Brandon Hatmaker’s Global Divorce: How America’s Christian Influencer Industrial Complex Became the World’s Cautionary Tale

**The Gospel of Divorce: How Brandon Hatmaker Became a Global Parable of American Evangelical Dysfunction**

From the outside looking in—and trust me, the rest of the world has been looking, popcorn in hand—the Brandon Hatmaker saga reads like a particularly spicy episode of a Netflix docuseries that nobody asked for but everybody watches. The Texas-based former evangelical power-husband’s journey from HGTV darling to divorced cautionary tale has achieved what American cultural exports do best: going viral across continents for all the wrong reasons.

International observers of American religious theater will recognize the familiar plot beats. Here was a man who built an empire selling Jesus-flavored lifestyle content to suburbanites, complete with bestselling books about “finding community” and “radical hospitality”—phrases that translate roughly to “buy my merchandise” in any language. His marriage to Jen Hatmaker, the more charismatic half of their brand-building enterprise, created a Christian power couple that spanned continents through speaking tours, podcasts, and enough merchandise to fill a small European nation.

Then came the divorce announcement in September 2020, dropped with the strategic timing of a celebrity publicist managing crisis optics. The international Christian community—yes, such a thing exists, though it’s less unified than your local PTA—responded with the kind of gleeful horror usually reserved for British tabloid scandals. From Nigerian megachurches to Australian hipster congregations, the reaction was universal: another American Christian power couple, another spectacular implosion.

What makes Brandon’s story internationally significant isn’t the divorce itself—Europeans barely blink at marital dissolution, and Latin Americans have seen worse from their televangelists—but rather how perfectly it encapsulates American evangelicalism’s unique talent for commodifying every aspect of faith, including marriage itself. The Hatmakers didn’t just have a marriage; they had a marketable marriage brand, complete with speaking topics like “Building a Strong Marriage While Changing the World” (tickets: $79-199, VIP packages available).

The global implications are darker than they initially appear. While American audiences consume this as mere entertainment, international Christian communities watch in horror as their faith gets repackaged into consumer products, then spectacularly self-destructs. In South Korea, where Christianity faces intense scrutiny, the Hatmaker divorce became exhibit A in arguments about American religious toxicity. In European seminaries, it’s taught as a case study in what happens when theology meets influencer culture.

Brandon’s post-divorce pivot to talking about “deconstruction” and “rebuilding” might seem like standard American reinvention narrative—fail upward, rebrand, repeat—but international audiences recognize something more sinister. It’s the same imperial arrogance that assumes the world needs another white American man explaining his feelings about personal growth, as if global Christianity were waiting breathlessly for his TED talk on healing.

The cynical beauty lies in how thoroughly modern this catastrophe is. Previous generations of religious leaders merely fell into sex scandals or financial fraud—almost quaint by comparison. Brandon achieved something more postmodern: he destroyed his marriage while preaching about healthy relationships, built a brand around authenticity while apparently living a lie, and now monetizes his failure as “wisdom.” It’s capitalism eating itself in real-time, served with a side of biblical references.

For Dave’s Locker readers keeping score at home, the Hatmaker saga offers a perfect distillation of contemporary America’s unique ability to turn even spiritual collapse into content. The rest of the world watches, not with admiration but with the morbid fascination of witnessing a culture so thoroughly commodified that even its religious leaders’ divorces become product launches.

In the end, Brandon Hatmaker isn’t just another failed evangelical entrepreneur. He’s a global warning about what happens when faith becomes content, marriage becomes branding, and personal growth becomes the final product in a long line of merchandise. The international community isn’t laughing with American Christianity anymore—it’s just laughing.

The joke, as always, is on the customers who bought what he was selling.