Today John Campbell launches Under His Command, a five-part TVNZ+ investigation into Destiny Church and the women who live in its shadows.
For more than 25 years Destiny Church and its controversial leader Brian Tamaki have occupied a small, if loud, fundamentalist corner of New Zealand’s religious culture.
But recently, the church has made fresh headlines due to its active stance against the LGBTQI community, with members of its Man Up division (and other Destiny offshoots) targeting rainbow events and most notably storming the Drag Story Hour at a West Auckland public library in February, resulting in injuries to the public and seven Destiny arrests.
Officially, Man Up professes anti-violence, claiming to “strengthen men to become better fathers, husbands and leaders in their home and community”. But an unexpected phone call to John Campbell in February revealed that some members’ aggression and fear tactics aren’t limited to public displays.
That phone call led to Campbell taking a deep dive into the shadows behind Destiny, a church with nine registered charities, all eligible for tax exemptions on their income. Through watching hours and hours of Tamaki’s sermons and conducting more than 20 interviews with current or former members of Destiny, he discovered a culture of at best antiquated patriarchy and at worst violence and coercion.
“In over three decades of journalism, I’ve never talked to so many people as afraid as the women I encountered in this investigation,” he says.
Today John Campbell launches Under His Command, a five-part investigation into Destiny, screening on TVNZ+. He talks to Emily Simpson.
ES: John, what sparked your interest in Destiny right now?
JC: Sometime in February, two people came to me and said, “We’re dealing with a whole lot of Destiny Church people, and some of them are in a really bad way.”
Years ago Campbell Live did quite a lot of stuff on Destiny (Brian Tamaki has accused me of being obsessed with him) but I hadn’t done much on them recently and hadn’t really been thinking about them. The Campbell Live stuff was more about the notion that a business was being built around a relatively low-income congregation. But as people have pointed out, that ain’t unique to Destiny.
Then these people said to me, “There is so much pain and hurt” and I thought, what are you talking about? I spoke to one of them, in particular, who, like many of those we spoke to, wanted to remain anonymous. After a couple of conversations, I felt like I really needed to sit down with this person. So I travelled out of Auckland to meet them, and we spent a day together. There was no doubt that they were genuinely troubled. And really well informed. And completely sincere.
ES: It’s a famously closed church. How did you delve deeper?
JC: This person introduced me to more Destiny people. And then I went back to some of my old Destiny contacts. Some people just hung up on me. But I got passed around and eventually established contacts with three or four members, or former members. And then they passed me on, and so on. In the end, I spoke to 22 people in meaningful ways, some many times and, with one exception, they were all women. They had all either left the church or were still in it, reluctantly, because their husbands were in it. And they didn’t have the sense of agency or the financial means to leave – their families are in the church, their children, everyone.
These conversations felt like this kind of unburdening, people often cried.
These women were hurt and scared and exhausted. They made me promise that Brian (Tamaki) and the Man Up guys wouldn’t know I’d spoken to them.
ES: What, specifically, were they afraid of?
JC: One woman said, about speaking to me, “I can’t do it, those Man Up guys know where I live.”
Another woman said, “If my husband finds out I’ve spoken to you I’ll get a hiding.”
You can’t unhear that.
I spoke to Debbs Murray, who does fantastic work in the family violence awareness space, about why people stay in toxic relationships. She talked about the dynamics of coercive control, how it traps people in relationships by tapping into their vulnerabilities. On a larger scale you could say that a group like Destiny exercises that same kind of control, because it attracts vulnerable people and convinces them that there’s great danger outside of the group.
ES: The premise of Destiny’s support group for men, Man Up, is family values, anti-drugs, anti-crime, anti-violence. Why are these women so afraid of Man Up and its members?
