Chip Gaines Claps Back at Critics of Same-Sex Couple Featured on New Reality Show Back to the Frontier

Chip Gaines is standing up for the same-sex couple recently featured on the new Magnolia Network reality show, Back to the Frontier.

In a post shared on X on Sunday, July 13, Chip, 50, wrote, “Talk, ask questions, listen.. maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never.”

The post continued, “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 statement from Chip comes after Franklin Graham, the son of Evangelical pastor Billy Graham, criticized the new show’s inclusion of married couple Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs, and their 10-year-old twin sons.

Graham, 73, wrote in a post on X shared on Saturday, July 12, “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.”

Chip and his wife Joanna Gaines, who maintain a home and lifestyle empire that began with their hit HGTV show Fixer Upper, launched Magnolia Network in 2022 as a rebrand of the DIY Network in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery. Back to the Frontier — which premiered on Thursday, July 10 — marks a new inclusive path in the network’s programming.

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The new reality show follows three families attempting to live off the land without modern amenities like electricity, in the style of 19th-century Western pioneers. Hanna and Riggs are the patriarchs of one of the three families competing on the show.

On July 11, Hanna told LGBTQ+ news outlet Queerty that the show presented a “great, amazing opportunity to normalize same-sex couples and same-sex families.”

“I’m super honored that when they were choosing three modern-day families, they did choose a same-sex couple as a modern-day family, because we are. We are your neighbors and your coworkers,” Hanna continued.