At the dawn of 2020, Christian author-lifestyle influencer-lightning rod Jen Hatmaker posted on social media a photo of her pastor husband Brandon and her at junior prom in Oklahoma and reflected affectionately on their 26 years of marriage and five children. Of the couple in the photo she wrote, “I wish I could tell them it all works out and they will build a beautiful life and their children will delight them and this love lasts, and also they will never fit into those outfits again so they should take a few more pictures.”
Relatable, wise, funny, reassuring: it was the sort of classic Hatmaker post that has propelled her to popularity among a cohort of women, many Evangelical-adjacent, who are, at midlife, taking stock of the delta between their youthful hopes and their current reality, and resolving to muddle through despite the challenges and disappointments. The affirmations from fans—she has 1.5 million social media followers—poured into the comments, with some respondents posting prom photos and self-deprecating jokes of their own.
Fewer than eight months later, locked down in the pandemic, Hatmaker awoke at 2:30 a.m. to the sound of her husband sending another woman a voice memo. He moved out the following morning. Within three months they were divorced. “I feel so sad when I look at that [post],” says Hatmaker in an interview a few weeks before her new book Awake hits the shelves. “What was true at the time, what I was unwilling to both face and say, is that we were in the weeds. I can pick up on that, even in the writing: Let’s just keep trying.”
Divorce is painful. A public divorce is more painful. A public divorce when you’re a prominent Christian is passing-a-kidney-stone-while-making-a-commencement-address level of discomfort. But pain, as they say, is good material. More than 40 years after Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, women writers are increasingly taking their marital discord to the page—Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Scaachi Koul’s Sucker Punch, and Haley Mlotek’s No Fault were all released in the last two years. Hatmaker’s book is part of what seems to be an emerging subgenre of divorce-growth memoir, written by people who were raised Christian such as Glennon Doyle, Lyz Lenz, and Lysa TerKeurst.
Hatmaker had already upset the capital-E Evangelical community because she was a female preacher, who supported the LGBT community, including gay marriage, spoke out against Christian support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, and taught that racism was a “scourge on the American landscape” that every white Christian must confront within their own lives. She spoke to TIME about how she remade her life after her marriage dissolved, the lingering aftereffects of purity culture, and why she no longer goes to church.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There are a lot of divorce memoirs. You are very online. Your fans would have known what you’ve been going through. Why write a book about it?
Divorce is not that interesting of a story. It happens to every other one of us. I did not anticipate my marriage going down in flames in that way, but when I got far enough away from the trauma of the way it ended, 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. I hope I’ve taken a clear-eyed look at what those bricks are and how they contributed, and how I was complicit.
The church is a very big promoter of marriage, but many of the things you name–purity culture, body shaming–are church-authored things. Is the church working against itself in promoting marriages and then creating an atmosphere where they can’t really survive?
It’s so hard to parse out; where are 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. I don’t have a tidy answer to this; it still feels like I have got a magnifying glass on, and I am looking at all those threads and trying to pluck out the ones that are good. 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.
What do you feel when you look back on that Facebook post now?
We had five kids, and I saw us walking them down aisles together and rocking our grandbabies on our porch. And I was very, very committed to the bit, and not even in a super duplicitous way. I just really wanted my marriage to work, and even though I knew everything in my body was telling me, five-alarm fire. When I see that picture, what I remember is how hard I was trying, how much I wanted things to improve and how little I knew what was happening behind my back. I think I’ll always feel a lot of grief.
When the news of the affair broke, did you as the betrayed one feel stigma or did you feel people supporting you?
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.” It was all my fault according to the internet. But in my world, I felt almost entirely loved and supported. That was the primary response from my community, because this is not an uncommon story. So many women kept holding up these lanterns for me, saying, “Keep going. You’re going to get there. It is not always going to feel like this.”
You have reason to be very angry at your ex, but in the book you’re pretty compassionate. Why is that?
I was mad, and in some ways I’m still mad. Anger is a useful fuel at the beginning of a story. It kept me moving into the rebuild process. I’m not taking responsibility for his choices; he made some terrible ones and they’ll follow him forever, and they’ll follow our family forever. But there’s just no way for me to not acknowledge that we were both a part of several systems that were corrosive and made it really difficult to be honest and to seek help. So that gave me some compassion. And then ultimately, we’ve got a lot of pavement in front of us. We’ve got nothing but graduations and weddings and babies for the next 40 years. It doesn’t serve my family long term for us to be in a constantly contentious space. That kept my delete button in working order.