JC: Back in 2019, I spoke to a Mongrel Mob former chapter head who said Man Up really worked for him, so there are success stories. But the women I spoke to believe it’s an organisation that isn’t nearly as dedicated to dealing with toxic male behaviour as it would proclaim. They said it’s sometimes been more interested in victim blaming – as in the woman shouldn’t have “triggered” the man’s anger. I think Man Up would very emphatically deny that that’s their message (our many requests for interviews were denied, our emailed questions unanswered), and I don’t have explicit evidence of that in more recent years, but what I am able to say emphatically is that many of the women I spoke to are terrified. In part they’re terrified about losing their place in the community, but four or five of the women I spoke to were afraid of a violent response.
Kaupapa Māori academic Professor Leonie Pihama – she’s incredible – had some interesting things to say about how, even if the men of Man Up were no longer violent in a domestic setting, their violence has been transplanted and directed at the LGBTQI community. The violence isn’t gone it’s just, in some cases, got new targets.
She also talked about Destiny’s use of haka against the LGBTQI community – and how utterly inappropriate it is to weaponise the haka in such a harmful way.
One former insider, the only man I spoke to, said “rage is Tamaki’s marketing tool”. I’ve watched hours of Brian Tamaki sermons – the incendiary tone, the homophobia, the transphobia, the xenophobia, it’s staggering and it’s not healthy, it’s not good for your heart to be assailed with that.
ES: Do you think that the trans issue, having been in the media a lot lately, has become a kind of vehicle for Destiny Church?
JC: That former Destiny member talked about attacking drag queens being Tamaki’s “ticket”, because Destiny’s toxic response to drag events gets media attention. And then I found footage of Tamaki himself actually using that word – “ticket”. He’s explicit in this. It’s a deliberate marketing strategy.
But it requires rage to fuel it.
When you think about it, about all of the moral panic around things like Homosexual Law Reform (1986), the Civil Unions Bill (2004) and same-sex marriage (legalised in 2013), you can’t go to market with that stuff anymore because none of it was true. So in order to create moral panic you have to go harder, or tell lies, or find new villains. And the new villains are trans people. But there’s such a disconnect. You look at the Pride Parade on Ponsonby Rd, there are people wandering along waving a rainbow flag or something and they’re met with this fury.
Some of the Destiny members I spoke to anonymously said they were ashamed of the church’s homophobia. They talked about having a brother or cousins who are gay.
ES: Aside from potentially being a marketing ploy, what do you think motivates the intense trans- and homophobia?
JC: Brian Tamaki seems obsessed with fatherhood and protecting families from the people he regards as perverted. He constantly conflates LGBTQI with paedophilia and child abuse, when we know that if you were a child abused in the last 30 or 40 years it was likely to have happened in a state institution or a church.
But that conflation of child abuse with trans people or gay people is incendiary. Leonie Pihama said you have to think about some of these Man Up members might have come from. If you look at the overwhelming link between state care and violent crime and gang membership – many Man Up members may share that background, they may be victims of abuse, and they’re being taught to channel their rage towards a community that doesn’t deserve it.
There are other targets for Tamaki’s rage, including a growing concentration on immigrant communities (I was really taken aback by the explicitness of some of this) but the LGBTQI community is the one he returns to again and again.
ES: Who else is targeted?
JC: Māori activism – Tamaki calls Te Pāti Māori a terrorist association.
Immigrants, as I said. He’s suggested that 98% of immigrants are “probably terrorists”. He says, “They’re not here to integrate, they’re here to invade.” He calls multiculturalism “evil”.
Hundreds of people turn up every week for these sermons, but it’s nearly all men who go out on these confrontational missions, which Tamaki admitted he directs. In one sermon, he talks about making phone calls and saying to people “you get to the Te Atatū library”. He uses military language: armies, generals, strategies.
In this TVNZ+ series I look at other issues attached to Destiny (such as laundry baskets full of cash disappearing into vans parked out the back of the church). But what to me is key now is that this is a community that is being galvanised into a kind of rage. And people who don’t want to be part of that feel afraid to step away. And it’s rage towards communities that don’t deserve it.
And then there’s the tremendous amount of hurt and fear being cultivated within the church. I don’t think I’ve ever, in over three decades of journalism, talked to people as afraid as the women I encountered in this investigation.
