In the Christian Bible, Jesus tells his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Over the centuries, people have tried different ways to fulfill this commandment, from waging wars to journeying to far-flung locales. But for Madi Prewett Troutt, it’s simple. All she needs is a Wi-Fi connection.
At first glance, Troutt, 27, looks very much like your typical social media character. She first came to prominence in 2020 via one of the biggest influencer breeding grounds, ABC’s The Bachelor, where she, briefly, captured the heart of the show’s lead. Since then, her star has risen. Troutt is objectively attractive: thin and fashionable, with long brown hair and blue eyes framed by Instagram-ready lashes. Her nails are done; her skin is dewy. To her 4.5 million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined, she’s positively influential.
But Troutt isn’t interested in selling her followers—who she says are mainly women between the ages of 20 to 35—on hair masks or skin care or clothing. She wants to sell them on Christianity as she believes it. The “saving yourself for marriage” and “The wages of sin is death” type.
You’d think this could be an uphill battle. The generation Troutt belongs to, Gen Z, is the least religious cohort in US history, with more than one third stating in a 2022 survey they had no affiliation with a faith (for context, only 18% of baby boomers said the same). On social media there seems to be an ongoing conversation about the harms the Christian church, especially evangelical-affiliated ones, have perpetuated, from the shame of purity culture and its effect on young women to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Many people, especially women, are talking openly online about the outdated mores of Christianity and the harm the faith’s rigid principles have done to communities and individuals.
But Troutt thinks this can change, and that, God willing, she can be the one to help do it. She used to want to be a traditional Christian missionary, traveling to foreign countries and selling people on her beliefs in hopes of converting them. Then she ended up on The Bachelor and likely realized that if she played her platform right, social media could be just as fallow a field for saving souls.
“Now I feel like my heart is just burning for America,” she says in a recent Zoom. “I want to be in America, and I just want to encourage people and tell people about Jesus, and serve people, and help people in my own backyard…. It’s a cool concept to know that we have purpose right here too, and it’s needed overseas, but it’s also needed here.”
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How does one use social media to do this? Well, a large platform doesn’t hurt, but since her Bachelor days, Troutt has traveled across the country to speak at college, churches, and more, but her main work is done through a screen. She posts clips of herself proselytizing about keeping her faith during The Bachelor; she appears on podcasts where she insists that the only way to truly love someone is to bring them to Christ and admonishes those who “flirt with sin.” Typical videos, like montages with friends set to music, have Bible verses in the captions. She’s Billy Graham with an iPhone and better hair.
Three years into her public persona, Troutt’s empire seems to be expanding. After years of preaching the value of waiting until marriage to have sex, she met and married Grant Troutt, son of billionaire businessman Kenny Troutt, last year, and moved to Waco, Texas, for his new job as a young adult pastor. It’s on the heels of her new relationship status that she is releasing her second book, The Love Everybody Wants, on Tuesday. The book, which the publisher says it designed to show the reader “how embracing God’s love allows you to truly love yourself and cultivate deep, meaningful relationships,” and Troutt’s new status as a wife are poised to position her as one of the most well-known, if not always well-loved, figures in the Christian relationship space.
At a time when purity culture’s reputation is on the ropes, Troutt wants to be a new kind of advocate. She insists that the version she is selling is about female empowerment.
“I definitely would not want anyone to hear my perspective and my experiences and feel any type of shame,” she says. “I don’t serve a god who shames people. I serve a god who loves unconditionally and, at the same time, calls us higher because it’s for our best interest. And I’ve seen in my own life when I followed God’s way over my own way, it’s always led to just better than anything I could have ever imagined.”
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If you knew Madi Prewett Troutt for anything before this, it was probably for being a virgin.
In 2020, Troutt, then 23, was chosen to be on season 24 of The Bachelor as one of the women competing for the heart of pilot Peter Weber. From her first scenes on the show, her persona was clear: the young, pious Christian woman who was vocal about waiting until marriage to have sex.
Considering the premise of the show, wherein one person dates dozens of people at once in hopes of finding a spouse, Troutt’s unwavering faith may have seemed like a strange fit. But The Bachelor has long had, as Ilana Masad wrote in Bitch Media at the time, a tendency to promote the values of “whitestream heteronormativity,” and Troutt’s open Christian faith and pledge of virginity until marriage soon gained her fans among evangelical viewers—a key demographic for the franchise. Plus, The Bachelor has always been a reliable launchpad for contestants if they play their cards right, more so than actually finding true love.
