A year after Queen Bee of pagan mommy bloggers and apostate influencers, Jen Hatmaker, announced that she’s left the church, she shared on her substack that after “a couple years of investigation” she’s “quietly laid down” her belief in a literal hell, and it’s been “best thing that ever happened” to her.
This is no surprise, as Hatmaker is not a Christian and hasn’t been for a long time. We’ve covered her decline into apostasy in our posts:
Jen Hatmaker Shilling Sex Gummies and ‘Arousal Oils’
Jen Hatmaker Org. Supports ‘Gender Affirming Care’ to Trans and Non-Binary Children, Ages 3-10
Jen Hatmaker Comes out as Pro-Choice
Jen Hatmaker: ‘The Center of the Church has Failed to be Black, Gay, and Transgendered’
Jen Hatmaker Awakens Her Mind to The ‘Mystery’ of ‘The Feminine Divine’
Another Jen Hatmaker Org. Brings Together Queer and Transgendered 6-Year-Olds for Playtime and Community
Jen Hatmaker Org. Supports ‘Gender Affirming Care’ for Children+ Gives Money to Groomers
Jen Hatmaker Celebrates Pride Month by Announcing New LGBTQIA2S+ Curriculum
Jen Hatmaker Mourns Loss of RBG, Says of Her: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’
Hatmaker elaborated on her depature on her Substack, writing:
I can’t remember doing anything out of spiritual joy. My “faith walk” was a weighted orchestration to keep myself out of hell, get (or try to stay) on God’s good side, and rescue all my classmates and everyone on earth from a fiery eternity that God was eager to sentence them to because they weren’t born in evangelical Kansas. He would gladly set them all on actual fire and let them burn for the rest of time. God was mad. God was offended. God was punitive. God was vengeful.
I was terrorized by an arbitrary, blood-thirsty God. We all were.
She continues:
“Ten years ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is verrrryyyyy prominent in evangelicalism. We were having yet another debate about reformed theology (her: for, me: against), and she told me this: “I was talking to ______” – the teaching pastor at her reformed megachurch – “and I asked him what to think about my beloved family members who weren’t Christian. He looked me squarely in the eye and said: ‘One day in heaven, you will look at them burning in hell and say AMEN.’”
W-T-actual-F.
This is so deranged. With a God like this, who needs the devil?? This cold calculation of human worth in a sacred context is genuinely deluded. That one normal human could find another normal human worthy of eternal torture while he is worthy of eternal glory frankly helps us make sense of the Christian nationalism destroying our country like a wildfire.”
Hatmaker reveals that around eight years ago, one of her “most respected faith leaders casually said while knitting that no, of course she didn’t believe in a literal hell.” and that that one sentence “reached an interior truth I’d carried for a decade but never allowed myself to consider.”
I won’t go into the scholarship, which is massive, or the exegesis, which is thorough and serious. I won’t list the endless theologians who have interpreted the few scriptures on “hell” through a rigorous cultural and linguistic lens and come to a totally different conclusion….but I will tell you that after a couple of years of investigation, I quietly laid down my belief in a literal hell, and it is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Tellingly, she notes that “No singular growth point has changed my faith more than this. Rather than the crushing fear you might think I’d experience, I felt ten million pounds roll immediately off my shoulders. My head and heart came back into alignment, and my belief in God was rescued.” I said to God: “There you are.”
As soon as she gave up her belief in a literal hell, “Now love made sense. Everything about God made sense. I was no longer trying to maintain allegiance to a tyrant who willingly sent most of the world he created to an eternal fiery torment. I knew that didn’t make sense. This opened up a whole new world to get to know God, really, for the first time, because if this whole life wasn’t a terrifying test to stay out of hell, then maybe it was a sacred experience meant for love and joy, peace and patience, kindness and goodness, faithfulness and gentleness, and self-control that led to a truly abundant life.”
She adds:
“If God wasn’t watching over his glasses keeping a record of my wrongs, maybe he just loved me. Perhaps he understood that living on this fluctuating earth full of sorrow and trauma and pain and injustice is often its own hell, and Jesus meant it when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Hatmaker concludes: “What if instead of assigning the darkest, cruelest, most murderous human traits to God, we understood he was the absolute best of every good trait times a million? No darkness in him, only light. Embodying a love and patience and compassion we can’t even conceive of, more than we could imagine receiving and more than we want for our enemies. No shadow side. No setting people on fire for millenia, which is pretty dark.”
