Watch These Megachurch Pastors Praise Each Other in a Huge Christian Circle Jerk

I didn’t think I’d watch this whole 45-minute video, but after the first few minutes, I was hooked.

It’s all about “celebrity super pastors” — the circle of evangelical megachurch preachers who sit on each other’s boards, speak at each other’s churches, promote each other’s books, and more or less fellate each other at every opportunity. You can watch them doing it for the first seven minutes before you find out what’s actually happening.

It’s never just a typical introduction, kindly hyping up the speaker. It’s more like a mind-control trick where they each tell the congregation that they’re beyond lucky to be part of this church, implying that leaving it would deprive them of something incredible.

As Steven Kozar shows in the video, they use the same language, same kind of rhetoric, even the same sometimes-creepy descriptions of each other’s wives. The congregations treat them like rock stars. As Kozar asks, “Who is being worshipped?”

And then, of course, some of those pastors eventually get caught in scandals of their own making.

Creepy cult-y stuff all around.