‘I was shocked to realise how asleep at the wheel I’d been’: JEN HATMAKER’s husband was a respected pastor. Then he woke her up at 2am while drunkenly messaging his secret girlfriend… and she discovered his hidden life

It was at 2.30am on a warm July night that Jen Hatmaker woke up to hear her husband and the father of her five children drunkenly voice-texting another woman. ‘I just can’t quit you,’ she heard him whisper.

After an ugly confrontation that Jen describes as an ‘hysterical unravelling, mostly by me’, her husband, Brandon, eventually passed out from booze, leaving her to scour his phone and computer, where she found texts and pictures of her husband’s other life with his girlfriend.

Now, Jen knew why he was always so careful never to leave his mobile lying around and why he was always out of the house at weird hours on ‘errands’.

At 6.30am, she woke him up and asked for the truth. When he refused, she told him to ‘pack his sh**t and get out’. That was back in 2020, and it was the last night he would spend in the family home.

A popular podcaster and best-selling author, Jen has now turned the disintegration of her marriage into a bracingly honest memoir, Awake.

But what makes her story even more compelling is its context. Now 52, Jen grew up in a deeply conservative, Southern Baptist Church in Texas, where most of the girls were married in their teens and divorce was considered a shocking aberration.

In this environment, even in the 1990s and 2000s, girls were expected to preserve their virginity and women to know their place – and Jen’s outspoken rejection of its sexist hierarchies caused a modern-day furore.

Worse, Brandon had been a pastor – a powerful Christian leader who was known and respected throughout the local community, and whose betrayal, she would finally learn, was ‘ten million times worse than I thought’.

We’re speaking at the home she shared with him for 26 years, an historic 1908 farmhouse in the picturesque town of Buda, Texas. The huge garden is shaded by majestic pecan trees, well over 100 years old, and the house is full of evidence of family life.

Jen is blonde and vivacious, wearing a grey sweatshirt that says ‘howdy’ and a short black tennis skirt. 

She pads around barefoot as she tells me she bought Brandon out and redecorated the house to her own taste, with a fuchsia pink bathroom in the loudest shade she could find. 

‘I thought to myself, “Why can’t I have a turquoise staircase and a library?”’ she chuckles. 

This is a ‘girl house’, she says, where her 20-year-old daughter Remy still lives and friends gather for cocktail parties surrounded by inspirational posters with quotes like The World is Your Oyster and Just Keep Going.

When her husband finally came clean about the affair three days after the phone message, he told her that he had lied to her every day for nearly two years and ‘couldn’t even remember what was not true’.

Every detail was ‘more shocking than the last’. ‘The money spent, the devastating time span, the substances, the lies. Taking her to our lake house, on our boat… out on public dates. the gifts he bought her, expensive and endless.

‘I was shocked to realise how asleep at the wheel I’d been,’ she tells me. ‘I was the perfect partner for it. I’m not suspicious, I’m not jealous. If you say you are faithful, I trust you. That naivety took a real hit and I’ve never returned to that version of myself, for sure,’ she says.

Does she think he wanted to be found out? 

‘I often think what a burden it must have been to carry that deception every day,’ Jen says. ‘Whether it was a conscious hope to get caught or it could have been more like: “Nothing could be worse because my life is in shambles”… I think it might be the latter,’ she says.

By modern, secular standards, it was an unconventional life. Jen and Brandon were both raised in deeply religious households, where the tradition was to marry young and stay married forever. 

At summer camp, girls weren’t allowed to wear shorts and were taught that revealing clothes made them responsible for boys ‘deviance’, while beneath the veneer of patriarchal respectability, dark secrets lurked: the science teacher at Jen’s school, for instance, was grooming and abusing 13-year-old girls.

They wed in 1993, when she was 19 and Brandon was 21, and had five children – two adopted from Ethiopia – who were aged between 14 and 22 when she discovered the affair.

For a while, Jen grieved the marriage – once in spectacular fashion, sitting in her car and screaming out loud for almost an hour. ‘I weep and sob and wail from the depths of my wrecked heart. I am inconsolable and out of my mind,’ she writes in her book.

Yet, later, she also came to realise that the relationship had been fractured for many years, and that her role had been to paper over the cracks so that the world would see only a perfect family. 

‘Our marriage wasn’t fine, but I pretended it was. The kids weren’t fine, but I told them they were. He wasn’t fine, but I treated him like he was.’

In fact, at the time of the affair and subsequent divorce, Jen was already a black sheep within the community. 

In 2008, she and Brandon had founded their own church – Austin New Church, later brought under the umbrella of the United Methodist Church (which has 10million members worldwide).

Jen built a successful career as a Christian women’s influencer – women weren’t allowed to be preachers, but she headlined women’s events and conferences on parenting – until it all came to a screeching halt in 2016. 

At that point Jen shifted away from some of the Church’s conservative positions by publicly supporting gay marriage and talking about systemic racism in America. 

Her largely evangelical audience was further angered by her criticism of Donald Trump, then in the middle of the ‘pussygate’ scandal (in video footage, Trump is heard bragging to TV host Billy Bush about trying to have sex with a married woman).

The response was cataclysmic. Jen’s social media following halved. The US Christian press bayed for blood, with headlines including: ‘Pastors: It’s Time to Audit What Your Women Are Studying’.

‘For both of us, Brandon and I, that ended our careers in that world overnight,’ she says. ‘But I had a broader base and a more diverse set of topics that I dealt with, so I was able to rebuild and he didn’t.

‘Rather than bringing us together, it drove a wedge between us. For him, it came out in a lot of anger and he was easily triggered. It made for an explosive atmosphere at home. My response was to go quiet, disconnect and disengage. The moment to steer into our marriage was then and I didn’t do it and neither did he.’

