How Madison Prewett Troutt Spun a Messy ‘Bachelor’ Season Into a Conservative Influencing Career
Madison Prewett Troutt finished a dramatic season of The Bachelor with 1.9 million Instagram followers—and a full-blown identity crisis. As a devout Christian with a certificate in ministry in pastoral leadership, she’d had mixed feelings about doing a reality dating show in the first place. While filming, her decision to remain a virgin until marriage became a central plot point up until she quit in her season’s final episode, upset that Bachelor Peter Weber had decided to sleep with other women in the franchise’s infamous fantasy suite.
“There was a lot of backlash and persecution for my choice of pursuing purity and the way in which I lived my life,” she says five years later, the day after her third book, Dare to Be True, was released. “On one hand, I definitely have developed tough skin. On the other hand, I always want to learn and grow from it.”
After an unusually chaotic After the Final Rose reunion special—Weber ended his engagement with winner Hannah Ann Sluss and pursued a relationship with Prewett Troutt, then broke up with her too a few days later—she emerged into a new life, just as the world shut down due to COVID-19. “I processed a lot of that with family and friends. It was a weird time,” she says. But that weirdness also brought opportunities, like a book project and speaking engagements. “I started speaking at churches and getting to talk about Jesus and my journey with purity,” says Prewett Troutt, “and it’s just been [going] from there.”
Like countless Bachelor and Bachelorette alums, Prewett Troutt has parlayed the attention she got from the show into a career as an influencer—though she is more polarizing among the fans who call themselves Bachelor Nation than most. Still, she’s drawn enough support to become one of the best known women making lifestyle content for a conservative audience. Prewett Troutt’s a regular in that sphere’s media circuit: She’s appeared on podcasts hosted by BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey, Duck Dynasty alum Sadie Robertson Huff, and controversial family vloggers Matt and Abby Howard. She’s also made occasional appearances on Fox News, and in 2024, she was tapped to be the convocation speaker at ultraconservative Liberty University.
At the same time, Prewett Troutt—who married Grant Troutt, a staffer at a Baptist church and the son of telecommunications billionaire Kenny Troutt, in 2022—has pursued a broader audience by touring college campuses and focusing on feelings over policy on her podcast, Stay True. Though she was a fan of Charlie Kirk—and even honored the late firebrand on Fox & Friends in the days after his death—she seems to shy away from the aggressive political comments that marked his style.
Her new book attempts to reconcile these contradictions. In its first chapter, she compares living with the “shame” of an abortion or “hook[ing] up with someone of the same gender, or…[having] thoughts about it” to a time she felt sick after a gas leak in her Waco, Texas, home. She adds that she, too, was once “enslaved to pornography,” though she now has been porn-free for around 10 years. She offers practical tips for singles pursuing the path of purity: “Just like in sports, when it comes to living pure and living free, you need a good defense and offense,” she writes, advising readers to confess their sins and avoid “temptation triggers” like “Xbox, YouTube, steamy romance novels, racy shows or movies, Instagram, Snapchat, or other social media or online sites that are feeding those cravings.”
Advice like this is overtly provocative—but Prewett Troutt says she doesn’t want to spark discord with her words. “I don’t want there to be hatred and division and violence and loss and brokenness and sin,” she says. “I mean, those are things that are really hard to see and to witness. And I love everybody, so I want everyone to love everyone.” To her, a religious revival seems like the solution to the country’s woes. “I don’t think we have a political problem. I don’t think we have a racial problem. I don’t think we have a gender problem,” she says. “I think we need Jesus.”
Prewett Troutt grew up in a fairly cloistered world before she took a limo to The Bachelor’s crowded mansion in 2019. Raised in Alabama by her father, a coach for Auburn University’s basketball team, and mother, a Bible teacher, she was involved in her family’s Assemblies of God church community and the wider evangelical subculture. After leaving The Bachelor, she was hurt to see how other conservative Christians responded to her choice to participate in a reality dating show.
“It was really hard for me after I came off the show,” she says. “There were some months where I really struggled with wanting to be a part of a church, because I felt so judged and hurt by the church.” For months, Prewett Troutt says, she kept her distance.
But marrying Troutt brought her back into the fold—and into a more modern church, where conservative theology goes hand-in-hand with athleisure and Nike Dunks. “My husband and I moved to Waco, Texas, right after we got married, and he was working at a local church called Harris Creek,” she says. She credits their pastor, Jonathan Pokluda, with helping her develop as a public speaker.
Prewett Troutt’s plan to present an aesthetically attractive Christianity to the wider world is not without its challenges. In July, a video of the Troutts laughing about their eventual intention to spank their daughter—they’re currently parents to Hosanna, who was born in January 2025—inspired widespread outrage on TikTok and YouTube. Over 500 commenters on The Bachelor’s subreddit weighed in on the incident, and most of their remarks were strongly negative.
For Prewett Troutt’s detractors, the spanking video was a reminder that despite her large reach, she is still firmly ensconced in a bubble. Even other evangelicals complained that she and Troutt were repeating old, debunked ideas about how Christians should raise their children, without having the experience to know that their advice could be harmful. Because she gained her audience through The Bachelor, she may be less equipped to navigate the challenges of sharing unpopular views online as she’d be if, say, she’d spent those years debating atheists instead.
In the meantime, Prewett Troutt says that she and her husband are “learning” from the negative reaction to the spanking video. “I always want to listen before I speak. I always want to take it to God and ask him to lead me and guide me,” she says. “We take it to wise counsel and just say, like, ‘Hey, where did we mess up? Where did we fall short? Can y’all be praying for this?’ And so that’s what we’ve done.”
And for now, the criticism she’s gotten for remarks that seem out of step with modern culture are only making her more determined to stay the course. “I think there’s always something to learn anytime you get backlash,” she says. “It doesn’t make me want to shrink back or speak out less. It actually just makes me want to be even more bold, and be even more unashamed of God’s truth that I believe is the only thing that’ll set us free.”
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