The World and Everything in It: August 27, 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

Progressive crime policies, Ghislaine Maxwell speaks, and another classified documents raid.

MAXWELL: To get the FBI’s permission to enter the Bolton home and office, you had to have two different federal judges examine the request.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And the political legacy of James Dobson, ahead on Washington Wednesday.

Also today World Tour, a conversation on persecution in Nigeria.

Later, the importance of physical space for spiritual well-being.

SJOELON:We think it’s just normal stuff, things we take for granted. It’s life-changing for these families. It really is.

MAST: It’s Wednesday, August 27th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast..

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

MAST: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump on Russia » President Trump is warning of major consequences for Russia if Vladimir Putin does not end the war in Ukraine soon.

TRUMP: It will not be a world war. But it will be an economic war. And an economic war is gonna be bad. And it's gonna be bad for Russia. And I don't want that.

Trump says every conversation he has with Putin seems to go well, but is only followed by Russian strikes on Ukraine.

And he adds that he is ready to ramp up pressure on Moscow.

TRUMP: I want to see that deal end. It's very serious what I have in mind if I have to do it. But I want to see it end.

Trump is pushing for face to face meeting to include both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

And Zelenskyy says he’s ready and willing.

ZELENSKYY: In Ukrainian

In a video address, he suggested Turkey, the Gulf states, or Europe as possible locations for peace talks.

Trump vs Cook - Fed board » Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook is filing a lawsuit to try and stop President Trump from firing her.

Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell said Trump “has no authority to remove” Cook.

But the president says there is cause to replace her.

TRUMP: But no, she seems to have had an infraction and she can't have an infraction and especially that infraction.

That follows an allegation against Cook of mortgage fraud from the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But no criminal charges have been filed.

Critics of Trump’s move say the president is eroding the Fed’s independence, and that he’s trying to remove her because she opposes cutting interest rates right now.

Cook was appointed by President Biden in 20-22.

Israeli-Gaza » President Trump also predicted on Tuesday that the war in Gaza will come to an end within the next few weeks.

But Israeli government spokesman David Mencer says Israeli leaders remain laser focused:

MENCER:  To meet all of our war aims, the release of all of our hostages, the elimination of the military and governing capabilities of the Hama terrorist organization, and the removal of the terrorist threat from Gaza.

He says those things must happen before the war will end.

This comes as Israeli leaders are launching a major new military offensive in Gaza City.

There's also mounting global backlash to the ongoing war, after an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza this week killed at least 20 people, including several journalists. Israeli Defense Force say the strike on the Nassar Hospital in Southern Gaza was meant to target a cameraman conducting surveillance for Hamas.

SBA chief on debanking » Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler says she's putting financial institutions on notice over so-called “debanking” practices.

LOEFFLER:  Pro-life, uh, or Christian nonprofits starting, they wouldn't let those nonprofits start in their banks 'cause they disagreed with them. We're ending that.

She said the SBA just sent letters to its network of 5,000 lenders across this country. The letter demands that they stop de-banking deserving customers, and if they’ve already done so, to reinstate those borrowers.

Violators could face fines or other penalties.

President Trump has issued an executive order that prohibits banks from using political affiliation or religious beliefs as a basis for refusing banking services.

Sinaloa cartel El Mayo pleads guilty » The co-founder of Mexico’s infamous Sinaloa Cartel has entered a guilty plea to multiple crimes in U.S. federal court.

75-year-old Ismael Zambada Garcia – nicknamed “El Mayo” – ran the violent cartel for over 30 years, trafficking drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States.

Attorney General Pam Bondi:

BONDI: El Mayo and his accomplices made billions of dollars… by bringing poisonous drugs into our country.…They committed gruesome assassinations, kidnappings and horrible crimes to maintain discipline within their own organization.

Garcia faces a minimum sentence of life in prison without parole.

His longtime partner, known as “El Chapo,” is incarcerated at a federal prison in Colorado and will also remain behind bars for life.

Michigan trans interventions »The University of Michigan’s medical center says it is halting so-called transgender medical interventions for kids. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more.

