Chip And Joanna Gaines Sell Out

If you’re an originalist or a conservative, there’s a basic rule of thumb when it comes to judicial appointees: If you don’t have a track record as an originalist or a conservative, when you enter the bench, there’s a good shot that very, very soon you will swivel to the Left.

This is also true in the world of universities.

It’s also true in the world of Hollywood. 

If you go to Hollywood and you don’t have an abundantly clear, long-standing track record as a religious conservative who stood stalwart in the face of left-wing aggression, there’s a good shot that pretty quickly you are going to cave because the pressure to be eaten up by the social values of the Left in Hollywood is so extreme. 

That is apparently what has happened with the Chip and Joanna Gaines show, “Back to the Frontier.” They present themselves as devout Christians, and a lot of their fans are Christian and faith-based.

But the new series features a gay couple with adopted children, and a lot of people are upset with Chip and Joanna Gaines because of this. They’re saying, “Hold up a second. You purport to be religious Christians, and this is a show that I would normally watch with my family. But now here you are normalizing what is — by any sort of traditional Christian theology — sinful behavior.”

If you’re a secular person and you’re not a Christian, none of this may matter to you, but the reality is that people who are traditionally faithful to Scripture believe that one man, one woman, and their children should be the basic standard for how families form.

So, for Christians who have made their money on being Christians, to actually now start infusing their shows with left-wing social values is a problem. 

The idea of the show is that they’re going to replicate the conditions of homesteading back on the range in the late 19th century. 

The gay couple on the show is Joe Riggs and Jason Hannah. Riggs told the Dallas Morning News that the show was an “opportunity to put ourselves out there and help normalize families like ours.”

That, of course, is the goal whenever Hollywood does something like this: to say that all forms of family are morally the same.

This goes all the way back to the early 1990s, when in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” you had Robin Williams lecturing the American public that all forms of families were essentially morally equivalent. 

Hannah opined, “When families like ours are visible, it opens doors for others to feel safe, loved, and validated. Visibility isn’t just about being seen; it’s about making sure no one feels alone.”

Chip Gaines was inundated with complaints from his fan base because the Chip and Joanna Gaines fan base is Biblically loyal. 

The complaints pointed out, “Listen, obviously this phenomenon exists in life. Gay marriage is legal in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that you as a creator, a person that we trust with our time and the fact that our kids watch your shows, should be mainlining left-wing social values into your shows.”

Chip Gaines then called all those people intolerant, saying in a post to X, “Talk, ask [questions], listen.. maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never … 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 reality star ended the post with an emoji of a broken heart.

Okay, dude. That is about the worst approach that you can take to your fan base. 

Put aside the morality of what he’s saying, which is insipid. It turns out that traditional morality does draw lines between certain behaviors and other behaviors. It doesn’t mean you have to treat people badly. It doesn’t mean that you have to be insulting or awful to them. 

But — if you are a traditional, religious person and you believe that traditional marriage is the way that God intended for the world to work and Nature designed the world to work — if that is what you believe, then you should stand by that, even when it is politically unpopular. 

That doesn’t even mean that you can’t have friends who are violating your faith standards. All Judeo-Christian teaching teaches that everyone sins; that’s the normal way the world works. 

But that does not mean that the sin itself becomes normalized, which is exactly what the show intends to do.

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. 

That is not mean or intolerant. That is simply saying there is a standard, and if you purport to be an upholder of that standard, you should abide by it.

If Chip and Joanna Gaines were a secular couple who had never purported to be Christian, and they were making a show like this in Hollywood, no one would care. No one would bat an eye because the expectation would be different. 

When you say that you are an adherent to a particular philosophy or a particular ideology — and this is true politically as well — and then you are disloyal to that idea, you should be called out.

Chip and Joanna Gaines have made their money off American Christians who believe that Chip and Joanna Gaines are like them.

They have been under fire for a long time. They were accused of being anti-LGBTQ. That’s because if you are a traditional Christian, Hollywood calls you a bigot and a homophobe.

If we’re to be honest with each other as a civilization and as human beings, we should be able to be honest about what we perceive to be the actual moral standards that are being violated. And just because you have friends who violate the moral standard, that doesn’t mean that the moral standard ought to be obliterated, because then there’s no moral standard at all.

Niceness and civility are not moral standards. They are good things, but they aren’t moral standards. They are not weight-bearing moral concepts. They are standards of behavior. And you need more than standards of behavior to build a civilization. 

If you are tasked with upholding a standard, you should uphold that standard. If you betray the standard, you should be called out for that. 

That is true politically. It is true with regard to religion. It’s true with regard to life more generally. 

So I think Chip and Joanna Gaines owe their fans a major apology. 

I talk about this cultural issue because it undergirds so much of politics and our social life together. That’s because two things can be true at once. One: You can hold a strong moral standard, a standard that matters. Two: You should be tolerant toward people in terms of how you treat them. 

You can treat people nicely who don’t abide by your moral standards as long as they’re not actively hurting anybody else. 

But that does not mean the moral standard itself should change.