Around a decade ago, Chip and Joanna Gaines remained mostly silent after Buzzfeed published a hit piece condemning them for attending a church that believed in a biblical definition of marriage in 2016.
This year, the couple cast a gay couple with adopted twin boys in a show on their Magnolia Network.
Now, the couple’s conservative supporters are wondering: what happened?
It would be an understatement to say that the Gaines family of 2016 is nothing like the entertainment powerhouse couple they’ve become today. Chip and Joanna have built a sprawling lifestyle empire, including a retail brand and emporium, partnerships with major brands like Target, a sit-down restaurant in their hometown of Waco, a renovated hotel, and most significantly, the Magnolia Network, a television channel all their own.
This success all goes back to the couple’s big break, with the HGTV show “Fixer Upper.” Prior to being discovered by the lifestyle network, Joanna said she and Chip were “broke.”
“I remember when we first got married the only money we had was what was in Chip’s pocket,” Joanna told People in 2020. “He always had a wad of cash, but we were broke. If I needed to go grocery shopping it’s whatever was in his pocket. That’s how we paid the bills.”
After “Fixer Upper” debuted in 2013, everything changed. America couldn’t get enough of the loving, wholesome couple living on a Texas homestead and teaming up to tackle renovation projects in the Lone Star State. And while they didn’t openly evangelize on the show, viewers were able to draw a few conclusions about their faith based on both their lifestyle and where they went to church. Soon, they’d amassed a huge audience among Christian conservatives.
It also didn’t escape notice that while HGTV mainstays such as “House Hunters” frequently included same sex couples, “Fixer Upper” never did. All of this helped make the Gaineses poster children of conservatives seeking woke-free, kid-friendly content to watch with the whole family.
Buzzfeed hit back against the couple’s rising popularity in 2016 by insinuating that Chip and Joanna were unrepentant bigots.
“Their church, Antioch Community Church, is a nondenominational, evangelical, mission-based megachurch. And their pastor, Jimmy Seibert, who described the Gaineses as ‘dear friends’ in a recent video, takes a hard line against same-sex marriage and promotes converting LGBT people into being straight,” reporter Kate Aurthur wrote in the piece.
Aurthur said she reached out to Antioch representatives so they could clarify their stance, only to find herself directed to the church’s website for clarification. That’s where the teaching still says, “Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. The husband and wife are of equal worth before God since both are created in God’s image.”
The author also quoted a sermon Seibert delivered in 2015 following the legalization of gay marriage.
“This is a clear biblical admonition. So if someone were to say, ‘Marriage is defined in a different way,’ let me just say: They are wrong,” the pastor told his congregation at the time. “God defined marriage, not you and I. God defined masculine and feminine, male and female, not you and I.”
Following the publication of the Buzzfeed piece, HGTV was quick to say they supported and affirmed same sex relationships.
“We don’t discriminate against members of the LGBT community in any of our shows. HGTV is proud to have a crystal clear, consistent record of including people from all walks of life in its series,” a rep for the network said.
But the Gaineses didn’t release a statement directly for either side of the argument. Instead, at the time, they alluded to being hurt by the allegations and issued vague statements about “loving everyone” while remaining neutral on the main point of contention.
Two months after the BuzzFeed News article was published, Chip appeared to reference the controversy in a since-deleted blog post on the Magnolia Market website.
“It’s not about what color your skin is, how much money you have in the bank, your political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, or faith,” he wrote. “That’s all fascinating, but it cannot add or take away from the reality that we’re already pulling for you. We are not about to get in the nasty business of throwing stones at each other, don’t ask us to cause we won’t play that way.”
Then, during a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joanna said she was sick of constantly being dragged by leftists.
“The accusations that get thrown at you, like you’re a racist or you don’t like people in the LGBTQ community, that’s the stuff that really eats my lunch — because it’s so far from who we really are,” she told the outlet. “That’s the stuff that keeps me up.”
Everything exploded earlier this month when the Gaineses featured Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs on their Magnolia Network series “Back to the Frontier.” The married men appear on the show with their 10-year-old twin sons, Ethan and Lucas.
The men said they chose to go on the show to help normalize their family structure.
“We’ve always felt it to be important that we try to be an example for same-sex couples,” Hanna said during an interview with the outlet Queerty. “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.”
The inclusion of Hanna and Riggs may have had leftists feeling smug. But conservatives and Evangelicals who had looked to the Gaineses as role models over the years felt betrayed.
Ed Vitagliano, vice president of the American Family Association, publicly called out the couple for disappointing their fan base.
“This is sad and disappointing, because Chip and Joanna Gaines have been very influential in the evangelical community,” Ed Vitagliano, vice president of the American Family Association, said on X. “In the past, they have stood firm on the sanctity of marriage regardless of the personal cost that has entailed.”
Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham, also posted about the controversy on X, calling it “very disappointing.”
“While we are to love people, we should love them enough to tell them the truth of God’s Word. His Word is absolute truth. God loves us, and His design for marriage is between one man and one woman. Promoting something that God defines as sin is in itself sin,” he wrote.
The backlash was swift and fierce, which prompted Chip to issue a response on social media.
“Talk, ask [questions], listen.. maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never,” he shared with his followers just after the show premiered. “It’s a sad sunday when ‘non believers’ have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian.”
The response caused even more anger among the Gaineses’ former fan base. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro laid out why that might be.
“Many of the followers of Chip and Joanna Gaines are not only upset with the fact that the show is featuring this sort of stuff, they’re upset with the fact that Chip is now sneering at them, looking down his nose at them, and suggesting that the real problem here is not that he has violated his own faith standards by promulgating a set of values that is unChristian, but that he believes that Christians themselves, by objecting to that promulgation, are thus demonstrating that they’re intolerant and vicious and mean by objecting to the normalization of what Christians consider to be sinful,” he said.
“That is not mean or intolerant,” Shapiro added. “That is simply saying there is a standard, and if you purport to be an upholder of that standard, you should abide by it.”
Finally, Seibert — still the pastor at Antioch Church — issued a new statement reiterating his position on the issue. While he didn’t mention the Gaineses specifically, his timing couldn’t have been more obvious.
“In Genesis 1, the Scripture says that God created us male and female. He created us in His image and He blessed us. There’s two genders – male and female. We’re to celebrate that and honor that,” Seibert said in a video posted July 19.
“Secondly, in Genesis 2, we see that marriage is between one man and one woman in covenant for life, and that children are to be born in that context of covenantal marriage, and that out of that to be loved, blessed, and cared for.”
He says if anyone finds themselves “in a different perspective,” they should go back to Jesus and “realign to God’s design of covenantal marriage between one man and one woman for life.”
Seibert notes that the church’s position hasn’t changed in 25 years, and that the message is one of “compassion” and of “clarity.”
Chip and Joanna Gaines adapted to mainstream culture when many of their fans celebrated them for doing the exact opposite. Only time will tell whether or not this shift will cut into their commercial success.