When Troutt dramatically left after Weber revealed to her he had been “intimate” with another contestant, her status as a role model for young Christian women seemed to be cemented (the couple did end up giving it another try and, several “most dramatic” hours of television later, called it quits).
According to Troutt, the opportunity to continue down the path of being a spokesperson for modern Christian values was practically handed to her on a silver platter shortly after the final rose. Suddenly her Instagram DMs were flooded with requests.
“I started looking at some of my DMs and I was being reached out to by different publishers and churches,” she says, “asking to just have me come and be a part of what they’re doing…people who saw something in my life and said, ‘Hey, I believe that God could really use your story and the gifts he’s given you to make a difference.’ People just taking a chance on me and believing in me.”
Before the show, Troutt had graduated from Auburn University and then attended Highlands College, a religious school where she received a certificate in pastoral leadership. She decided to jump into the opportunities to proselytize with both feet, saying that she knew she wanted her new platform to be more than “just me posting about clothes. I wanted to stand for what I cared [about] and valued.”
“I think it could be really easy to come off of something like a reality TV show and just get super caught up in the hype of it and the craziness of it,” she says. “But for me, it really was going back to leaning into: What is God’s will for my life? What are the values that I have, the passions that I have, the dreams that I have? And just staying true to those.”
Her first book, Made for This Moment, released in 2021, documented her decision to go on the show and the opportunities she got because of it, with the thesis being that a lifetime of faith can prepare you “to keep your standards high and your roots deep so that you can make decisions you’re proud of.” But it’s with The Love Everybody Wants that Troutt is leaning into her own, carefully curated persona. The book is unapologetically Christian and a passionate defense of what Troutt refers to as “purity.”
Troutt started writing the book, she says, when she was “single and miserable,” originally intending it to be a guide for those like herself.
“I was in a season of just being frustrated with the waiting season, seeing everyone else be married, having kids, living their best life, while I was battling heartbreak and rejection and loneliness, and just began to wrestle with thoughts. Is it me? Am I the problem and am I enough?” she says.
She soon realized that many of her followers had the same concerns and questions, so she began to write the book for them, to encourage them that waiting for the One and learning to love yourself (through also loving God) was worth it.
“The love you’ve been looking for doesn’t come from a compliment, a like, a follow, a boyfriend. Real love is found only in relationship with God. He is the love you want,” she writes.
Troutt’s prose is as cloying as her very pink book cover, full of sparkly pop culture references and you-go-girl-isms. Like another young preacher with a large following (Jesus himself), she often speaks in parables, offering up short anecdotes from her own life to deliver her message. (A story about how she decided to get Lasik eye surgery is a preamble to a chapter on ignoring relationship red flags, in another she compares choosing emotions over logic in love to the feeling of being on drugs at the dentist.) Halfway through writing the book, she met Troutt, and thus validated her own experiences.
Heavily documented in the book is her and Troutt’s relationship (they met and began dating in early 2022, were engaged by August 2022, and married in October) on social media. One revelation that made headlines was her explanation that she and Troutt had signed a “purity contract” detailing what they could and could not do with each other sexually, and sent it to their best friends to hold them accountable. On her wedding day she wore a veil embroidered with the phrase “Worth the Wait.”
She devotes a chapter of The Love Everybody Wants to the issue of “purity,” and while she insists she doesn’t want to shame anyone for their choices, she also says that the only way her relationship was able to work was by remaining “pure.”
“The idea of purity has become a joke to many, yet those same individuals wonder why their lives are so full of anxiety, anger, hopelessness, and relational disappointment,” she writes. “I can assure you, following God’s way is always in your best interest, for your own protection and future pleasure.”
In one passage she blames relationship struggles she and Troutt experienced while dating on “‘small’ moments of compromise” of the contract.
“Here’s the thing—sex and all sexual acts were created to be experienced in the confines of marriage and to bring unity to the marriage,” she writes. “But when we experience them outside the covenant of marriage, they bring the opposite—all the destructive consequences Grant and I experienced and, sometimes, irrecoverable devastation. This is true for any sexual acts, not just sex. Anything done that arouses you. Whatever that means for you.”
