What happens when you reach middle age and the very things that sustained you, that gave you structure and identity — that made you you — are gone?
Jen Hatmaker went through a drastic middle-age crisis like that. Twice. Hatmaker, who is 51, had built a career as a Christian women’s influencer, best-selling author and TV personality — all along modeling a lighthearted, relatable yet enviable family lifestyle for evangelical women. Then, about a decade ago, she went through a public shift away from some of her most conservative stances on things like gay marriage. That shift alienated a big part of her fan base and turned her from popular to pariah in the evangelical community. It also forced her to find a new audience and a new relationship with her faith — and develop some seriously thick skin.
Then, in 2020, Hatmaker discovered that her husband of 26 years was cheating on her. They divorced soon after that, and for a second time, she had to pick up the broken pieces of her past life and start over in a myriad of ways: as a professional, as a public figure and as an independent person. Her upcoming book, “Awake: A Memoir,” which will be published on Sept. 23, marks the first time she has gone into detail publicly about that painful, heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, process.
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On your website, you say, “I used to be a darling of the evangelical women’s subculture, but now I am a bit of a problem child.” How did you become a darling? I grew up in a really traditional, regimented Christian environment, the Southern Baptist world. I had always been good at being good, so that was a great environment for me to succeed in because it’s rules based: This is what we do, this is what we don’t do, this is what we believe, this what we don’t believe. I went to a Baptist college, and I married a ministry major. We immediately went into full-time ministry. But the way that it works in church is a two-for-one approach: His job was my second job. I was a teacher, but I was at every single church thing that existed. Then when I was 29, I wrote my first book. Miraculously it got published, it became a five-book contract, and thus began my ascent into evangelical lady subculture.
How do you understand the influence that you had within that subculture? It dovetailed with the rise of social media. So I had twin paths: a traditional publishing path in that I was writing books, and they were going on shelves, and then this larger world that existed on the internet. I hit a moment in that space where it was growing as fast as I could keep up with it. I think what people were drawn to is that I held to most, if not all, of the traditional doctrines, the theology, the talking points, the party lines. At the same time, I was funny and had a shiny personality. I was entertaining and just spicy enough, but without threatening the story. That was the magic formula.
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