elements of power converge in a recording of Lee-Curtis standing at the pulpit to condemn the “homosexual agenda.” With Trinitie seated supportively behind him, he decries same-sex love as an attack on “the Word of God” and on the sanctity of his own heterosexual marriage. “It is man, and woman, and marriage,” Lee-Curtis proclaims from behind his sacred desk. “That is the only way to prosperity, and that is the only way into the kingdom of God,” he continues. The sermon elicits smiling applause from his wife and cries of “speak on it, pastor!” from the congregation, as the camera pans to a packed sanctuary.

The juxtaposition of this flashback and the film’s present highlights the discrepancy between Lee-Curtis’s words and his conduct, as well as how far he has fallen. Later in the movie, Lee-Curtis practices his sermon for the church’s grand reopening in front an empty sanctuary with only Trinitie in attendance. “God doesn’t make perfect men,” he offers, “But he can and does make great men.” When his sermon crescendos to its conclusion, Lee-Curtis is tearful and perhaps genuine for the first time in the film, but he is not contrite. There is no crowd to affirm his “greatness,” only ghostly silence. This time, Trinitie sits unimpressed with her hands folded. “That just doesn’t ring” she says. “See, you don’t quite acknowledge…” Her sentence trails off momentarily before she dismisses the sermon as “dry excuses.”

(Scene from Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul)

The scene is the closest Trinitie comes to holding Lee-Curtis accountable. For once, she is not playing the stereotyped role of the smiling First Lady who sits quietly, supportively, and even unquestioningly behind her husband. Now she is facing him, aligning herself with the unconvinced phantom audience that wants an explanation for Lee-Curtis’s harm. Trinitie occupies these dual positions throughout the film: she is both a victim of Lee-Curtis’s infidelity and misogyny, and a beneficiary of his power. Trinitie best captures the source of her and her husband’s authority when she summarizes their joint mission: “We need peace so that you can get back in that pulpit and preaching—and get me back on that stage.” As a first lady, Trinitie’s proximity to Lee-Curtis and her performance of the role of Christian woman is the way she accesses privilege. Trinitie portrays what scholar Tamura Lomax calls the archetype of the “Black woman of virtue,” whose merit is based on her sexual morality and her unimpeachable loyalty to Christianity and Black men. In exchange, she receives privilege and stardom in what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls the counterpublic of the Black Church—a social sphere where Black women can exert levels of influence that mainstream, white society does not afford them. Yet, Trinitie’s power is more precarious than her husband’s. As a “Christian woman,” her personal success depends on the success of her marriage—even if it is achieved at the expense of her own integrity, emotional fulfillment, and sexual satisfaction.

Megachurch pastors like Lee-Curtis may have uniquely “perfected” these classed, gendered, and sexualized configurations of religious power, but the configuration itself is not restricted to megachurches alone. Part of megachurches’ power, then, is the pressure they exert on other congregations that feel compelled to compete on the same terms without the same resources. The megachurch rubric informs churches’ increasing shift toward corporate-based financial, organizational, and leadership models. It is behind the rising industry of church consulting and Christian content marketing that views religion as a product for consumption and the pulpit, in Trinitie’s words, as a “stage.” And it reinforces the notion of the male celebrity pastor and his virtuous wife as both a moral good and a commercially profitable image.

The megachurch as the model for all twenty-first century Black churches plays out in Honk for Jesus through Keon and Shakura Sumpter, the Childses’ former mentees and co-pastors of Heaven’s House—a rival church that has grown in the aftermath of the Childses’ downfall. Heaven’s House is a midsized congregation with megachurch aspirations. The Sumpters do not question the Childses’ former power or hold them accountable for their abuse. Instead, they have seized the moment of the Childses’ demise to perpetuate and perfect the same formula for “success.” They want to replace Lee-Curtis and Trinitie as the premier pastor-first lady power couple so they can claim the Childses’ lost social and religious capital. Both couples think of the Atlanta church scene as a competitive marketplace with limited souls to go around.

The Sumpters are younger, and they have rebranded the roles of pastor and first lady into a co-pastor team, but they are not actually any different from the Childses. At best, the presumed feminism of their co-pastoral model is a marketing strategy that communicates the dominant cisgender, heterosexual, Christian norms with an egalitarian twist. At worst, it positions Shakura Sumpter, alongside her husband, to weaponize the same violent theology that Lee-Curtis espoused.

The film hints that what feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins calls the matrix of domination—the intersecting structures of class, gender, sexuality, and, in this case, religion—will replicate itself in the Sumpters just as it did in the Childses. When the couples meet in the marital counseling office at Heaven’s House to discuss their competing church openings, they appear as mirror images. In the Sumpters, the Childses face their younger selves and the symbol of their own irrelevance. Opposite them, the Sumpters are staring down the barrel of their own future, scandals included. The scene is a subtle, but haunting, reflection on the aspirational relationship between megachurches and their mid-sized counterparts.

Honk for Jesus is a cautionary tale about the consequences of the grasp for power in religious communities. As long as megachurches and their leaders are emblematic of power and “success” in ministry, then the values that create them and the desire to replicate them will stain broader church cultures. Honk for Jesus invites Christians to look more closely at those barometers of success, the desires they produce, and the price people pay for them. It questions the kind of religious power that dominates and exploits others while calling it, as Lee-Curtis does, “divine favor.” When such power is the object, victims of church abuse will continue to proliferate in the wake of the church’s ambitions. Without questioning the foundations of authority and the quest for power in religious institutions, figures like Lee-Curtis and Trinitie will only reproduce themselves, their harm, and their own demises.

Honk for Jesus may be a parody, but there is plenty of horror behind the laughs.

Ari Colston is a Ph.D. student in Religion at Princeton University where she studies African American religion, law, and Black geographies. Ari has written for Canopy Forum and Afropunk.