BENJAMIN EICHER: The hospital system says it will no longer offer cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers for anyone under the age of 19.

Officials there said the move is in response to federal pressure to end those practices.

Last month, the Justice Dept. issued more than 20 subpoenas to physicians and clinics involved in providing those procedures … including the University Michigan medical center.

The Trump Administration has threatened to pull federal funds … from providers that perform the life–altering procedures on children.

However, private practices in the state can still offer the procedures … as Michigan is not one of the more than two-dozen states with laws protecting children.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Washington Wednesday with Hunter Baker. Plus, making homeless people feel at home and setting them up for success.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 27th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST:  And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

MONTAGE: The FBI searched the home and office of John Bolton, / the former national security adviser in President Trump's first administration, / and allegations he included classified information in a 2020 memoir critical of Trump / suffers major Trump derangement syndrome. / To get the FBI’s permission to enter the Bolton home and office, you had to have two different federal judges examine the request. / A federal judge noted Bolton had gambled with the national security of the United States. 

Joining us now is political scientist and WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well Hunter, that federal judge, by the way, was Judge Royce Lamberth. He refused to block publication of Bolton’s memoir because it was about to be released, but that line by the judge ... that Bolton “gambled with the national security of the United States” by disclosing information before the review process was complete seems serious—and I guess maybe we’ll find out about that.

But one of the voices I included in that montage was military historian Victor Davis Hanson. He said on The Daily Signal that Bolton himself defended the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump over classified documents, telling conservatives to hold their fire and wait for the evidence. So now the shoe’s on the other foot—but isn’t the principle a sound one? Let’s just wait.

BAKER: It is a sound principle. And I mean, I think back to Trump’s first term, and Bolton was in a big hurry to get that book out, because it was very much tied to current events within that first administration and the gamble. I don’t know how it worked out for our security, but it worked out for Bolton because that book sold almost 800,000 copies in the first week, which helps to pay for that $2 million advance.

But to me, there is a bigger problem here. We are continually seeing this question of materials that are taken home where they should not be. We need to have a much more secure system and a clear set of rules to which we adhere in the future.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, let me follow up with you about this. The issue involving President Trump was never adjudicated, because you don’t prosecute a sitting president, so we never did get to the bottom of it. But how might that play out? Let’s say if John Bolton was, say, not very … hygienic … with his classified information, and he winds up going to jail over it. And yet, here’s the president of the United States with that same sort of thing hovering over him, unresolved and unprosecuted because he’s a sitting president.

BAKER: It’s an interesting question. Somebody who is sort of a national security advisor is a different situation than a president, and there’s less ability to claim executive privilege or anything like that.

But the difficulty here just kind of points us toward why we need to have some clear expectations about exactly how we’re going to handle it and whether or not we make laws, we need to have norms to which everyone agrees. You use the word hygienic, I would say that’s exactly what we need. We need to figure out what our national security hygiene is and to stick with it.

MAST: President Trump’s crackdown on crime continues…This week he signed an executive order to withhold federal money from jurisdictions with cashless bail policies… saying those policies drive up crime.

TRUMP: That was when the big crime in this country started… Somebody kills somebody, they go in, don't worry about it. No cash. Come back in a couple of months. We'll give you a trial. You never see the person again.

He also signed an order to end cashless bail in Washington D.C. Now, cashless bail policies have been touted as being more “just” than cash bail. Perhaps it’s worth asking, “just” for whom? So Hunter…what do you say… is there a correlation between cashless bail and higher crime rates? And how does this fit into the bigger picture of progressive crime policies and their success or failure?

BAKER: Well, so when Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in the early ’90s, there were people who called the city the ungovernable city, that there was nothing you could do. You couldn’t get control of the crime and vice in the city.

And Giuliani picked up on some social science research that said the way you get control is that you crack down on even the smallest crimes. You fix the broken windows. Everything you do to project an image of order and rapid justice you do. And we all know the story New York was made far safer than it had been.

