Prominent religious author Jen Hatmaker dared to speak out against two of the most powerful and hypocritical forces in America today: Evangelical Christian Republicans and Donald Trump.
Hatmaker took a stand on same-sex marriage, calling out the intolerant position of Evangelicals on the issue.
We all know that Donald Trump is hardly a paragon of moral virtue, and prior to his nomination in 2016, most of the Evangelicals were vehemently opposed to him as a candidate. When he secured the nomination, they put all the character flaws aside and wholeheartedly supported him, sinfulness, lewdness and all. Obviously, political party supersedes morality with these folks. Democrats must be morally chaste, Republicans can have multiple wives, affairs, etc. Tribalism is the order of the day with Republicans.
Trump clashes with evangelical ethics in ways that got Bill Clinton impeached two decades ago.
You may recall that the former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed declared that “character matters” when it came to Clinton but privately offered to run Trump’s campaign in 2012.
In an interview this past August, she was asked about her life since she came out in favor of same-sex marriage and her unheeded warnings about Donald Trump's treatment of women.
This entire year has just been one for the record books. Everything last year just felt like it was DEFCON 1 at all times. It was sort of the dovetail of my statements toward the LGBTQ community and their inclusion in every manner of church, right alongside the election and the insane rhetoric surrounding the campaign.
In both cases, for me, I just could not sit silently by in order to protect my own brand. I just couldn’t do it. And I was advised to do it.
Hatmaker, in an interview with Politico, explained how much worse it became after she proclaimed herself a "Never Trumper."
(Hatmaker) says people in her little town of Buda, Texas, just south of Austin, pulled her children aside and said terrible things about her and her husband. She was afraid to be in public, and she wasn’t sleeping or eating well. “The way people spoke about us, it was as if I had never loved Jesus a day in my life,” Hatmaker recently told an audience in Dallas. The gilded auditorium was quiet, its 2,300 seats filled to capacity with nearly all women. “And I was just an ally,” she said. “Think about how our gay brothers and sisters feel.”
“This year I became painfully aware of the machine, the Christian Machine,” she wrote in April on her blog. It was Good Friday, a somber day for Christians to observe the crucifixion of Jesus. Hatmaker wrote that she understood now the machine’s “systems and alliances and coded language and brand protection,” not as the insider she had long been, but “from the outside where I was no longer welcome.” During the election season, she added, the “Christian Machine malfunctioned.” It laid bare the civil war within her Christian community.
And of course, she's received death threats from people who claim they obey the Ten Commandments better than anybody.
It's rather disturbing that someone who is a spiritual and moral leader is punished for having compassion, kindness and other virtues which Jesus Christ espoused. But yet, here we are. Hatmaker should not be the exception, she should be the norm.