What does that faith look like walking around this earth? First off, it would be purged of judgment, since we no longer get to be excited about sneering at people from heaven while they scream and burn and saying AMEN.
Take out every condescending spiritual authority terrorizing people into behavior modification. “Us” and “them” is over. Self-importance and self-righteousness don’t make sense anymore. We’d have to purge our faith instruction of fear and shame-based threats. We could finally hang up our very embarrassing tools of evangelizing and proselytizing, and just be good, normal neighbors.Then we’d have to learn to settle into a new relationship with God, one where he just really, really loves us, all of us…..Doesn’t that sound like heaven?
9 responses to “Jen Hatmaker Says She No Longer Believes In Literal Hell ‘it’s the best thing that ever happened to me’”
Boy is she going to be surprised…
You do realize that the earliest church Father’s didn’t even teach of an eternal Hell, right? You also realize that there are several different words all translated to Hell in scripture which all carry different meanings. Some were literal places at that time. You owe it to yourself to actually do some deep research. Stop listening to what is being taught from the pulpit and study church teachings on your own. Boy would you be surprised..
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Person who renounced orthodox Christianity continues to renounce orthodox Christian views. News at 11.
Soon she will renounce the gospel entirely. What need of it is there if there is no hell?
Good for her. I came to the same conclusion upon doing my own research into the early church teachings and the actual words used within scripture. What we are being taught in modern churches does not line up with the earliest church teachings nor what scripture really teaches when you take off modern western interpretations.
How do you explain Luke 16:19-31?
I noticed a common error in Hatmaker’s reasoning. She believes we should understand God as “the absolute best of every good trait times a million,” without any “darkness” assigned to Him.
The error here, aside from not relying on Scripture, is a category error. Justice and judgment are deemed darkness in all circumstances. Further, judgment and justice, and wrath against wickedness, are seen as mutually exclusive against love and compassion. Ergo, God is either loving, or He judges, but He cannot do both. Any justice or judgment then is darkness. (What then is the cross?)
Do we praise a judge if he refuses to convict or punish a repeat murderer, an offender who has nothing but animosity for his countrymen and a desire to harm them? No, we would say that judge is wicked, enabling evildoing. On the other hand, if the judge convicts and punishes the murderer, we would see that as just and praise the judge.
The allegory is true of sinners, who reject the Gospel of grace, who hate God’s law and His people, and of God’s judgment. Truly we will be able to praise God for His perfect justice, even if we do not fully understand it in this life. Looking to Scripture, we see that God both loves the world and His people to a greater extent than any of us could ever love anything, and we also see that God is a perfect judge.
One final error, where Hatmaker seems so close and yet so far: the Gospel itself. Hatmaker says abandoning a literal Hell removes an impediment to the Gospel. She is right that the Gospel does not entail self-righteousness, self-importance, or mere calls to behavioural modification.
Yet she misses that there is a real reason to fear God (sin merits judgment, 1 Timothy 5:20), especially as an unbeliever in need of grace. Before one believes, he is under judgment (John 3:36). This is not shame-based manipulation, but a statement of fact. Hatmaker’s view of the Gospel pre-abandonment of Hell was that she had to work to earn God’s favour or to stay in His grace. This is not the Gospel. Rather, the Gospel is that salvation is a gift from God, not of our own works, so that none may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). She discarded God’s judgment rather than her false gospel.
Paul said it best in Romans 7-8: who can free us from this body of death? Thanks be to Christ, for He has saved us, and there is no condemnation for those who are in Him. We are freed to love and to be good neighbours not when we abandon Hell, but when we teach the true Gospel out of love for others and their salvation, as well as for the glory of God.
Jen, seems to want the loving God only without the Judging God. She loves that God and she goes directly to Him bypassing His Son, who died for her sins so she could be happy ever after.
The word Hell is mentioned more times in the NT than heaven…..must be a reason for that.