And I think that the progressive policies that include things like cashless bail are making it harder to incur a felony charge for things like shoplifting are a massive mistake. They send exactly the opposite message. And anytime that you send a message of permissiveness toward crime, I think it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to get more chaos and disorder, and we’ve seen that.

So I would say that cashless bail is a bad policy. I would separate that from the question of whether Donald Trump needs to be dictating that policy to all the states. I think that’s a bad idea, but I think that cashless bail is a disaster.

EICHER: Hunter, we refer to you as political scientist and educator, but you’re also a lawyer, so one more legal question, if I may, just quickly on the Jeffrey Epstein matter … a very unusual interview between the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche and convicted sex offender Ghislane Maxwell. Unusual in a couple of respects. She’d never before been interviewed by federal investigators. Never until now, and well after her conviction. But in that interview she was asked about President Trump’s involvement with Epstein, and she was given limited immunity to talk about it. So let’s listen to that.

MAXWELL: The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.

BLANCHE: And did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world?

MAXWELL: Absolutely never.

Maxwell also told the deputy attorney general she also didn’t recall inappropriate behavior by President Clinton. So given the timing of this, given the immunity, is there anything from this jailhouse interview that changes our understanding of the Epstein matter?

BAKER: Well, I would say that this comment from Maxwell goes along with what Alan Dershowitz said a few weeks ago, which was that there was no implication that Trump had been some kind of a guest, you know, or on some kind of a guest list, relative to this sort of sexual predation.

But I don’t think that people’s fascination with the issue is going to stop, and that’s because of the way Epstein died. People are going to continue to wonder if he was assassinated or forced to commit suicide in that jail cell. And so I think we’re going to be talking about this maybe decades from now.

MAST: Well, James Dobson, the evangelical leader whose influence once extended all the way to the Oval Office, died last week. Back in 1985, he interviewed President Ronald Reagan and asked a simple but profound question. Let’s listen.

DOBSON: What should be the role of government in the family in building in forging strong families?

REAGAN: well I think that everything that government can do first of all it starts with his prime responsibility of course of securing our freedoms and and our security both against outside assailants and against the criminal elements within our own country but it does not interfere and it does everything it can to strengthen the family economically…

Hunter, that exchange with President Reagan underscored how Dobson really did have the standing to shape both family policy and evangelical politics. But times have changed. Is the movement today more politically fractured than it was in the Dobson years?

BAKER: I don’t know if we’re ever going to have a period where the evangelical influence is as strong in one person or maybe two as it was with James Dobson. I think that James Dobson and Chuck Colson together were just a tremendous team.

And between the Focus on the Family broadcast and Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint, the ability to spread a message in the evangelical community was unparalleled. In fact, I have even argued that Dobson alone really may be responsible for ensuring that the Republican Party remained a pro life party when he threatened in the late 1990s to leave the party and take as many people with him as he could. That was a threat that Republicans could not ignore.

MAST: Can you point to anyone of similar stature today — someone who’s carried on that legacy?

BAKER: It’s really a tough question. You know, I have watched significant leader after significant leader leave the scene. I think about people, not only evangelicals, but people such as Richard John Neuhaus and William F Buckley, Charles Colson, James Dobson.

And I’m not sure if I see who is really going to replace them, but I can tell you somebody who I think is trying, and that’s Charlie Kirk. I increasingly hear people impressed with Charlie Kirk and think that maybe he’s really building something, so we’ll see.

EICHER: Well, that’s interesting. Hunter, you know, talking about the difficulty of another leader gaining traction after Dr. Dobson, I think we have to go back and realize how different the media landscape was at the time, and it’s difficult to assign what’s the most important and what’s secondarily important. Certainly, Dr. Dobson was a key figure, but he was also on Christian radio in drive time virtually every morning in every major market in America. He had built a legacy of trust with millions of families and when it became time to get political about attacks on the family and the nature of public policy to harm or to help the family. In that regard, he had already built up this enormous reservoir of trust, and so people, I think, very willingly followed him and trusted him. And now not only do you not have that singular figure like Dobson, but you’ve got this atomized media landscape where there’s no one voice able to concentrate in a drive time the way he did, and reach all those people.

