Twenty years ago, Hatmaker was much like Waters: a young pastor’s wife raising three little kids while writing her first books on Biblical wisdom for Christian women. She practiced the same schedule sorcery as Waters, writing from 8:15 A.M. to 12:15 P.M., three days a week, plus occasionally during nap time. In “Make Over,” from 2007, she seeks to help overwhelmed women find their balance: “If the Lord created a woman to be a servant of God, a wife, a mother, a professional, and a friend—not forgetting that she is still a daughter—then there is a way to be that woman.” In “Ms. Understood,” published a year later, she distances herself from feminism—“this is no battle cry for independence, because men are our beloved allies”—and carefully circumscribes her mission. “On behalf of my generation, I believe we’re pursuing center,” she writes. “We recognize the oppression of being subservient male accessories as well as the danger of turning into contentious, genderless semi-females.” Same polemic, just with Bush-era archetypes.
Not long after these books appeared, however, Hatmaker’s career took an unexpected turn. She had begun straining against the boundaries of the Southern Baptist subculture she came up in, in which women teachers were relegated to small groups and sidebars. She and her husband left their church to co-found “one centered around the marginalized.” She started tossing around words like “patriarchy” and “white supremacy.” In 2016, she gave an interview in which she said she would gladly officiate a gay marriage. The backlash was swift: books pulled off shelves, speaking engagements cancelled. For four years, she slowly built back her brand—still the advice-giving Christian sister, just a little libbed out. But, in 2020, the final, irredeemable break came: she filed for divorce.
“Hey, buddy—how about you come up here and call me a tufted titmouse to my face?”
Cartoon by Johnny DiNapoli
In a memoir from this fall, “Awake” (Avid Reader), Hatmaker writes of how she discovered that her husband, whom she had met and married while they were both students at the same Southern Baptist college, had been drinking, lying, and cheating. “Out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: ‘I just can’t quit you.’ My husband of twenty-six years is voice-texting his girlfriend next to me in our bed.” Hatmaker, who is now fifty-one, had spent years coaching women on marriage: “Sweet Friend, if your marriage has suffered a catastrophic blow, I beg you, seek Christian counseling,” she wrote in her early thirties. “I know it would cost your pride, your controlled image, to seek help, but is that worse than a destroyed marriage? A family in crisis? A lifetime of loneliness?” And yet, when the catastrophic blow finally came for her, she knew to call it. Within thirty-six hours of her middle-of-the-night discovery, she was talking to a lawyer.
Whatever evolution Hatmaker went through in the heady years around Donald Trump’s first Presidency, it was nothing compared with the wreckage at home. She sees her failed marriage not just as a specific relationship gone bad but as a casualty of rigid Christian purity culture that taught her to keep herself small and to idolize early marriage as the ultimate achievement. “The community that raised me placed little premium on healthy young evolution,” she writes in “Awake.” Her husband entered ministry soon after graduation, a choice she seems to look back on with both regret and tenderness. “What if that boy splinters inside hierarchical leadership, and that girl is actually powerful?” she writes. “The patriarchy failed him too.” She is scathing about “biblical rules” that “felt terrible”; for example, that women should “spiritually and socially submit to men” and that queer people should be shamed. “Some combination of patriarchy plus religion, gender roles plus groupthink, power plus the threat of exclusion became the soil in which my marriage ultimately died,” she writes. She stopped going to church, convinced that “the fruit of these trees was rotten. Not one bad apple, not one questionable limb; rotten to the roots.” Her career has been huge—five Times best-sellers, an HGTV show, more than half a million Instagram followers—but she concluded it wasn’t possible to continue within the constraints of traditional Christian womanhood.
Many evangelicals of Hatmaker’s generation have travelled the same path of pointed questioning—not just about specific verses or churches but about their whole cultural milieu. The phenomenon is so common that defectors have repurposed the term “deconstruction” for it, as in “I’m deconstructing the deeply patriarchal views that evangelicalism taught me.” Of the five prominent Christian female writers whom Hatmaker counts as among her closest online friends, two got divorced around the same time that she did, each from a pastor she had married young. The scripts Hatmaker seems most interested in these days don’t come from the Bible. They come from within. In “Awake,” she lightly auditions new paradigms for sisterly guidance: learn to self-mother; listen to your body; trust your intuition as the greatest source of truth. Your authority is yourself. Her early books are no longer on her website.
Source: Read Full Article
