Christian author Jen Hatmaker’s new book ‘Awake’ explores her divorce and evolving faith

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — When bestselling Christian author, podcaster and influencer Jen Hatmaker’s life fell apart following the discovery of her husband’s affair, she just wanted to “bubble wrap my little family and tuck us away from prying eyes forever,” she writes in her new memoir “Awake.” But that wasn’t an option for the woman whose brand was built on writing about her life.

“Transparency with each other is one of my core values,” she told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “That’s not a shtick I’m doing. It’s not a PR move. It’s not an optics choice.”

Still, she wasn’t yet ready to go public about the breakdown of her 26-year marriage when someone posted about it online in. But it’s now several years past the 2020 nadir when COVID-19 isolation and personal upheaval unraveled her life. While “Awake,” released last week, is in some ways about divorce, it is ultimately a hopeful book about Hatmaker’s evolving relationship with herself.

The book chronicles memories spanning Hatmaker’s entire life and is divided into three sections — beginning with “The End” and ending with “The Beginning.” Her writing is often funny, and she’s even funnier in person.

At a recent appearance in Nashville promoting the book, an audience of 400 women — and at least one man — hooted with laughter as she quoted from her adolescent journal and read about the 12 harrowing hours she spent on a dating app.

In an interview beforehand, Hatmaker discussed what has changed since 2020 and why she no longer feels the need to save Christianity from the religious right.

An evolving Christian faith

The daughter of a pastor and married at 19 to an aspiring minister, Hatmaker built a following writing Bible studies, devotionals, and books about following Jesus and her family’s efforts to consume less. She and her ex-husband also founded a church together and have five children, including two whom they adopted from Ethiopia.

But over the years, she veered away from the conservative Christianity she was raised in.

Hatmaker began pushing for action on racial equality in 2016, following the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And after an interview in which she advocated for same-sex marriage, Hatmaker’s publisher dropped her, her books were pulled from shelves, and many of her followers turned hostile. Hatmaker writes that she chose her integrity over her career in that moment. But not all of her fans deserted her, and new ones have arrived in the years since.

“I see that as just faith evolution, and I find it a great and wonderful good,” she said of her changing viewpoints. “I’m always proud of people who continue to grow. And I think that is indicative of a good faith, not a bad one.”

Criticism from the religious right used to “take me out, and put me under, and I would be so emotionally wrecked over it,” she said.

But now, Hatmaker says she’s “lost my fear over it.”

“I hope that at this age, at 51, I’m sitting in a place where the tail is no longer wagging the dog — that I am much more comfortable, much more secure and unafraid to simply live my life,” she said.

Taking a break from the church

While Hatmaker is still a Christian, she said she no longer feels good about attending church.

In “Awake,” she writes that the few times she has returned to the sanctuary in recent years, “I found myself desperate for someone to say the grittiest, hardest thing. I wanted to hear the truth about being a human and trying to figure out life, and loss, and God. I needed the opposite of polished and produced.”

She told AP she has been “so overly-churched, I am probably saved times 400.”

She is not sure what role organized religion will play in her future.

“Right now, that does not feel like an environment in which I can find God,” she said. “If I thought church was the only place I could find God, we’d have a real problem. But I don’t think that.”

Leading with kindness

Hatmaker, too, has reached a point where she doesn’t feel the need to “redeem the name of Jesus from the American flag and from all the ways that faith, at this point, has been bastardized in our country.”

“I think once upon a time, I would have felt far more responsible for ceding words or spaces to fundamentalists or losing ground to some of these Christian nationalists who are staking their flag in the ground and saying, ‘This is what God endorses,’” she said. “Once upon a time, believe me, that was my fight.”

She now finds that to be “a waste of energy and time.”

“I’m a better steward of my influence to sit in the pocket of the community that I have built and lead with what, to me, feels truthful, good, good-hearted, good-natured, loving, kind — all those old standard fruits of the spirit. They’re out of popularity, I understand. They’re not in vogue right now,” she said. “But I’m a better leader to simply build that community than try to convince another one to be better.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.