BAKER: He was there at the right time with the right vehicle, which was the broadcast. The broadcast had a massive audience. He was able to make or break different ministries and figures by talking about them on the broadcast.

There are any number of ministries that probably were launched, like Summit Ministries, through some sort of appearance or discussion on the broadcast. But the other thing about Dobson was that he was a unique figure. He was not another preacher or pastor, which had been the norm before. He was a child psychologist with an appointment at the USC School of Medicine.

He was there 14 years, 14 years at the USC School of Medicine, and then he leaves that position speculatively to take over this ministry opportunity, and then we see what he did with it. And really, I would say that during the 1990s his influence was unparalleled. I think that he exceeded what Falwell had done with the Moral Majority, or Robertson with the Christian Coalition, and really became a decisive influence in the latter part of the ’90s.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and provost at North Greenville University and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: persecution in Nigeria.

According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, Islamic militants killed more than 7,000 Christians in Nigeria in just the first seven months of 20-25. During that same period, roughly the same number were kidnapped.

NICK EICHER, HOST: American Clint Lyons works with the nonprofit I-Reach to support persecuted Christians in Africa. He recently traveled to Nigeria—calling it the most deadly place in the world to follow Jesus.

WORLD Executive Producer Paul Butler spoke with him when he got back and we’ll hear a few minutes of that conversation on this week’s World Tour.

PAUL BUTLER: Well, let's start with Nigeria. What's going on there that makes it such a dangerous place to be a Christian?

CHRIS LYONS: Well, over these past few months, really these past couple of years to broaden it, we're seeing an increase, a dramatic uptick in the persecution of Christians. This is fueled by a lot of things. It's fueled by a need for land, scarcity of resources. But there's without a doubt a renewed fervor among Islamic militants to specifically target Christian villages and to take them out to steal their resources and their land. We've been really heavily involved in an area of Nigeria called Plateau State where, and I can tell you one very specific example where it was about 2 a.m. and more than a thousand of these militants, Fulani militants, came in. We're talking about well-resourced soldiers with trucks, with AK-47s going into these areas and shooting people at random. We're not talking about men, we're talking about men, women, and children who are being attacked by these militants.

And I had a chance to spend some time with one of the pastors in this region. He is a close relative who was killed in one of the attacks recently there but he just took me through what that night was like and what he saw was was just dreadful think of women just lying on the ground dead children lying on the ground dead and so such a senseless loss of life. You know, over two years we've seen a dramatic uptick in these attacks.

BUTLER: In a recent editorial, you wrote that, in a recent editorial, you called on the United States to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern, also known as the CPC. This is under the International Religious Freedom Act. Why are you calling for that redesignation for the CPC? What will that accomplish?

LYONS: Right. Under the first Trump administration, Nigeria was designated as a Country of Particular Concern. And rightly so. Things were really bad then. With Fulani militants, with Boko Haram, with Islamic State of West Africa province going in and specifically attacking Christians. And so it received that designation. During the Biden administration, that designation was lifted. And we're calling upon Secretary Marco Rubio and President Trump to redesignate, reinstitute that designation.

And what that's going to do is put that country on alert. And I think it is a good first step. To now say, hey, you are on alert. There are things that are happening in your country against a particular religious group—talking about Christians here—that need to be addressed by your country, and that you're neglecting to address in the way that preserves human dignity and human rights.

BUTLER: So you're calling for a kind of state-to-state pressure or perhaps we might call that political pressure from the outside. But I know that you've just recently returned from a trip to Africa with the ministry that you lead. So what sort of things are you all doing inside the country to try to help the situation?

LYONS: We're going in and doing what we call reach outs. And reach outs are initiatives where we come in with food, basic necessities, and we resource people who have lost their homes, and we give them things that they just need to survive.

