Awake?

“I’m out of the church right now. I don’t know that I will ever go back, and I don’t know that I will never go back,” Jen Hatmaker told Time in September. “My lifelong exposure has left me in a place where I know too much. I have been a part of the problem. So, I need a break from the machine.”

Hatmaker’s September interview coincides with the release of her latest book, Awake, in which she chronicles the devastating collapse of her 26-year marriage. It would be easy (and cynical) to suspect the podcaster and bestselling author of serving up tasty soundbites—such as calling the Church a “machine,” a quote other media have already picked up—to juice sales of her new book. After all, “exvangelicalism” has turned into something of a cottage industry, churning out, among others, books like Sarah McCammon’s 2024 bestseller, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

I’m not sure what “white” has to do with evangelicalism, but the secular media seem to love the racist distinctive. They also love the “leaving” part. Secular media don’t interview liberals who join the Church, only former conservatives who criticize or abandon it.

Jen Hatmaker’s trendy critiques of evangelicalism have cut a broad swath through secular media: The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, NPR. The list goes on. But I don’t think she’s in it for the fame.

Decades ago, Hatmaker and I shared a literary agent, Lee Hough. One summer, Lee and his wife Paula hosted a small group of authors at their home in Colorado Springs. I remember sitting on the Houghs’ lush lawn with Hatmaker and the other guests, astonished at how unbelievably hot the sun was. Not the air—the sun itself, its searing intensity.

Someone told me it was the altitude. At 7,100 feet above sea level, the sun simply feels hotter on your skin. That’s how finely tuned God’s creation is: Though the sun is about 94 million miles from Earth, just a mile and a half makes a big difference.

Degrees of error make a big difference, too. When I sat on that lawn with her, Hatmaker was an up-and-coming writer, a young Christian conservative whose style was fresh and sincere. That’s why I don’t think she left the Church to boost her brand. It’s sadder than that: Hatmaker is saying what she really thinks …

On abortion: “Women deserve agency over their own bodies and their own futures.”

On marriage: The Church “idolizes marriage to such a degree that it pushes people into unhealthy spaces, and it keeps them there. It has done a real disservice to marriage overall.”

On divorce: “When I got far enough away from the trauma … and I started examining all the bricks that built that house—patriarchy, religious subculture, body shame, gender limitations, purity culture, misogyny—I started to realize that maybe it just wasn’t such a shock that that house came down.”

On homosexuality: “Any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love.” In 2016, after a year of studying what the Bible says about homosexuality, Hatmaker and her pastor husband concluded that marriage sanctifies same-sex relationships, that “a same-sex marriage, as a life-long monogamous commitment, can be holy before God.”

In making such pronouncements, Hatmaker has joined the stream of others—including singer Katy Perry, former pastor Joshua Harris, and John Piper’s son, Abraham—who first dabbled in doctrinal detours, then fell over the cliff.

Today, Hatmaker enjoys 1.5 million followers on social media. I’m not a follower. I’m a mourner. I mourn the unjaded young woman who sat with me on that soft green lawn.

Now 51, Hatmaker told Time in September, “I still love Jesus but church is hard for me.”

It seems strange to claim to love Jesus—who is the Head of the Church—while rejecting the Church. Or to claim to love Jesus—who is the Word of God—while leading people away from the Word of God. The red letters in the Gospels offer no sanctuary, either, for David declared, “The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.” (Emphasis mine.) So which Jesus is Hatmaker loving?

She told Time that leaving the Church makes her sad, “like I am missing my childhood home.”

I’m sad, too, Jen. I hope you come home.