Jen Hatmaker, progressive Christian influencer, bestselling author and speaker who has long stirred controversy within Evangelical circles, has revealed she has walked away from the Church and might never return.
"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," Hatmaker told Time in an interview ahead of the release of her new book, Awake. "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."
The 51-year-old writer and podcaster, who built a platform of more than 1.5 million followers, claimed she’s maintaining a relationship with Jesus but no longer feels at home within institutional Christianity.
"I don't feel like I am forfeiting or want to forfeit my faith. I'm relearning what faith can look like outside of the structures. And I'm finding it very healing, very gentle," she said.
Hatmaker’s new 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 is not that interesting of a story. It happens to every other one of us,” she said. “But 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.”
When asked if the Church is “working against itself in promoting marriages and then creating an atmosphere where they can't 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 three times a week as a fetus. It was the air in every room that I breathed. Separating out from that level of indoctrination is hard, but I think that the church, at least the one that I have been a part of, 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."
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 happen. She had walked away from the tenets of her faith. She let Satan into the marriage,’” she said. “It was all my fault, according to the internet.”
She also decried the sexual ethics she absorbed as a teen during the rise of purity culture in the 1980s: “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 somehow a healthy bedroom to come out of that system.”
Hatmaker’s eagerness to critique what she has deemed “corrosive systems” has long made her a lightning rod among Evangelical Christian circles. Her website states: “I used to be a darling of evangelical women’s subculture but now I am a bit of a problem child.”
“I still love Jesus but church is hard for me, and this makes me sad, like I am 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 just a human being side, any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love.” She added that “they should be afforded the same legal protections as any of us,” and maintained that, “I would 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 greatest 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 would change in our story, is I wish I could go back and shake myself to life sooner — well, well, well, before,” she said. “The truth is, every single church is just filled with gay kids and gay moms and dads and you know, it's just so irresponsible to break their hearts.”
In a 2022 blog post, she expressed her support for abortion: “Women deserve agency and choice not only with their bodies but over the decision to parent for the rest 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 just right.”