The idea is to go in and to figure out ways that we can serve this community, not just in the short term, but giving them long-term support as well. And that's where it becomes a real challenge because you have people who've lost everything. How do you then serve them long term? How do you help them thrive long term? And that's a real challenge. But to do that, we need the government involved. We need the Nigerian government involved. And what we're seeing right now is a kind of an unwillingness to go in and to really help in these areas. You know, I've heard stories from our contacts on the ground that these villages will be attacked and security forces are nearby and they won't go in because they're afraid. And so with that, that kind of mindset, it becomes really difficult to really serve and help these people long term when the government is, in my opinion, neglecting their responsibility toward their people.

BUTLER: How have you seen the church in Nigeria respond to this persecution?

LYONS: I think when you look at the landscape of the church in Nigeria, there is a real sense of community that you see when this happens. In these areas where you go in and you see devastated communities. You see fresh mass graves, you know, when you walk in. Our goal is to not just go in as a Western relief agency and help, but to mobilize the local church to help. And we're seeing some amazing things happen there.

I talked with one young lady who was part of our recent reach out in this area, and she was so encouraged by the believers there who had lost everything. Many of them lost their children, had lost spouses, had lost parents in these attacks and you see them coming together and saying we're going to be resilient, we're going to love one another, and really maybe even take the step of loving our enemies which is incredibly difficult to do if you think about that. But that's the mandate that Jesus gives us is to love our enemies. And so I personally have been very encouraged by the church's response there.

BUTLER: You know, the Scriptures tell us that when one believer suffers, the whole body suffers. So what can the church in the West do to encourage those in Nigeria who are experiencing such devastating loss and intense suffering for their faith?

LYONS: I think first is pray. Pray and specifically lift up these areas where these things are happening. Then find ways to get involved. Share your time, share your resources. And I would say secondly is, as you can, be involved politically, right? We're putting pressure on the State Department to make this CPC designation, to put Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. Speak to your local congressman, right? Email your local congressman and call. They have influence over the State Department. So you have a voice in this. You have a way to help. We're not helpless over here. There are things that we can do to stand with our brothers and sisters in Nigeria.

MAST: Paul Butler speaking with Clint Lyons, Executive Director of iREACH Global. That’s this week’s WORLD Tour.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 27th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: designed for hope.

Families without a place to live often turn to shelters for temporary housing. Shelters can offer classes, counseling, and job training.

EICHER: But what about the space itself? The walls, the beds, the rooms? WORLD’s Jenny Rough reports on a shelter that sees design as more than decoration. It’s part of helping families heal.

VOLUNTEER: Okay guys come on in!

JENNY ROUGH: Diane Little opens the door to her new bedroom. She lifts her youngest daughter out of a stroller.

DIANE LITTLE: Look, Jayla.

VOLUNTEER: She’s making herself right at home! [Laughter]

The main bedroom for Little and her husband, and another bedroom for their three girls, have both been fully redesigned. There’s colorful comforters, lamps, stuffed animals, and artwork. But just months ago, the family had nowhere to call home. Little initially moved to Durham, North Carolina, in the late 2000s. Finding affordable housing there was tough.

LITTLE: It was terrible. They had Section 8 projects, but it would take a long time to even get that assistance.

She scraped by. Then, she says, her husband was in a terrible car accident.

LITTLE: He fell asleep behind the wheel with his left arm out the car after pulling a double for two days.

His truck flipped and crushed his left arm. At the hospital, doctors had to amputate. Little says the accident, skyrocking rents post-COVID, and a series of bad decisions all led to homelessness.

Last April, the family moved into Families Moving Forward, Durham’s largest family shelter.

ANNA KRECKLOW: Because we’re a family shelter, we have a big focus on children.

Anna Krecklow is the former volunteer coordinator.

KRECKLOW: We provide childcare in the evenings while parents are in their programming. So we have parent programming where our families learn about budgeting, landlord-tenant rights, art therapy, various skills and knowledge so they can be more successful when they move to more permanent housing.

