After it was announced this week that Joshua Harris was separating from his wife I saw lots of discourse online, much of which I find to be troubling and unhelpful.
Why do I want to write about this today? Well I have the background of having read many of his books as I've grown up, and I also got a chance to talk with him while he was a student at Regent. I was just finishing my own 2 year program at Regent when he first went there. From this background I'd like to add a few thoughts to hopefully advance more helpful discussions.
First: People say their separation disproves purity culture. An example of this kind of statement can be seen in the "Friendly Atheist" blog: "The news of his separation essentially confirms what we already knew: Purity culture makes extraordinary promises that it ultimately cannot keep."
Response: How do you define: Purity culture? From the sounds of the Atheist, purity culture means a 100% guarantee that a marriage will never have a divorce, and promises perfect relationships and marriage. No Christian has ever written a book that says that. Instead books like "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" say there are better alternatives than dating around without a purpose and becoming physically and emotionally involved too soon and without a commitment. All the secular studies show that divorce rates do indeed go down when "purity culture" type standards are applied. So is purity culture failing? No... And I'd argue that the entire term Purity Culture is unhelpful, unless you actually define it.
Defining Purity Culture is essential if you're going to try and refute it. There hasn't been a concerted effort to start a Purity Culture movement and to put 100% focus on keeping one's virginity etc. The history of this so called movement is that our secular culture has gotten more and more sexually explicit and pornography use has gone up exponentially in the lats few decades. What is the Christian response supposed to be? To encourage pornography use? To encourage divorce? To encourage immorality? Of course not, so what do you expect to happen as a response? An emphasis on purity..! This doesn't mean it's a movement in which purity is the only thing we focus on, but it's a response that's needed because of the cultural problem. The only way this response would not be needed is if Christians aren't engaging in culture. But we are engaging in culture. So perhaps these authors and liberal theologians think Christians should disconnect, so purity culture isn't needed? No that's not it either.
Second: People say we shouldn't be listening to anything a 21 year old says anyways (referring to Harris book "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" which people assume is now refuted).
Response: There is certainly wisdom in not getting all of one's counsel from inexperienced people who are young. That doesn't mean we automatically ignore anything a 21 year old says though, history continues to show us that younger people have had significant and important things to say in the world stage. Example: Bill Gates was 30 years old when Windows 1.0 came out, should it have been ignored because he was too young? The more important question for Christians is, how does this book engage with the Bible and does it teach scriptural principles that are important to hear in our secularizing age and culture? And on that note I would argue that his books still have much to say because of the way they go to the Bible. We shouldn't automatically believe everything a younger person says, but we also shouldn't automatically reject everything. Scripture should be the lens.
This all leads me to another point I feel bothered by. In the last year when Harris went on his "apology tour" for "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" I never saw any substantive critiques of the book. I have yet to see anyone pull a single quote from the book and analyze and respond to it and show why it was problematic. The only thing I've seen is people feeling rejected and hurt by the book and it's effects on people, or emotional hurt from people's own implications of the book. In any case this section could really get a blog post of it's own...
Those are some brief thoughts on the matters of this week.
