Jen Hatmaker on Speaking Out, Breaking Down, and Beginning Again

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When your story falls apart, how do you begin again? Jen Hatmaker has lived through more than one public unraveling. Once an acclaimed evangelical Christian leader and author, she lost much of her audience when she began to publicly speak out against racism and homophobia within the church. And then, a few years later, she lost her marriage too. But instead of retreating, she rebuilt her life from the ground up. In this episode of Hello Monday, Jessi Hempel sits down with Jen to talk about faith, identity, and what happens when you decide to live in alignment with your values, even when it means losing the world you built. Jen shares what she’s learned about listening to her intuition, rewriting her story, and building a new identity rooted in honesty and self-trust. Her new book, Awake, begins the night everything changed—and chronicles how she moved from shock and grief to calm and clarity. Jessi and Jen discuss: What it means to lose everything you thought defined you How to tell the truth about your life, even when it breaks the story you wanted How to listen to intuition when fear is loud Jen’s experience of public cancellation after confronting racism and affirming LGBTQ+ rights The difference between recovering and truly flourishing How identity evolves after faith, marriage, and public failure What it takes to move from rupture to renewal Jen’s story is about more than resilience. It’s about the power of starting over and finding freedom on the other side of letting go. Continue the conversation with us at Hello Monday Office Hours! Join us Wednesday at 3 PM ET on the LinkedIn News page.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I had lost what I thought were the two most important institutions on my resume.
0:05.2	Church or marriage.
0:10.0	From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel, and this is Hello Monday.
0:14.0	And today we have an episode for you that is all about change and our identity.
0:19.6	Right.
0:20.5	So our guest is Jen Hatmaker and I first started following
0:24.6	Jen Hatmaker a lot of years ago when she was a Christian influencer. Her whole audience was
0:32.4	committed to her beliefs and her thoughts about what it meant to be her, a very young, married mother living in the
0:39.8	Christian faith. Now, Jen Hatmaker was one of the first people that I knew of to be canceled by
0:46.0	the internet. What happened is this. Back in 2016 and 2017, her beliefs began to evolve as she
0:52.8	learned more about the world. And she tried to take her
0:56.0	audience with her as she began to reckon with big concepts like racism in the church, like the
1:03.2	existence of LGBT members of the Christian faith. And much of her audience did not share her beliefs.
1:10.5	They did not come with her. In fact,
1:12.0	they turned her off. You know, most of the folks who were canceled by the internet during this period,
1:18.5	we never heard from them again. They went quiet. But not Jen. Jen came back and she grew a new
1:25.0	following, a following of other people who are similarly confused
1:29.0	by the values of the faith they had grown up in and similarly interested in questioning
1:33.6	them. And so they followed Jen right up until the moment in 2020 when once again suddenly
1:40.4	her feed went dark. This time it wasn't because the world canceled her. And we all wondered,
1:46.9	well, why was it? That's where our story begins today. Her new book is called Awake. It just
1:52.4	debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. And it begins in the moment when her
	...

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