Jen Hatmaker once taught the Bible. Now she’s selling deconstruction. Denny Burk calls it spiritual poison and urges believers to see the danger behind her shifting gospel.



A well-known evangelical professor is sounding the alarm on influencer and author Jen Hatmaker, saying her brand of faith discards biblical truth and markets deconstruction to her audiences. Hatmaker was once a bestselling evangelical author and sought-after speaker whose books and live events shaped the faith journeys of millions of Christian women. Then, in 2016, she publicly affirmed same-sex marriage and voiced support for other LGBTQ causes. She went on to embrace other progressive ideas, and today says she rejects much if not most of what she was taught as a child, adding, “I’m still a big fan of Jesus, but I guess I don’t like many of his folks.”

In a weekend interview with The New York Times, Hatmaker said she no longer attends church.

Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of What Is the Meaning of Sex?, says Hatmaker’s public fall from the orthodox Christian faith has, tragically, influenced others.

“If Jen Hatmaker had quietly walked away from her faith, we probably wouldn’t be talking about her,” Burk said in a World Radio commentary. “But she didn’t do that. She still wants the attention of Christian women, and she would very much like to continue to peddle her wares to whomever will buy them. Only this time, she’s not selling discipleship. She’s selling deconstruction, a spiritual poison pill concealed in the rhetoric of therapy, freedom, and self-actualization.”

Burk added that “for only $69 dollars, Jen Hatmaker will show you exactly how to abandon Christ and His word” -- a reference to an online “Deconstruction + Reconstruction” course on Hatmaker’s website that explains: “Asking questions and going through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction is not something to be seen with shame or negativity.” The course even comes with a “Bible deconstruction worksheet.”

“She is telling people that they can be a ‘big fan of Jesus’ while looking down their noses at the body of Christ -- the church,” Burk said. “She has turned the Biblical admonition on its head. First John 4:20 proclaims: ‘If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.’”

Hatmaker’s deconstruction, Burk said, “is as complete and thorough an apostasy as I have ever seen.”

In the New York Times interview, Hatmaker criticized the abstinence movement of the 90s and early 2000s, saying purity culture and the True Love Waits campaign led to “a whole generation” of young people “absolutely freaked out around sex.”

She stopped attending church during the 2020 pandemic, as in-person gatherings shut down, and amid a painful divorce following her husband’s infidelity.

“By the time church started meeting again, and I went back to my own church that I had helped found, I could not shoulder everybody’s shock and pain and pity. I couldn’t handle it. So I stayed home, and I haven’t gone back,” she told the newspaper. “That’s not to say that I won’t ever. I don’t really know. But the organized-religion part of faith is not serving me right now.”

Hatmaker said her “faith is still what anchors me, what leads me, what compels me, what sustains me.”

“I had always deeply succeeded in the two institutions that kept me credible: church and marriage,” Hatmaker said. “Having lost one and disconnected myself from the other, I’ve discovered a faith that exists beautifully outside of all of that.”

Burk, though, says Hatmaker’s faith is not the faith of Christianity, but one of her own invention.

“Discerning followers of Christ will see through the ruse,” Burk said. “Tragically, many others won’t.”

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