Jen Hatmaker, progressive Christian influencer, bestselling writer and speaker who has long stirred controversy inside Evangelical circles, has revealed she has walked away from the Church and might never return.
“I’m out of the church straight away. I do not know that I’ll ever return, and I do not know that I won’t ever return,” Hatmaker told Time in an interview ahead of the discharge of her recent book, Awake. “My lifelong exposure has left me in a spot where I do know an excessive amount of. I even have been an element of the issue. So I want a break from the machine.”
The 51-year-old author and podcaster, who built a platform of greater than 1.5 million followers, claimed she’s maintaining a relationship with Jesus but not feels at home inside institutional Christianity.
“I do not feel like I’m forfeiting or need to forfeit my faith. I’m relearning what faith can seem like outside of the structures. And I’m finding it very healing, very gentle,” she said.
Hatmaker’s recent memoir details the breakdown of her 26-year marriage to Brandon Hatmaker, a pastor, who left her in 2020 after she discovered his infidelity. The two share five children and previously served on the leadership team at Austin New Church.
“Divorce isn’t that interesting of a story. It happens to each other one in all us,” she said. “But once I got far enough away from the trauma … and I began examining all of the bricks that built that house — patriarchy, religious subculture, body shame, gender limitations, purity culture, misogyny — I began to understand that perhaps it just wasn’t such a shock that that house got here down.”
When asked if the Church is “working against itself in promoting marriages after which creating an environment where they can not really survive,” Hatmaker said it’s “hard to parse out” the threads of “health and connection and goodness and longevity.”
“They’re in there, but they’re interspersed with all these others which actively sabotage the system,” Hatmaker said. “I went to church thrice every week as a fetus. It was the air in every room that I breathed. Separating out from that level of indoctrination is difficult, but I feel that the church, at the very least the one which I even have been an element of, idolizes marriage to such a level that it pushes people into unhealthy spaces, and it keeps them there. It has done an actual disservice to marriage overall.”
Hatmaker also criticized the response of the Christian community when her divorce became public, claiming she took the brunt of the blame.
“After the divorce became public, it was all eyes on me. ‘What did she do? I knew this was going to occur. She had walked away from the tenets of her faith. She let Satan into the wedding,’” she said. “It was all my fault, based on the web.”
She also decried the sexual ethics she absorbed as a teen through the rise of purity culture within the Nineteen Eighties: “It was just shame- and fear-based,” she said. “It became really clear to us that our belonging was predicated on our adherence to purity culture. And then we walked that right down the aisle and expected in some way a healthy bedroom to return out of that system.”
Hatmaker’s eagerness to critique what she has deemed “corrosive systems” has long made her a lightning rod amongst Evangelical Christian circles. Her website states: “I was once a darling of evangelical women’s subculture but now I’m a little bit of an issue child.”
“I still love Jesus but church is difficult for me, and this makes me sad, like I’m missing my childhood home.”
In 2016, the publishing company Lifeway stopped selling her books after she expressed support for same-sex marriage.
“From a civil rights and civil liberties side and from only a human being side, any two adults have the fitting to decide on who they need to love.” She added that “they ought to be afforded the identical legal protections as any of us,” and maintained that, “I’d never wish anything less for my gay friends.”
In 2020, Hatmaker released a podcast titled “A Moment of Pride,” where she publicly said she was “glad” her daughter is lesbian and said her best regret was speaking out against homosexuality.
“I wouldn’t change one ounce of who she is. Not a molecule. Not a moment. The only thing I’d change in our story, is I wish I could return and shake myself to life sooner — well, well, well, before,” she said. “The truth is, each church is just full of gay kids and gay mothers and dads and you recognize, it’s just so irresponsible to interrupt their hearts.”
In a 2022 blog post, she expressed her support for abortion: “Women deserve agency and alternative not only with their bodies but over the choice to parent for the remaining of their lives,” she wrote.
In 2023, she promoted “sexual wellness” products, including “libido gummies” and “arousal oil” on social media. In a post that began with the phrase “attention sexy people,” she wrote, “The rock stars over at FOCL have been working on a sexual wellness line for months to get it good.”
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