“This year I became painfully aware of the machine, the Christian Machine,” she wrote in April on her blog. Hatmaker’s career was on the line, but so was her very sense of self, and the essence of her life and work-most importantly, her faith.
“I thought we had a lot more common ground.” The fissures within Christianity became trenches, with men and women like Hatmaker, as well as Christians of color, left on the losing side. “What’s been really painful and disorienting for me is to realize how far away from my evangelical family I am,” she told me in an interview before her Dallas event. And Hatmaker’s community-at least 80 percent of the white evangelicals in America-had helped put him in office. Two weeks after her bombshell interview, Trump won. “Think about how our gay brothers and sisters feel.” The gilded auditorium was quiet, its 2,300 seats filled to capacity with nearly all women. “The way people spoke about us, it was as if I had never loved Jesus a day in my life,” Hatmaker recently told an audience in Dallas. She was afraid to be in public, and she wasn’t sleeping or eating well. She says people in her little town of Buda, Texas, just south of Austin, pulled her children aside and said terrible things about her and her husband. There were soon angry commenters and finger-wagging bloggers.
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That’s when the full weight of conservative Christian outrage crashed down on Hatmaker. Nor will we forget the Christian leaders that betrayed their sisters in Christ for power.” Then, in an interview with Religion News Service columnist Jonathan Merritt, she made what was a stunning admission for her evangelical community: She said she supported same-sex relationships. But then 2016 happened, and, well, of course everything changed.ĭuring the campaign, as other white evangelicals coalesced around the Republican nominee, Hatmaker effectively joined the coterie of “Never Trump” evangelicals, telling her more than half a million Facebook followers that Donald Trump made her “sad and horrified and despondent.” After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked and prominent evangelical men came to Trump’s defense, she tweeted: “We will not forget. Up until that point, she had been a wildly influential and welcome presence in the evangelical world, a Christian author whose writings made the New York Times best-seller list and whose home renovation got its own HGTV series. LifeWay Christian Stores, the behemoth retailer of the Southern Baptist Convention, pulled her titles off the shelves. Readers mailed back her books to her home address, but not before some burned the pages or tore them into shreds. Last fall, Jen Hatmaker, a popular evangelical author and speaker, started getting death threats. She has written for the New Republic, the Atlantic and Washingtonian. Tiffany Stanley is a writer based in Washington.
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