In the book say that you have left the church, although you have not left Jesus. Is this the first step away from being a practicing Christian, or are you looking for a whole new expression of faith?
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. I grew up under the steeples. My dad was a pastor. I married one at the ripe age of 19, and I have always been a part of the machine. I was a leader. I was an organizer. I was a pastor. I don’t even know what church could or would be for me just as a person. 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. 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. I did not grow up in a gentle faith. I was reading an interview with theologian Dallas Willard. Somebody asked him to describe Jesus with just one word. He said “relaxed.” My God was never relaxed. That Dude was wound tight.
You are tough on purity culture. But in some ways wasn’t purity culture a push against the other culture of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which said that all virgins were losers, and do not wait one more second to have sex, no matter how bad? Is there a line to walk between those two for how we talk to young people about sexual development?
I was on the front edge of the huge wave of purity culture in the ‘80s. That was when all that curriculum hit the market, and all of a sudden there was a way to package virginity and sell it. It’s not as if we were educated in a way that was well-rounded, that was healthy, that talked about anything meaningful around sex, consent, or attachment, or commitment. It wasn’t like that at all. It was just shame- and fear-based. It became really clear to us that our belonging was predicated on our adherence to purity culture. And so we were terrified. And then we walked that right down the aisle and expected somehow a healthy bedroom to come out of that system. I feel grateful to see that conversation shifting in different ways for the younger generation. I think my generation has been deeply affected by that approach, and we’re having to relearn a lot of sexuality here in the middle of life.
When TIME interviewed you in 2017, you called yourself a D-minus celebrity. Where do you think you’re at now?
I don’t know what celebrity even is; the internet is so weird. But I do have this sense, in this world, which is so outrageous, so loud, with a billion moving parts every other second, that I’m not interested in competing for the spotlight. And I certainly was—I’m ambitious in general. But at this point, I have this real sense that I’m a steward over these women who have opted in. They voluntarily are here to build this community. And I feel a deep sense of love and responsibility to them. And so even if it never grows by one more person, I’ll be grateful for that for the rest of my days.
Have you found that ambition has been one of the qualities that people have punished you for the most?
Of course. The patriarchal nature, of not just the world, but Evangelicalism, has always promoted that women are second. That’s not how they would say it. They would say submissive, complementary. There’s some lovely language around it. In most cases, it’s subtle. That kind of stuff absolutely could take me out of my game, even a decade ago. I have a hyper fixation on what other people think of me. It’s a very, very overdeveloped muscle I am constantly trying to get to atrophy.
I was surprised to read that you had to take charge of your own finances. You have a lot of income streams: the tour, the books, the book club, all the courses, the sponsorships. You didn’t outsource finances to an adviser? Haven’t you got too much to do to be sitting there stapling receipts?
That’s kind of a humiliating part of my story, this reckoning with my financial irresponsibility. In our marriage, and this is not a super uncommon division of labor, I handed all money to my ex. We had a CPA, we had some people, but that was a burden to hand to somebody without any cooperation, without any partnership. I had not even pulled up my bank account to see, where is our money? How much do I make? What are we putting in retirement? When I finally went to a financial planner after it all crashed, he was asking me what I now know to be very basic questions. I could not answer any of them, none. It was very scary. I still have some fear around money that I’m still trying to purge. But to realize I was capable of computing and accounting, that I’m actually good with money and I’m careful with money, that put a safety into my body.
I saw that you’re promoting THC gummies for sleep. Have you had any pushback on that, given how you grew up?
Actually, no. I am basically like the target demo. We’re all in perimenopause and menopause; none of us can sleep for a damn. Also, these are legal, you can get them in the mail—we’re not talking about getting them off a street corner. And again, I am north of the season of life where I make all of my choices based on what a certain subset of the culture is going to say.
So if people say, “Hey, Jen Hatmaker’s promoting weed! That shows how far she strayed from the faith,” you don’t give AF?
Couldn’t have said it better than that.
Your online style is very self-disclosive, and this book is very self-disclosive. Do you ever feel like you want to take some of it back, that you’ve gone too far?
Honestly, we’ll see. I don’t know which parts people are going to run up the flagpole in a way that is uncomfortable. But at this point, I feel very settled. I do not feel manic. I don’t feel like I am polishing up my public-relations responses. I’ve said what I said as true as I could say it and as generously as I could.
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