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For an hour, Keith Hudson has been pacing around the sanctuary of the Kings Road Church on the outskirts of London. With his shaved head, wide-open eyes and thick black glasses, he’s a striking figure who frequently punctuates his sermon with a loud “Hallelujah!”
As his wife Mary watches on, he has been telling the congregation his story — that Satan has lured his daughter away, that she has fallen. But that he must love her anyway. Must pray for her.
Pretty typical stuff for a preacher — even an American one so far from home.
But then he stops short, ready to unleash his big pitch. With tears in his eyes, hollering at the top of his voice, he delivers his keynote with as much bombast as he can muster: “I kissed God — and I liked it!”
Hold on a minute. Isn’t that a pop song? Who’d this guy steal that line from?
His own daughter, Katy Perry, is who. But unfortunately, thanks to her massively successful career and semi-Hindu husband, she is most certainly going to hell.
Aside from being Perry’s dad, Hudson is no ordinary preacher. He’s a 63-year-old, reformed, LSD-dropping scenester who has dedicated the past four decades to spreading the gospel alongside his wife Mary, also 63. Throughout that time they have fought to make themselves and their ministries stand out from the more conservative image of evangelical pastors. Keith wears cowboy boots, black leather trenchcoats and huge, heavily jewelled silver cross worthy of any gangsta rapper, and Mary wears coiffed hair and stylish clothes.
For years, they crisscrossed the United States, preaching. Then they settled in Santa Barbara, Calif., and founded the Christian Oasis Center before moving on to their current headquarters, the Life Christian Church, just north of San Diego.
Except for a circuit of evangelical churches, not many people cared about the Hudsons. Until four years ago that is, when their controversial daughter became an overnight sensation with that song, “I Kissed a Girl,” and Keith and Mary Hudson suddenly hit heavenly paydirt, touring on a circuit that took them to eight countries last year and even a date in the Poconos next month, when they appear at Life Church in Poconos Pines, Pa.
With her penchant for skintight, bust-
flaunting latex dresses, suggestive dance routines and risqué songs about lesbianism, Perry seems about as Christian as a tweet from Anthony Weiner. Yet week in and week out, her global notoriety is being exploited by the Hudsons — Perry is Mary’s maiden name — to spread their version of the Gospel and simultaneously expand the scope of their ministry. While publicly declaring concern over their wayward daughter — she is, they candidly admit, destined for hell — they brazenly use her fame for their own ends.
Consider their itinerary. This month they are touring Texas, California and Panama City, Panama. Last month it was Georgia, Florida and Medellin, Colombia. The month before that a visit to England.
Their services repeatedly namecheck Perry and her husband, Russell Brand, the English comic with a lurid past of drug addiction and rampant promiscuity. In his London sermon, it’s an odd mix of boastful exhilaration (“Anyone here heard of Russell Brand? He’s my son in law. I love Russell. He’s a wonderful man.”) and overwrought condescension (“We pray for him — pray for the entertainers.”).
The fundamental message, however, is simple: Keith and Mary disapprove of their daughter and her peculiar husband, but by God they are enjoying the attention. Take Keith’s recent performance in Hertfordshire, England, scene of that extraordinary exclamation: “I kissed God — and I liked it!”
Tears in his eyes, he went on: “I understand the burden of having a daughter or son that is not serving God. When my daughter came out and sang that song, ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it.’ I said, ‘My ministry is over.’
“We get people all the time saying, ‘How? How, that you’re a minister all these years and you raised Katy in the church, how could she come out with a song like that?’ I look at them and I say, ‘I don’t know.’
“But maybe you’re sitting here, you saw in the paper that Katy Perry’s parents are coming to church and you wanted to come check it out. Let me tell you everything is divinely ordered. There is no coincidence that you’re sitting here today. God brought you here.”
To those who have witnessed Keith’s ministry in the past three years, it is a familiar story. Since Katy hit the big time he and Mary have spoken of little else.
Yet despite their disapproval, they turn up at her shows — she’s appearing locally at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum on Friday and Newark’s Prudential Center June 19 — walk the red carpet at awards ceremonies and never tire of boasting about their celebrity connections.
Invariably dressed flamboyantly in head-to-toe black, Keith is every inch the aging rock star. His wife is a more conservative dresser, but it is clear that Perry inherits her good looks from the maternal side. Even today it is easy to see why Mary once caught the eye of Jimi Hendrix, who she briefly dated in the ’60s.
