Denny Burk: The fall of Jen Hatmaker

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 27th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. A one-time Christian celebrity is making the rounds talking about her new book about life after faith. So what happens when someone like that drifts off-course? WORLD Opinions contributor Denny Burk says it matters a lot more than you might think.

DENNY BURK: In the early 2010s, Jen Hatmaker was a Christian superstar:

HATMAKER: It started with God and His word..so that made me furious because you can’t argue with it…and…[LAUGHTER] and then I just started reading it. Right? And there it is. All that time…

Hatmaker’s “ministry” gained her a vast following of evangelical women. She was as funny and charismatic as they came. She sold a lot of books and spoke at countless conferences. She even had a series on HGTV called “My Big Family Renovation.”

HATMAKER|HGTV: Before, this space was cramped, segmented, and not very functional. Now it’s open, spacious, and downright beautiful…

She was in the “zone” until it came crashing down in 2016. She and her then husband Brandon announced that they were changing their minds—particularly about Biblical sexuality. Her vast following and her status as an evangelical celebrity teacher cratered and was never the same. She divorced her husband in 2020 after his infidelity came to light.

Her website now celebrates the “deconstruction” of her former faith. She sells online courses coaxing others to do the same. For only $69 dollars, Jen Hatmaker will show you exactly how to abandon Christ and His word.

HATMAKER CLIP FROM NEW YORK TIMES INTERVIEW: 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.

Over the weekend, Hatmaker spoke with The New York Times about her forthcoming Simon and Schuster memoir titled Awake. In it, she reveals that she no longer goes to any church at all. She’s dating a guy and going through what she calls a “sexual renaissance.”

Her conversation was immodest, ugly, and sad. It is as complete and thorough an apostasy as I have ever seen.

Hatmaker particularly sneered at the so-called “purity culture” she was raised in, and has now left behind.

HATMAKER CLIP: 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.

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

She says that she stopped going to church during the pandemic and has not gone back. She says she might return someday, but not yet:

HATMAKER: The organized-religion part of faith is not serving me right now.

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

If Jen Hatmaker had quietly walked away from her faith, we probably wouldn’t be talking about her. But she didn’t do that. She still wants the attention of Christian women, and she would very much like to continue to peddle her wares to whomever will buy them. Only this time, she’s not selling discipleship. She’s selling deconstruction, 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.

I’m Denny Burk.

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