The Tragic Apostasy of Chip and Joanna Gaines

By Laurie Higgins, July 15, 2025; this article first appeared in Breakthrough Ideas

By now, most conservatives have heard about Chip and Joanna Gaines’ new streaming series on their Magnolia Network titled Back to the Frontier. It imitates the PBS reality series Frontier House in structure and title, choosing three families to live for a period of time without modern conveniences. While the PBS series had families live as frontierspeople for five months, the Gaines’ carefully selected families will suffer for only eight weeks. The other major difference is the Gaineses decided that one third of the families needed to be headed by homosexuals. In fact, according to the homosexual men chosen, Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs, flyers for series applicants featured homosexuals.

In an interview with Queerty, the website whose motto is “Free of an Agenda (except that gay one),” these homosexual men made clear their motivation for applying to be on the series. Hanna said,

When I first saw the flyer on social media, there was a gay couple on the flyer, and so that initially sparked my interest. … When our boys were born—our twin boys were born via surrogacy in 2014—we faced some legal challenges, and so we’ve always felt it to be important that we try to be an example for same-sex couples. … And so it was this amazing opportunity to [continue to] normalize same-sex couples and same-sex families.

Hanna’s “spouse” Joe Riggs echoed those unhealthy, unholy sentiments: “[O]f course I was on board with the whole concept of continuing to normalize same-sex families.”

The self-identifying Christians Chip and Joanna Gaines, whose net worth is estimated to be $50 million, promoted the pernicious cultural goals of two men who embrace sodomy as identity, used surrogacy to create motherless children (while likely destroying unwanted embryos), and objectified women by purchasing their eggs and renting their wombs. The Gaineses sold their faith for a mess of potage and a pile of filthy lucre.

Billy Graham’s son Franklin posted a tepid criticism of the Gaineses’ “Gay Little House on the Prairie,” but even that was too much for the prickly man-boy Chip.

Grahams posted,

I hope this isn’t true, but I read today that Chip and Joanna Gaines are featuring a gay couple in their new series. If It is true, it is 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.

In response, Chip Gaines responded,

Talk, ask qustns, 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

It’s a sad day when self-identifying Christ-followers castigate their brothers and sisters in Christ for holding fast to truth.

It’s a sad day when self-identifying Christians accuse their fellow Christians of being hateful and vitriolic for condemning actions of celebrities who use their influence to normalize sexual perversion and family structures that God abhors.

It’s a sad day when Christians who could use their celebrity to call their fans to repentance or could at least refuse to participate in any way with egregious sin, instead acquiesce to modern God-hating secular culture.

It was a sad day when Chip Gaines lumped all criticism of his and his wife’s actions together as hateful and vitriolic.

It’s tragic that Chip and Joanna Gaines chose to promote that which Scripture says will cost Hanna and Riggs eternal life:

“Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral … nor men who practice homosexuality … will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6: 9-10).

It’s a sad day when Christians with influential platforms refuse to live in accordance with Scripture that says,

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11).

“It would be better for that person if a millstone would be hung around his neck and he would be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:2).

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:6-8).

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).

One would hope all Christians understand that marriage has an ontology—that is, marriage has an immutable, objective nature—that modern American lawmaking cannot change. Central to marriage is sexual complementarity, without which a relationship cannot in reality be a marriage. In other words, marriage is something. The law can no more change an intrinsically non-marital relationship into a marriage than it can change a man into a woman.

Maybe on their next soulless money-making venture, the Gaineses will feature a polycule.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)