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Why Are Women Leaving the Church? Learning from Jen Hatmaker’s Deconversion
Whether or not you’re familiar with Jen Hatmaker, you need to know her story.
She rose to Christian celebrity in the early 2000s; her witty, conversational writing on Christian living resonated with many conservative evangelical women. The former Texas pastor’s wife wrote several best-selling books, amassed a large social media following, and was a beloved speaker at Christian women’s events.
That is until a 2016 interview when she came out in support of the LGBT+ lifestyle and argued for its consistency with biblical Christianity. From there, she pulled further and further away from orthodox belief and the evangelical community. Within a couple of years, she became a poster child of sorts for the trend of deconversion. As Michael Kruger has helpfully explained, there’s a pattern to deconversion stories, and Hatmaker’s example can help us understand it.
It’s not always quite so clear, however, what drives people to deconversion. On the surface, Hatmaker seemed to simply drift toward the culturally celebrated position on sexuality rather than faithfully stand for the biblical sexual ethic. But her new memoir, Awake, tells a fuller, more nuanced story of how “Jen Hatmaker the Pastor’s Wife and Faith Leader became a spiritual orphan from the church that raised me” (137).
As she tells her story, Hatmaker gives us a glimpse into the mindset and motivations that led her away from the evangelical faith and helps us understand some of the larger dynamics leading women away from the church.
Power of Negative Experience
From the outside, Hatmaker’s departure from evangelicalism seemed to originate in her changing view on sexual ethics. But in her own telling, there was an earlier, more pivotal moment when her disillusionment began—when she publicly condemned racism. “My comment feed was a daily nightmare. I lost a thousand followers a day,” she writes. “It was like I’d been leading a den of lions and they turned on me” (140).
Blindsided by this reaction, Hatmaker began to question evangelical doctrine: “Because if white evangelicalism was willing to say racism is obsolete when plain evidence exists to the contrary, if what is true no longer matters for what is right, what else might they be wrong about?” (141).
This was the beginning of her faith unraveling. Notably, she didn’t first become disillusioned with what the Bible says. She became disillusioned with how believers behaved. As Samuel James has observed, this is a growing trend: “When someone talks about why they’ve changed their convictions about something, they increasingly will refer to negative experiences more often than persuasive arguments. . . . It’s hard to separate personalities from doctrines, to stay committed to convictions even when others holding those convictions behave badly.”
This squares with findings reported by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge in their book, The Great Dechurching. They identify a group called “exvangelicals” comprising more than 2 million Americans who have “permanently, purposefully exited evangelicalism” in the last 25 years. Sixty-five percent of exvangelicals are women. The authors asked why they left the church: “Exvangelicals in our survey scored 74 percent higher on having experienced a lack of love from their congregations than the other four groups combined. On top of that, they scored twice as high as any other group on ‘negative experiences you personally had in an evangelical church.’”
As we see in Hatmaker’s example, people who leave evangelicalism may change their views on issues like sexuality or women’s roles in the church. But in many cases, the doctrinal shift comes after a negative experience within the church. Changes in theology may become a justification for leaving, but they aren’t necessarily the root cause.
Changes in theology may become a justification for leaving, but they aren’t necessarily the root cause.
It’s important to note that Hatmaker and many other women are leaving the church, not a church. It’s not particularly unusual for an individual or family to leave one local church and move their membership to another one if they lose trust in the leadership or have some other negative experience. In many situations, that’s a wise decision. It’s not even that uncommon for people to become disillusioned with an entire denomination and move to another one. In recent history, we’ve seen Christian leaders with large public platforms do just that.
Hatmaker levels significant critiques against Southern Baptist churches throughout her memoir. But interestingly, she doesn’t move to a different denomination. She stops going to church altogether.
Therapy Culture’s Influence
That brings us to a second important thread in Hatmaker’s story—the influence of therapeutic culture. Hatmaker’s title, Awake, points to how literally waking up during the night to discover her husband’s adultery began a process of figurative awakening to discover her inner strength and true self, much of which was guided by therapy.
Therapy and counseling can be helpful and necessary resources, and they can be conducted with a biblical worldview. I’m not critiquing Hatmaker’s decision to seek professional help as she processed betrayal and grief. But the therapy she engages in doesn’t seem biblically informed, and the way it shapes her understanding of her experience and identity is noteworthy.
Near the end of the memoir, as she discusses an experience of feeling lonely, Hatmaker writes, “Because my therapist is now the narrator of my inside voice, I am wondering if I might consider this feeling a tiny victory” (235). That’s a revealing statement: Her therapist is the narrator of her inside voice.
Our culture is increasingly embracing therapy, not as something like medicine for the sick but as a guiding perspective on life akin to religion. As Ian Harber explains, “Therapy has become the new confession, self-affirming mantras have replaced prayers, communities with the same diagnosis have supplanted church groups, and self-actualization has taken the place of salvation.”
Indeed, the way Hatmaker ultimately articulates her “awakening” at the end of the book illustrates Harber’s point. Hatmaker concludes,
The one who will never quit is me. The one who will never lie to me is me. The one who will always love me is me. The one who will always protect me is me. The one who will always choose me is me. (298)
Notice that every statement is a version of “The one . . . is me,” and almost every claim is something only true of God. Processing her life-altering experience through the lens of secular therapy brings Hatmaker to the conclusion that she’s her own savior.
But why does she need saving? It’s not because she’s a sinner in need of forgiveness but because of how others have wronged her. Every sentence implies a wrong she has suffered and explains how she’ll make it right. To be clear, I’m not debating that Hatmaker has been wronged. Her ex-husband and others clearly sinned against her. The point is to notice how those wrongs have become central to her identity and where she has decided to turn for help and healing.
Our culture is increasingly embracing therapy, not as something like medicine for the sick but as a guiding perspective on life akin to religion.
The Christian worldview says our greatest problem is our own sin, while acknowledging how the sin of others affects us and ultimately pointing us to Christ, who saves us and redeems our stories. The therapy-culture worldview says our greatest problem is other people’s sin, while pointing us to our own inner goodness and power that we can draw on to rewrite our stories.
It’s not hard to see how this secular therapy-culture worldview might lead someone away from church altogether. If you have a bad experience at church, but you still view yourself as a sinner in need of the Savior, then you find a different church or denomination. But if, like Hatmaker, you come to view yourself as savior, then there’s no point in going to church.
Wake-Up Call for the Church?
Sadly, Hatmaker isn’t the only woman who has suffered a negative experience in the church (whether online or in person). She’s not the only woman whose worldview is being shaped by secular therapy culture. Too many women are becoming spiritual orphans like Hatmaker, and I hope my observations help shed light on this concerning trend. But even more than that, I hope Hatmaker’s story reminds us that while deconversion may be influenced by common cultural dynamics, it’s always complex and deeply personal.
Some voices today emphasize that Christians need to “wake up” and recognize “what time it is.” But we won’t keep more women in the church simply by diagnosing the problems in our culture and fighting about them with other believers on social media. That sort of situation is exactly how Hatmaker’s deconversion began.
The church doesn’t need a wake-up call so much as it needs to heed the call of Christ to love our neighbors as ourselves. We must do the hard work of loving the individuals in our churches and communities. We need to do everything we can to decrease the number of women who say experiencing a lack of love from their congregations was the reason they left the church. We need to do everything we can to point women to the love of Christ, not the love of self, as their source of identity and fulfillment.
Jen Hatmaker’s memoir is a reminder that whatever else it might be time for, we can be sure it’s always time to love.
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