Bestselling author Jen Hatmaker says she's no longer worried about saving Christianity

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. 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.

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.

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.”

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.

Best-selling Christian writer and influencer Jen Hatmaker poses for a portrait in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Best-selling Christian writer and influencer Jen Hatmaker listens as an audience member asks a question during a talk by Hatmaker in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Audience members listen as best-selling Christian writer and influencer Jen Hatmaker talks about her new book, "Awake," in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Best-selling Christian writer and influencer Jen Hatmaker talks about her new book, "Awake," in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Audience members applaud author and influencer Jen Hatmaker as she talks about her new book, "Awake," in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Best-selling Christian writer and influencer Jen Hatmaker waits to be introduced to talk about her new book, "Awake," in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal immigration court in Lower Manhattan has come to represent the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in New York City, with agents carrying out chaotic and sometimes violent arrests in the hallway as migrants leave hearings.

Now the court is serving as a front in a different kind of battle: one of the city’s most closely watched congressional races.

In the Democratic primary between incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman and former city Comptroller Brad Lander — for a district so solidly blue that the June primary is considered its deciding election — both candidates have made the Trump administration's treatment of migrants at 26 Federal Plaza a feature of their campaigns, but with decidedly different approaches.

Goldman — an heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune and former prosecutor who was lead counsel for President Donald Trump’s first impeachment — has approached the topic with a lawyerly bent that leverages the power of his office.

He sued the administration to open immigration detention centers to members of Congress, conducts oversight visits and turned his office across the street into what he's called a triage center that connects immigrants with advocacy groups and legal services.

After a recent visit, Goldman credited his oversight work as a reason conditions at a holding facility inside the building have improved.

“What you see from our multipronged approach is the way that I push back, which is not performative, but it is substantive,” he told The Associated Press outside 26 Federal Plaza after he toured the detention center that is closed to the public.

Meanwhile, Lander — a progressive city government stalwart who is running with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — has acted as protester and court observer, watching hearings and attempting to accompany immigrants out of the building past masked federal agents.

His efforts have gotten him arrested twice, the most recent headed to a trial scheduled to take place just before the primary.

“I would characterize his oversight function as strongly worded letters," Lander told AP when asked about Goldman's approach. “And my oversight function is: Show up with hundreds of your neighbors and bear witness and accompany people and demand access and stay until they give it to you or they arrest you.”

Lander's first arrest happened last year when he linked arms with a person authorities were attempting to detain in the hallway outside the court. Lander was running for mayor at the time, and the arrest gave his campaign a jolt of excitement at a time when Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo were considered the front-runners in the race.

A few months later, after losing the mayoral primary but not long before launching his congressional campaign, Lander was arrested again during a large protest at the building and hit with a misdemeanor obstruction charge.

But instead of accepting a deal that would have made the case go away in six months, Lander instead opted to go to trial. He said the case would extract information about the federal government's immigration enforcement efforts at the building.

Goldman dismissed Lander's efforts as performative.

"I don't understand why someone would reject a dismissal of a case so that he can have a public trial, ostensibly to ask for information that I could provide him whenever he wanted because I have the answers from doing my oversight,” Goldman said.

This week, Lander returned to 26 Federal Plaza to sit in on hearings. But just before entering the building, his team got word that federal agents were lingering outside an immigration hearing at a different federal courtroom in a building across the street. He raced over and eventually found the agents, who were wearing masks and milling around in the court's waiting room.

“The challenge is trying to figure out who they're going to arrest,” Lander said, popping out of the hearing, where he sat in a back row and took notes. After a while, the agents walked away from the hearing room, down a hallway and exited the floor. It was not clear why they left.

“Maybe we have different styles," Lander said of his opponent after the agents departed. He later went back across the street and filmed a campaign video in front of 26 Federal Plaza.

FILE - Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., left, speaks to the federal agents at the Jacob K. Javits federal building, June 18, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

FILE - New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and FBI agents outside federal immigration court, June 17, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Olga Fedorova, File)

FILE - Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol, July 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, file)

Candidate for U.S. Congress Brad Lander appears outside a Federal Immigration Courtroom, in New York, Monday, May 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)