Worldly Gaines?

Chip and Joanna Gaines built their empire as public Christians. So now God’s word doesn’t matter?

Chip and Joanna Gaines haven’t put a foot wrong this past decade-plus they’ve been very publicly in business, until now.

The couple left HGTV after wild success and created their own Magnolia Network, in addition to promoting the faith through numerous interviews and campaigns like “I Am Second.” As their popularity grew, so too, predictably, did the criticisms. The Christian pair were criticized for not featuring same-sex couples on their house-flipping show. The press began “investigating” their church to discover that, shockingly, the pastor holds Biblical views on marriage.

I can only speculate, but for some reason, the couple decided to reverse course. Chip Gaines announced their new show called “Back to the Frontier” which features two dads and the boys they adopted as part of the cast. The questions from believers came swiftly as expected, and the responses were troubling:

Everyone from Franklin Graham to the American Family Association expressed disagreement with the Gaineses:

Chip and Joanna Gaines built a very relatable empire on small town values and their Christian faith. They’ve given countless interviews expressing how their faith guides them in all things and how their work is an extension of their faith.

"Our family has made a commitment to put Christ first, a lifestyle our parents modeled for us very well. They showed us how to keep our marriage and family centered around God," Chip said.

Chip and Joanna Gaines reportedly personally selected the couple:

And so we’re super honored that, when they were choosing three modern day families, they did choose the same size couple as a modern-day family—because we are; we’re your neighbors, and your coworkers. And so it was this amazing opportunity to [continue to] normalize same-sex couples and same-sex families. So that was one of the initial main drivers

The show’s Joe Riggs and Jason Hanna said in numerous interviews that the purpose of their participation was to mainstream their lifestyle:

Riggs was initially hesitant to uproot their lives for a summer, but he said being on the show was an “opportunity to put ourselves out there and help normalize families like ours.”

It’s clear why Chip and Joanna fans were confused. The Gaineses didn’t start out professing secularism and I’m not sure they’d have found equal success had they done so in the beginning.

The Gaineses built their empire as Christians. They’ve hosted church services at the Silos. So now that they’re awash in success God’s word doesn’t matter?

The world ironically holds the view that Biblical values and the refusal to normalize actions that God views as sinful are “intolerance” and “hate.” When Jesus ate with tax collectors and ministered to unrepentant sinners He didn’t “normalize” their actions, He told them to go forth and sin no more. He didn’t hate them, quite the opposite: He had the love in His heart and integrity to be honest with them. The difference between treating others with kindness and friendliness is a world away from culturally consecrating the activities they do.

Many fall back on “don’t judge” as a way to defend godlessness, but that is a poor interpretation of what Jesus actually says in His Sermon On the Mount in Matthew 7:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Jesus isn’t disavowing discernment, He’s warning against hypocritical judgment. To misinterpret the verse as a shield against godly correction isn’t something I’d expect from anyone mature in, or genuine about, faith.

They’re pitting a non-Biblical practice, against a covenant between a man, woman, and God as “not a big deal.” This doesn’t just alienate the believers that helped build their empire, it diminishes the Christian view of marriage to the fringe of society while accommodating the godless, worldly view.

If anything, the traditional American family needs to be mainstreamed. Marxism continued the millennia-long war against this building block of society because without it, society falls apart.

Chip’s harsh reaction to even the most minor good faith correction instead is very unlike his previous grace under fire, when he lovingly held firm in faith and robustly defended his values without a hint of malice. The former made him an icon, the latter makes him seem like an average secularist. Absent is an effort to glean the wisdom offered by the scores of fans who now feel marginalized and confused by both the casting choice and the odd defense of it. The people who prayed for them when they were under attack by the secular world are now reduced to “Christians” in quotations when questioned?

What changed?

Isn’t the Christian call to minister to souls for God, not make them easier in the fire?

Relatedly, one of my favorite responses to Christian witness comes, ironically, from Penn Jillette. It’s short and worth a view:

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