That was way back then, however. Despite having a wild background of her own — including a tempestuous first marriage in Zimbabwe — Mary is now every inch the moralizing campaigner.
Keith claims to have been spoken to by God 39 years ago in an apple orchard in Wenatchee, Wash., and says the experience “transformed” his life. Ever the showman, however, in his sermons he candidly admits to having taken hard drugs. Mary, meanwhile, calls herself a “prophet/evangelist” and claims God has given her the power to heal people through the Holy Spirit. It was against this background that the boundary-pushing Perry grew up in Santa Barbara with her elder brother and younger sister. As a child she was only allowed to listen to gospel music and denied access to books, while Mary would read her nothing but the Bible.
As Perry herself put it, in an interview with Vanity Fair: “I didn’t have a childhood.”
Singing was her way out, though predictably enough she started out as a Christian-pop artist, releasing a gospel album under the name of Katy Hudson in 2001. Six years and four record labels later, she was reinvented by Capitol Records as Katy Perry.
At the time her parents were disgusted, with her mother declaring: “We cannot cut her out of our lives as she is our child, but she knows we disagree strongly with what she is doing and the message she is promoting regarding homosexuality, which the Bible clearly states is a sin.”
As a tearful Keith put it to his followers: “We must pray for our family. We all have our crosses to bear. If you have a son or a daughter that is not serving God, just stand up right now. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t be ashamed. Listen, we love them. I love Katy. I want everybody to go to heaven, but I want my family most of all. What would heaven be without them? It won’t be the same.”
Life on Earth wouldn’t be the same, either. Today, despite having no other visible source of income, the Hudsons lead a blessed existence. Witness their trip to Panama last month, when they were treated to an all-expenses-paid jaunt culminating in a huge public service, which reached upwards of half a million people.
Pastor Edwin Alvarez, leader of the Communidad Apostolica Hosanna, says: “It was a great blessing for our church to have such famous people come to visit. We transmitted the service live on television, the radio and on the Internet. We think 500,000 people will have seen it in total — which is just incredible.”
While the Hudsons do not generally request a fee for their appearances, they’re happy to sell their books — Keith wrote a memoir called “Cry,” Mary a spiritual guide titled “Smart Bombs” — and collect tax-free donations for their nonprofit Keith Hudson Ministries. Mary is currently working on her second book, “Joyful Mother,” which is reportedly about how Perry “has impacted her Christian ministry.”
In 2008, the year Perry first broke through and the most recent year for which public records are available, they raised a tidy $130,000. They spent all of that on their travel expenses, a $35,000 salary for Keith and donations to other ministers. Their activities included “preaching the gospel abroad . . . and in the United States. We lead many to rededicate their lives to Christ.”
Reflected fame seems to agree with Keith in particular. Prior to Perry’s success, the closest he came to such acclaim was hanging out with the counterculture icon Timothy Leary.
And any concerns the Hudsons may have about Perry marrying Brand — a former heroin addict who admits to having slept with more than 1,000 women — are conveniently swept aside. Indeed, prior to visiting England in April, Keith joined Brand at the premiere of his hit animated movie, “Hop.”
Ostensibly he and Mary were in the UK to preach the Gospel, however pastor Ray Toms says the service was a last-minute booking.
Like their other missionary work, whenever the Hudsons show up to preach, they’re able to declare all of their travel expenses as part of their tax-deductible missionary work.
“They were coming to their daughter’s concert in London and rang up to say they’d like to preach at our church,” he says. “They turned up 10 minutes before the service began and just jumped up and got on with it. To be quite honest, one or two people in our church didn’t take to them. They felt these people were cashing in on their daughter’s fame. But a lot of young people turned up because of the Katy Perry connection and five of them made a fresh commitment to God that day.
“Keith has a real passion for young people, and you can’t deny that his methods work.”
Yet while Keith is happy to speak to the multitudes about his prodigal daughter, he doesn’t like to answer direct questions about her. Attempts to speak with Keith were met with the abrupt — and patently inaccurate — response: “I don’t talk about my daughter. Goodbye.”
Perry has been rather more forthcoming about her parents, stating: “I don’t try to change them anymore, and I don’t think they try to change me. We coexist.”
And for all their public bad-mouthing of their daughter, one can’t help but suspect the sainted Keith and Mary wouldn’t have it any other way.