Since the launch of their flagship TV show all the way back in 2013, Chip and Joanna Gaines have created a veritable fixer-upper empire. From that single HGTV hit, they expanded into spin-off shows, bestselling books, and a whole range of products bearing their stamp of approval. They eventually founded their own network to host their ever-expanding brand.
There were, and still are, a seemingly unending number of home renovation shows, but the Gaineses managed to rise above the herd due to their natural charm and their wholesome image centered around family values and their Christian faith. They were successful entrepreneurs who seemed to balance work with a large, happy family and openly professed their religious beliefs.
Conservative Christians could find some comfort in the fact that, while the vast majority of modern culture either explicitly mocked or conveniently ignored Christian values, at least one cultural phenomenon affirmed them.
But, as the Gaines brand grew ever more mainstream, cracks began to show in the facade. The Gaineses partnered exclusively with Target for their “Hearth and Hand” line of home decor products. But business clashed with personal values once Target became the subject of a massive boycott in 2023 in response to the retail giant selling pro-transgender merchandise, some of which was designed by a self-proclaimed Satanist. Chip and Joanna Gaines chose to remain silent on that controversy.
Only a few years later, they moved from quiet complicity to outright endorsement with their latest show: Back to the Frontier. The show’s premise is simple enough: take modern-day city slickers out into the wilderness and see if they could make it as 19th-century pioneers. The trouble comes with the show’s choice of casting. The Gaineses, who are professing Christians and attend a church that preaches the biblical definition of marriage, chose to cast a gay couple who have two sons through surrogacy.
But once the backlash started, the Gaineses didn’t choose to stay silent. They doubled down, falling back on the same out-of-context quotes about loving everyone and not judging others that have been used to silence Christians for decades.
“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,” Chip posted Sunday on X.
This has become an all too common pattern. Once a nominally Christian or conservative cultural product becomes sufficiently popular, its creators start to give in to the pressures of the dominant, left-wing cultural atmosphere and soon enough are completely subverted. The hit TV show The Chosen represents another recent example.
As my colleague Jordan Boyd pointed out, the hit Christian TV show came under fire in 2023 after eagle-eyed viewers spotted an LGBT pride flag on camera equipment during a behind-the-scenes video of the show’s set. The show didn’t seem bothered by the flag’s presence, and it even handwaved the whole incident, chalking it up to the imperfection of man: “We ask that audiences let the show speak for itself and focus on the message, not the messenger, because we’ll always let you down.”
The lesson from these incidents is not that Christian cultural products are incapable of breaking through into the cultural mainstream without becoming compromised. It’s that they can’t break through in isolation. The left’s stranglehold on almost every facet of modern culture — TV, movies, video games, literature, art, etc. — allows them to either smother or co-opt and subvert any ostensibly conservative effort to effect the wider culture.
And much of it happens without any direct pressure because there are certain incentives in place that encourage cultural producers to go along with the current dominant cultural atmosphere. The Gaineses know that speaking out against pushing transgenderism onto kids could upset a highly lucrative business partnership with Target. They know that having a gay couple on their show ticks a diversity box that our wider culture cares about. Therefore, they have both economic and social incentives to toe the line on leftist values.
There is no such power on the right, which has to resort to more direct action like boycotts, precisely because it does not have a monopoly on the cultural institutions in this country in the way that the left indisputably does. As a result, conservative cultural values have been relegated to being countercultural — a real-life contradiction in terms that nonetheless is the current state of play. While the right’s counterculture has gained quite a bit of popularity on the right itself, it has failed to break through into the mainstream without encountering the type of subversion that has befallen the Gaines brand or The Chosen. A counterculture can only ever survive in particular enclaves, or else it risks becoming too popular and subject to subversion.
The solution: Christianity, and conservatism more broadly, must control all of the culture, or it won’t control any of it. It has to break through on every front simultaneously in order to reestablish a permanent grip on the culture. We often forget that Christianity was the mainstream culture of the West for almost a millennium and a half, and quite successfully so, after beginning as a counterculture. But Christianity was only able to become the mainstream cultural force after it completely replaced the old pagan Roman culture. Christianity’s hegemonic grip on the West has only been weakened and then broken in the last century or so. We used to call it Christendom. Back then, it would have been unfathomable for Christianity to have so little an effect on the wider culture as it does today — primarily because it was the wider culture.
Christianity needs to hold the same monopoly that the left currently holds over our culture, or it will continue to fight a losing battle against the forces that wish to extinguish religion and religious values from our society. The culture war is truly a zero-sum game, and only total victory will safeguard our values.