HGTV host Jen Hatmaker addressed the “reckoning” she faced from the religious community after coming out in support of LGTBQIA+ rights.
“You cannot put a rate on living in your own integrity. It’s priceless,” Hatmaker, 51, said on the September 16 episode of the “Jamie Kern Lima Show” podcast. “It was like I took a deep breath of fresh air for the first time in a decade.”
In 2016, Jen and today ex-husband Brandon Hatmaker publicly showed their support for same-sex marriages, with Jen later calling for the LGBTQIA+ community to be given full inclusion among Christians. The TV host and author has since also become a public champion for the rights of transgender youth.
Hatmaker opened up to host Jamie Kern Lima about how her shift in her beliefs about same-sex relationships came from examining biblical lessons “with an adult brain.”
HGTV alum and former pastor Brandon Hatmaker found love again after his today-ex-wife Jen Hatmaker revealed that infidelity led to their divorce. After several years of dating, Brandon, 53, and Jen, 51, got married in 1993 and expanded their family with five kids. They became reality stars when their HGTV series My Big Family Renovation […]
“[I learned] to process this information in a new way, independent of the spiritual authorities who just told me what to think,” she remembered.
The Your Big Family Renovation alum described initially feeling “cognitive dissonance” between her evolving belief system and the spiritual principles she’d grown up with.
“It was untenable anymore because I’d changed my mind. I examined [the issue] with an adult thought and discernment and went, ‘I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s true at all,’” Hatmaker insisted. “Not just because of what I think but what I see! … Not only is it not true but it’s so damaging. It’s so painful and it’s having catastrophic consequences.”
Once she chose to stand publicly with a historically marginalized group, Jen faced the wrath of those who still passionately supported religious doctrine.
“I also knew the community … I’m not new here. I knew. Boy, talk about ‘cancel culture.’ That’s it. It was the end of the road,” she said of the backlash. “There was no road after that, and I knew it.”
Hatmaker recalled how, early on, she felt “scared” to go from being “a darling in evangelical subcultures” to a pariah among her friends and loved ones.
Jen Hatmaker in April 2021. Paul Archuleta/Getty Images
“That was the end of my belonging in this space,” she said. “It was the end of my career, as I knew it. … But, walking around, knowing I was duplicitous — that I believed one thing and I was letting the [LGBTQIA+] community suffer at the hands of the subculture I was in and succeeding in — I couldn’t do it another day. I could not look at myself in the mirror.”
She added, “I knew I was going to keep my career or I was going to keep my integrity. But I could not have both.”
After Hatmaker went public with her dissent to evangelical doctrine, her bestselling books were pulled from shelves “overnight.”
“It was a lot of loss,” she acknowledged. “[The backlash] was really scary. It had a lot of attention on it. It wasn’t quiet. It was loud and splashy.”
Hatmaker went on, “I lost a lot of friends, lots a lot of partners, lost a lot of everything, I guess.”
HGTV’s Jen Hatmaker is happy and in love with boyfriend Tyler Merritt after her marriage to Brandon Hatmaker ended due to infidelity. In September 2025, Jen revisited her divorce in her memoir, Awake, which addressed Brandon’s cheating scandal and their subsequent split. The former couple were married from 1993 to 2020. Before their breakup, Jen […]
However, Hatmaker stressed that she doesn’t see it as “a sad story” because she championed a community that desperately needed help from public figures. She later confirmed to Kern Lima, 48, that she knew many religious leaders who secretly agreed with her about LGBTQIA+ rights but were too afraid to take a stand.
She disclosed, “It’s been a decade since that whole breach, and I’m no longer a part of that [evangelical] community and I’ve built a new one over here in the wilderness, but to this day, I will have pastors, preachers, big para-ministry leaders give me their little, quiet, private DMs going, ‘I am 100 percent in alignment with you on this theologically but I will lose everything if I say it.’ I’m like, ‘You will, so when you’re ready to pay that rate, come back to me.’”
Hatmaker concluded, “That rate is so affordable, compared to what you get and compared to what we owe the community. … We owe them our support. We owe them our truth. We owe them allyship. … It’s an easy rate to pay on the other side of it.”
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