Jen Hatmaker and her appeal to deconstruct

In the early 2010s, Jen Hatmaker was a superstar Christian influencer whose “ministry” online and in books gained her a vast following of evangelical women. She is as funny and charismatic as they come—exactly the kind of Christian celebrity who can command and influence through sheer force of personality. She sold a lot of books and spoke at countless conferences. She even had a series on HGTV called “My Big Family Renovation.”

She was in the “zone,” as it were, until she wasn’t. Hatmaker Inc. completely unraveled in 2016 when she and her husband announced that they were leaving behind the 2,000-year-old sexual ethic of the Christian faith in order to affirm and celebrate LGBTQ identities. Her vast following and her status as an evangelical celebrity teacher cratered and would never be the same again.

I confess that I have not followed Hatmaker very much since her departure from evangelicalism back in 2016. Nevertheless, I have seen her here and there pop up on a social media feed or on a podcast, usually playing the part of the gadfly that she has always been. On her website she now celebrates the “deconstruction” of her former faith and sells online courses coaxing women to deconstruct their faith as well. For only $69, Jen Hatmaker will show you exactly how to abandon Christ and His word.

Over the weekend, Hatmaker popped up again, this time in an interview with The New York Times about her forthcoming memoir titled Awake (Simon & Schuster, 2025). In it, she reveals that she no longer goes to any church at all. She’s divorced and says she’s dating a guy and going through a “sexual renaissance.” She’s learning to focus for the first time on what she wants in the bedroom. The whole conversation is immodest, ugly, and sad. It is as complete and thorough an apostasy as I have ever seen.

Hatmaker sneers at the so-called “purity culture” that she was raised in and has now left behind. Here’s how she describes it,

We were taught there’s zero sex before marriage. Our dads would give us what were called purity rings. They went on our left hands and that was the placeholder for our purity until some man put a wedding ring on it. We all went through this curriculum called True Love Waits. It was abstinence-only, and that instruction was baked in with fear and shame. It was scary to imagine getting on not just the wrong side of our parents, of our faith communities, but on the wrong side of God. ... We were scared to death. A whole generation of us came into marriage absolutely freaked out around sex. We had no idea what the hell we were doing, or what we were supposed to be doing once we could finally have it.

For Hatmaker, the Bible’s teaching on holiness and sexual purity is like a straightjacket constraining women from true freedom and pleasure. Loving fathers who guard their daughter’s virtue are an imposition on young women who need something other than “abstinence-only” discipleship. After all, shouldn’t women be allowed to fornicate without having to worry about disappointing their fathers or even God?

Hatmaker tells the Times, “I’m a complicated person because I’m still a big fan of Jesus, but I guess I don’t like many of his folks.” She says that she stopped going to church during the pandemic and never went back. She leaves open the door to perhaps returning someday. Nevertheless, she says, “The organized-religion part of faith is not serving me right now.”

This is where her influence is particularly pernicious. She is telling people that they can be a “big fan of Jesus” while looking down their nose at the body of Christ—the church. She has turned on its head the biblical admonition, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

If Jen Hatmaker had quietly walked away, we would not be talking about her. But she didn’t do that. She still wants the attention of Christian women, and she would like very much to continue to peddle her wares to whomever will buy them. Only this time, she’s not selling discipleship. She’s selling deconstruction. It’s a spiritual poison pill concealed in the rhetoric of therapy, freedom, and self-actualization. Discerning followers of Christ will see through the ruse. Tragically, many others won’t.