Standing for purity on prime time: Madi Prewett Troutt on 'The Bachelor'

Madi Prewett Troutt is known by most of the country for her stint on “The Bachelor” — which began with her friends submitting her name without her approval.

“I was 23 years old living in Alabama, and I was going through Bible college at the time,” Troutt tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“I’m hanging out with these girls. I come over, and they’re all watching 'The Bachelor.' I immediately start judging them, Allie. I’m going to be really honest with you, I started judging them, and I was like, ‘You guys, we have to turn this off, why are we watching this show?’ And I had never watched it before,” Troutt explains.

“I just knew it was reality TV. So I was like, ‘OK, this is probably trash.' ... They make a joke: ‘You should go on the show, you would be great on the show,’” she continues.

Troutt shrugged them off as they “laughed in the corner,” but then months later, she got a call from a random number.

It was “The Bachelor,” and they wanted her on the show.

While Troutt was ready to turn it down, her mother told her to “pray about it,” and that's when she began considering it — though she believed God would tell her no.

“And over the course of a couple of months, ironically, I kept feeling a pull to say yes,” she says.

“I hadn't really watched an episode before, maybe one or two after I said yes to kind of prep for it and went in with just an open mind, open hands, thinking, 'I’m here to share the gospel with the girls on the show,'” she explains.

“Looking back, I so see how the Lord has used it and even grown me so much in my faith and dependence in Him. And it’s truly crazy the opportunities and moments that I had even behind the scenes filming the show with producers and with the girls to get to just talk about Jesus,” she tells Stuckey.

“They would see me reading my Bible. They would see me, you know, praying and not gossiping and not dressing a certain way and not drinking and these things and would be curious about it and just would ask questions. And it just was really cool in a culture of there being such compromise and competition to just say, ‘Hey, I know who I am in Christ, and I’m not here to, you know, steal a rose from you or anything like that,’” she says.

Toward the end of the show, the remaining few girls are asked to stay the night at the bachelor’s fantasy suite, where there’s an implication of sexual impurity. Troutt refused to partake in it and explained to the bachelor that she was saving herself for marriage.

“I think it was really cool how the Lord used that and then when it aired, you know, getting to take a stand for Jesus and for my purity,” she says.

“I just remember being so prayerful about it because I was like, I know a lot of people are going to be watching this who aren’t believers,” she continues, adding, “And I don’t want to come across as judgmental at all, but I also know my values and my convictions that I’m unwilling to compromise in.”

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