An Open Letter to Chip and Joanna Gaines

Dear Chip and Jo,
You don’t remember, but we first met in 2017. I was 24 years old, a new wife and an even newer mom. Our daughter, Reagan, was born just 10 months after Steven’s and my wedding. For the first time since adulthood, I wasn’t going to work every day. My world had become very small. I’ve heard women fondly reference their “postpartum show,” the television series that they marathoned during their first weeks with a new baby. Mine was Fixer Upper.
For those first few months with a newborn, your show was the background noise in our 800 square foot home, and I was completely hooked. I have very fond memories of my daughter napping in her baby swing in one corner of our living room and me ripping up the carpet in the other, fingers crossed for hardwoods. (They were not.) I had never had much of a vision or outlet for home improvement before, but I was soon deployed on a room-by-room sweep through the whole house, painting things gray and accenting with cotton sprigs as I went. We sold our house a few years later for a good profit, and I officially dubbed myself a flipper. We’ve lived in 3 houses in the last 9 years, and I always take a peek at what Jo has going on in Waco for inspiration when tackling a new project.
Magnolia has built a brand on functional beauty, down-to-earth practicality, and warm hospitality. But in our culture today, hospitality, friendliness, and warmth are traits that have been fashioned into hinges that whole worldviews can be turned on. You’re seeing this play out right now in real time. In “Back to the Frontier” - a show you both produced - you feature a same-sex couple in a prominent role and use them as an example of true family values. And I get it: your whole brand is built on welcome, hospitality, and kindness. How could you, in mainstream America in 2025, do anything but celebrate a same-sex marriage?
And that is the central point of this letter: people everywhere are asking “How can I be kind or loving or welcoming while maintaining faithfulness to God’s standard?” And they’re hoping to see it modeled by someone like you.
Why you? You are trend-setters. You nearly single-handedly convinced a generation of modern women (and their husbands) that they should be living in farmhouses. I can’t imagine that the trad wife movement would have taken off the way it has unless Chip had tilled the soil in his signature white tee and ball cap, and unless Jo had made backyard chickens seem both chic and attainable for neighborhood moms. I, who had never potted anything before 2024, am currently wondering how much trouble I would be in with our HOA if I erected a potting shed and studio (A studio for what? Who knows?) in our backyard.
You have captured the hearts and imaginations of countless women, and many of them are ready and willing to follow you in any direction. This is power. Use it to tell us that God’s design for the family is beautiful. Because it is, and people need to be shown. Use your power to display how someone can be welcoming AND stand on conviction. Beauty AND goodness. Truth AND love. As Douglas Wilson has said, “Coming to worship the Lord in the ‘beauty of holiness’ somehow gets translated into the ‘warmth of niceness.’” But it’s not the same. And when people experience the real thing, they can easily tell the difference. There is a piercing, sustaining, sweeter-than-honey, hard-as-nails beauty in the truth of the Word of God and in the world that He made. Share it. Without this truth as an anchor, anything else is just shiplap and bronze fixtures on a house that’s crumbling into the earth.
A generation of men and women are compelled by your kindness and love for people. But kindness is not kind at all if it’s telling a lie. Show the world what honest kindness looks like. Show them the kindness of insisting that the foundation must be in place in order to have a house that won’t collapse on top of the people living in it. That foundation is the word of God, his standards, and HIS love. Show them that the hidden, thankless, high-stakes work done in secret is what results in a house that can be beautifully finished and able to stand for generations. None of this happens when you take your cues from culture. It’s only possible by the grace of God. Show the world the work it takes to make a home water-tight, strong-walled, and ready to weather a storm. And in that vein, make sure you’re weathering the right storm. You may say to yourself, “if one group or the other is going to rage at us on the internet, why even try to walk this puppy back?” Well, what you’re currently experiencing as a storm of conservative indignation is actually a crowd of Christians pounding on your front and back doors, which I grant may feel aggressive, except for the minor detail that we’re just out here trying to let you know that your roof is on fire.
What we’re asking you for is a difficult task. Not just a walk-back, but real repentance. Not to your fans, but before the Lord. If your life before God is a house, you have to do a walk-through post-haste and see what’s going on in there. The floor is caving in the middle, and might it have anything to do with the cinderblock that got tossed through the window and the rain that has been coming in? And maybe the reason the roof seems to be sliding off right now is because there’s been a slow leak in the basement that has set off a chain reaction of small compromises through the whole house. The symptoms we’re seeing are indications that something went off the rails back there, and it’s going to be thankless work getting to the bottom of it. It might seem like a big job, like a lot of work, like a financial risk, like you might have to get your hands a little dirty.
But I know y’all have never been afraid of a fixer-upper.
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