Instead, as she recounts in the book, they became ‘distant bedfellows’, then stopped having sex for two years.

Three months before discovering his affair in July 2020, she decided to try to save the marriage.

‘I had us in therapy twice a week. I planned outings, bought him gifts, tried to be thoughtful.

‘We started having sex again every day. I thought that if he is deep down in the gutter, I will put him on my back and I will climb us out of this. But, as I say in Awake, two people have to want to save a marriage.’

Two months after the revelation of the affair, says Jen, Brandon had moved on and acquired a new girlfriend (a different woman altogether). Meanwhile, with breathtaking unfairness, she was attracting all the public flak for the marriage’s demise.

At this point, Jen had a new, more progressive Christian following and an audience of 1.5million on social media. She was also the author of numerous books on Christianity and lifestyle issues – Awake is her 14th, and five have been on best-seller lists. Yet once the traditionalists found out about her divorce, they came for her online again.

‘Every hateful word is directed at me; ironically my husband is omitted from the reckoning,’ she writes in Awake. ‘Within minutes [of finding out] these same people skip over to my online spaces to gloat and condemn. It is an emotional bludgeoning.’

Even more ironically, perhaps, the deep conservatism of their religion had damaged Brandon too, she says. Outside of their church bubble, she could see he had never wanted to be the dominant, assertive sort of man it had forced him to be.

Indeed, one of the first things she realised as a separated woman was that Brandon’s assumption of sole responsibility for the family’s finances – even though she was by far the major breadwinner – had been an alleged disaster.

‘I don’t think I’d ever looked at a bank account,’ she says. ‘I didn’t ask to be in on any of the big financial decisions. It’s so humiliating for someone who talks about women’s independence and autonomy.’

In Awake, she talks about her husband’s ‘illicit spending’ and the money he spent on his girlfriend.

‘Now I tell women that I don’t care if you are the happiest married woman who ever existed, you should know every detail about your financial life, you need every password, you need to be a part of it.

‘It may not be divorce that catches you, but death and ill health are indiscriminate. At no point do we know when we will be responsible for our entire financial wellbeing.’

And what of her views today on faith? 

In the book she offers a clear-headed analysis of the Southern Baptist tradition in which she grew up: ‘We have men in leadership, shame-based purity requirements, limited agency for women, a deeply punitive cancel culture. 

‘This operates exactly as intended. It is highly functional as long as women don’t challenge it or leave it.’ And she did both.

‘Organised religion isn’t a place where I flourish right now, or maybe will ever again,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t want any part of it, but it leaves me out in a faith wilderness that I find challenging to describe.’

Her ex-husband, who now describes himself as a ‘brand development and communications leader’, married his new girlfriend (not the affair partner) in 2022. 

Jen found out about their engagement ‘from a curated shoot set to music on Instagram’. 

‘I was going to fire off a furious speech to him – I had a whole dissertation worked up,’ she exclaims. ‘But it wasn’t my business anymore.’

In response to the publication of Awake in the US, Brandon wrote on the social media platform Substack that ‘people in a healthy marriage don’t just wake up one day and decide to have an affair’.

Explaining that their relationship was ‘coming to a slow and painful ending’, he said the affair ‘was not who I truly am’ and praised his new wife for helping him to ‘heal’ from ‘self-inflicted trauma’.

Jen now concedes that ‘we’ve got five shared kids and a lot of life ahead of us still, with weddings and christenings. We’ve got a beautiful grandson. We’ve managed to create a civil relationship. Every year, it gets a little bit easier.’

And she, too, has fallen in love again. In 2021, she was in New York to discuss a book deal when her agent set up an introduction to Tyler Merritt, another author, because they were both planning to see the musical Waitress.

‘I thought he was gay because who else goes to musical theatre by themselves?’ she laughs. ‘I hadn’t had a date since 1992, so I didn’t know what was out there and I wasn’t looking for him.’

Merritt, 50, lives in Nashville and she lives in Texas, so they have a long-distance relationship.

‘I’m a white girl and come from a big family, and he’s this giant, tall black man and an only child. He’s never married or had kids. He’s vegetarian, for god’s sake – my dad was a cattle rancher. He’s never had a drop of alcohol in his life. We are so opposite on paper, but our relationship is like a puzzle piece, it fits.’

She admits she had nerves around the idea of intimacy with a new man in her 50s. ‘By the time I met him I was in a much more emotionally stable place, but it was absolutely new territory, and I ran the gamut of fear,’ she acknowledges.

‘My friends were no help at all because they were all married and had been having sex with the same men for decades. They were like: “What do we know – but you have to tell us everything.”

‘He was tender and patient and loving, and allowed room for all my nervous energy and my pre-packaged excuses about having a body that has had three babies. 

‘The way I was brought up around sex was that it was deeply serious, so being liberated from those heavy boundaries freed up sex to be beautiful and fun and enjoyable.’

Today, Jen has 1.4million followers on Facebook and Instagram, a popular book club, a Substack and a podcast called For The Love. 

In the past, she’s described the end of her relationship with Brandon as ‘the gift of devastation’.

‘When my marriage broke up in 2020, so many women in real life but mostly online said that they’d been there and they’re happy again.

‘All those women were holding up lanterns for me and Awake is my lantern that I’m holding up for women behind me.

‘It’s to say keep going and you will do more than recover, you will thrive. It seems such an insane message, but I’ve lived it and I know that it’s true.’

You can’t help but feel her divorce also lit the path out of an oppressive religious tradition that forced her and her ex-husband to be people they were not. That late night phone call might have been the best thing that ever happened to her.

Awake by Jen Hatmaker (Bluebird, £10.99) is out now.