The shelter has also partnered with a nonprofit to incorporate an emerging concept known as trauma-informed design. That’s an idea that suggests comforting physical spaces can improve mental health. A study from North Carolina conducted in 2021, found that over half of those experiencing homelessness reported post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

SJOELIN: If you’re struggling with PTSD, your prefrontal cortex shuts down. You’re not able to handle your anger, frustration, organizational skills. You need somewhere where you feel safe.

That’s Lotta Sjoelin. In 2014, she had an eye-opening experience. She’s originally from Sweden and works in interior design. After moving to North Carolina, a neighbor mentioned that a local women’s shelter needed pillows.

SJOELIN: And in my white, Swedish, privileged world, I thought they needed décor, decorative pillows.

Accent pillows of mixed shapes and sizes to add aesthetics to a room. Her neighbor clarified: No, no, no, the shelter needed standard bed pillows. For sleeping.

SJOELIN: The house manager has a goal to give every single child their own pillow to sleep on at night.

Sjoelin filled her car with pillows. When she toured the shelter, she cried. The rooms looked like prison cells. Broken beds with thin mattresses and worn hand-me-down dressers. No color. No comfortable place to sit. No rugs on the floor—not even a bathmat.

The next day, she drove back to the shelter. This time, with more than just pillows.

SJOELIN: New bedding, new towels, rugs, curtains for the windows, bedside tables and lamps.

Sjoelin fully decorated a room for a resident and hasn’t stopped since. As of today, her nonprofit A Lotta Love has worked with 25 different shelters in North Carolina.

SJOELIN: Every single family who moves in here gets a makeover. And it’s personalized with the families in mind.

Researchers assessed her work. In 2022, they published the results in the journal Psychological Services. The conclusion: Designing shelter bedrooms improves the residents’ well-being by boosting their sense of dignity, safety, and hopefulness.

Most items are brand new. Some are purchased. Others are donated from big box companies, small businesses, real estate stagers, and strangers.

SOUND: [Moving bed]

A design costs about $650 per room.

SJOELIN: What if we put the bed here. And then maybe move the dresser there, what do you think?

After rearranging the furniture—

SOUND: [Drilling]

—volunteers get to work.

SOUND: [Hammering]

Volunteers come from high school clubs, church groups, nearby colleges, and even business professionals.

MELISSA CROSS: I mean, you’re going through what’s probably the most difficult season of your life.

Melissa Cross runs an interior design firm. When she learned of trauma-informed design, she knew immediately she wanted to get involved.

Cross says her Christian faith motivates her.

CROSS: The Biblical language of a people in their place that’s all throughout Scripture and knowing the impact that that has on a person’s health, physical, emotional, psychological.

She says God gave us bodies that are tactile and visual.

CROSS: Who doesn’t want to sit on a comfy couch with a cozy blanket? It communicates something to your body about: You can rest, you can rest here.

For Diane Little’s three daughters, shelter lead Jennifer Galloway decorates each bunk with the girls’ initials, wall stickers, and personal touches.

GALLOWAY: One that likes Bluey, one that likes unicorns, and one that likes Cocomelon. So I just got them each a lovey with the character they like.

The family arrives for the big reveal.

AUDIO: She loves it. I like the letters. Aren’t those cute?

When families leave the shelter, they get to take their “room” with them as a starter kit.

SJOELIN: We think it’s just normal stuff, things we take for granted. It’s life-changing for these families. It really is.

Cross agrees. Transforming a shelter room into a pleasing space helps residents feel comfortable and cared for.

CROSS: This is a temporary place for them, but the most that you can make it feel like it’s somewhere that’s theirs, the better long-term these people will be. It’s true of us in our own homes. When things are broken in our homes, when things are sloppy, we feel disintegrated. I can’t overestimate the value of feeling like you have a place to be.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Durham, North Carolina.

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.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Violent crime is not just a DC problem, it’s a national one. We’ll dig into the numbers. And, the Bureau of Prisons has a new leader, someone who knows the system from the inside. That and more tomorrow.  

I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

Jesus said to His disciples: “‘Temptations to sin[a] are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.’” —Luke 17:1, 2

Go now in grace and peace.

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