The message is an uphill climb. On social media, and in society at large, women of all ages are unpacking how hurtful purity culture can be, and how toxic and sexist the messages gleaned from it can be (the hashtag #purityculture on TikTok has more than 450 million video views, mainly from people decrying it). Last month podcasters and TikTokers Syd King and Becca Stephenson, whose content focuses on unpacking the harmful messages of religion, among other things, posted a video asking what the weirdest message purity culture taught their followers was, and got dozens of responses and stitched videos from women recalling the degrading messages they absorbed.
“My 8th grade BIBLE teacher told the girls if a shirt is fitted enough that I can tell you have breasts it’s tempting and inappropriate,” wrote one person. Wrote another, “My church called women ‘stumbling blocks.’ So anyway that was obviously my villain origin story.”
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Online, Troutt has her fans, but she’s also an object of scorn and lurid fascination by those who don’t share her beliefs. Last year a TikTok Troutt posted of herself telling a crowd that “Jesus is the only one who can satisfy” went viral. It quickly became a meme. One creator’s video, in which he describes the things that “satisfy” him besides Jesus (a beanbag chair, an air fryer) got nearly a million views on TikTok. Another posted a response video in front of a cardboard box. “Everything in that box did come from Adam and Eve” (yes, she’s talking about the sex toy company).
“I knew that there was going to be backlash,” she says. “This has been a part of following Jesus for as long as he’s been here. People have not understood it and people have persecuted and hated and all the things. I’ve known that pretty much my whole life that it kind of comes with the territory. I expect it in a way, and in no way does it discourage me. In no way does it make me question what I believe. If anything, it just reminds me of why I do what I do and just encourages me to keep going.”
She is willing, though, to engage with critiques of purity culture, telling me that she knows that not everyone believes what she does. She’s insistent that even if they aren’t Christian, everyone can get something out of her book.
“I have the understanding that we’re all on our own journey and we’re all figuring it out,” she says. “I think those feelings that we all have of empowerment and knowing what we deserve and wanting to stay true to our values is really the message [of the book]. I would just encourage anyone, no matter where they stand in a relationship with God, that you deserve to be treated with kindness and love. All women deserve to be respected. My hope would be that all women would know their worth, and know that you don’t have to give your body to someone just to feel more worthy or to feel loved or accepted.”
Her message is resonating with fans, thousands of whom fill her comments with messages of support and asking for advice. Troutt says she spends a lot of time counseling women in her DMs and IRL after her speaking engagements, but says she doesn’t consider herself a preacher, exactly.
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“As Christians, we’re all ministers in some way,” she says. “I believe that we’re all ministering and communicating about something…. For me, being a minister and just sharing my faith is so important. Almost even seeing it as [being] a missionary. I’m on [a] mission and my goal is truly just to encourage as many people as I can with the gospel that has saved me and brought me so much hope and joy and peace and my life. So yeah, I would definitely say to some level, but I probably wouldn’t label myself as a minister. I guess I would say a Bible teacher, or just someone who’s eager to share her faith or to hopefully influence people to want to pursue a relationship with Jesus.”
Three years after appearing on TV and launching her platform, Troutt has more followers than ever. If attention is currency, she’s rich. Every viral reaction video only spreads her message more, which is ultimately, what she wants. Looking at her feed, you have to wonder: Is this the future of Christianity? Can the faith live on through a cadre of influencers for God, just like Troutt?
“I would hope that it would start a movement,” she says of spreading the message of Jesus online. “I would hope that it would take off and that people would not just get caught up in the next trend, but have a voice for themselves. I think I’m seeing a lot of this younger generation, they don’t even know their own voice. They’re hopping on whatever the news or the trends or the whatever everybody else is saying.”
It may seem an unlikely reversal, but in Troutt’s mind, it is a necessary one. Even if those she’s talking to may not believe it. Not yet, anyway.
“My goal is like, ‘Hey, let’s not just be paper in the wind and just following wherever the wind goes, but to know who we are and to know what we believe and to know why we believe it, and to stay true to that,’” she says. “That is definitely something that I hope and pray for the younger generation.”
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More!: Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
