\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span> read Boy Meets Girl <\/em>decades ago as an adolescent alongside thousands of other church kids in America. It was the much-anticipated follow-up to Joshua Harris\u2019s now-infamous book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye<\/em>. As a very young adult, Harris had told us all how to date (or rather, how to court) in a pure way, so that we could all make it to our wedding night as virgins.<\/p>\n Boy Meets Girl <\/em>was going to tell us how this had all worked out for Josh on a personal level. It also introduced us to Shannon, who I pictured as Josh\u2019s leading lady. Turns out, however, she was more like his backstage help. As Shannon Harris makes clear in her recent book The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife<\/em>, she longed to fulfill her dream of being a singer and actor, but was instead tasked with passing out cake to the cast.<\/p>\n I naively read Boy Meets Girl<\/em> as a love story. I thought of Joshua and Shannon Harris as an example for all of us kids out there trying to date the \u201cright\u201d way. The book felt like a kind of promise that, if I followed the same rules, I, too, might find my future spouse and live happily ever after.<\/p>\n Decades later, holding Harris\u2019s memoir , <\/em>I can practically feel the weight of her untold stories in my hands. In it, she finally inserts her own voice into the narrative, giving us an entirely different perspective on the marriage, their ministry, and how being the pastor\u2019s wife of a famous evangelical leader left her \u201cstarving\u201d with \u201cnothing left to give.\u201d<\/p>\n What turned Harris from being a new, excited Christian into feeling like she had been handed \u201cheavy bricks\u201d by the local church? Those who knew Harris before her conversion, like author Aimee Byrd, describe her<\/a> as \u201cbeautiful, popular, very talented, friendly, and always smiling.\u201d And Harris says of herself, \u201cI was a young, talented woman, full of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n She was the brave, driven kid in school who wanted to play the leading role in Annie<\/em>\u2014the singer who loved to share her voice. But shortly after her courtship with Joshua began, Shannon was thrown into a new world with a specific code of expectations and rules and a call to abandon her dreams.<\/p>\n She recalls being sat down early in the courtship by Carolyn, the wife of C. J. Mahaney (the lead pastor at Joshua\u2019s church), who told her that marrying Josh would mean surrendering her own ambitions. Mahaney would even introduce her as \u201cthe girl who gave up her dreams for the local church.\u201d<\/p>\n For over a decade, she played the role of pastor\u2019s wife\u2014cooking, cleaning, raising children, helping with church worship, and opening up her home. She would also be told what not to wear, how often she could assert her own voice, and where she fit in the hierarchy of church leadership. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t any following my heart,\u201d she says, \u201conly follow[ing] the leader.\u201d<\/p>\n She recalls the day Carolyn took her out to the garage to view her freezer, fully stocked with pre-prepared meals for her family and for hosting church members. Harris says that when she saw the rows of frozen chicken Kiev and chocolate mint pies, she knew this wasn\u2019t her idea of \u201cwomanhood.\u201d Nevertheless, she obediently conformed to the plan laid out for her, accepting that she would be \u201cwatched and monitored\u201d along the way. To survive, Harris says that she tried to fit herself \u201cinto the quietest, smallest shell possible.\u201d<\/p>\n As Harris reflects on these years of feeling like unwilling clay in the hands of male church leaders, she concludes that her entire conversion to Christianity was essentially built on \u201cthe premise of shame.\u201d Because of this, she felt like she was always trying to make up for her sins. Many women coming out of the purity movement (that Harris\u2019s husband, Joshua, ironically spearheaded) feel the same, that the gospel they heard was, You messed up, so you are forever dirty and guilty, and must live a life of groveling<\/em>.<\/p>\n We know this isn\u2019t what Scripture teaches, so why is it what so many in the church hear? This question compels us to consider the role of Calvinism in souring Harris on Christianity . <\/em>She cites Calvinist theology as the reason she now pays her therapist \u201chundreds of dollars to remind [her that she\u2019s] fabulous.\u201d<\/p>\n The fruit she saw from this particular theological camp was a group of men who touted the doctrine of total depravity but somehow believed they got everything right. \u201cNo one else was doing Christianity right enough or hard enough or biblical enough,\u201d Harris writes, \u201cand their unquestionable certainty had grown tiresome.\u201d<\/p>\n I, too, was surrounded by the theology of Calvinism during my formative years in the church. The Young, Restless, and Reformed movement<\/a> was in full swing by the time I was in college. Harris rightly identifies some of the bad fruit that came out of the movement, such as pride, a de-emphasis on the imago Dei<\/em>, and a confusing narrative about our worth as human beings. Are we totally depraved or \u201cfearfully and wonderfully made\u201d (Ps. 139:14)?<\/p>\n Harris concludes that, to heal from this theology, we must strive to connect \u201cto our own wisdom, to nature and our bodies, to our own fulfillment in work and pleasure, and to our own ways of being and doing.\u201d And I imagine many readers have underlined that particular sentence in their copies of her book, finding it refreshing to think so positively about themselves and their bodies after years of sermons on our \u201cfoolish hearts\u201d and \u201csinful flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n But what does this really look like in practice?<\/p>\n Sometimes, it might look like bringing your neighbor freshly made bread, just to cheer them up. But other times, it might look like following your own wisdom and seeking your own pleasure, like binging on a sleeve of Oreos while watching porn. Or trolling someone you don\u2019t like online instead of spending time with your kids.<\/p>\n We can and do image God in all sorts of beautiful ways, but without Christ we are sick\u2014sinners in need of salvation.<\/p>\n We are stunning image-bearers of God, and <\/em>we have inherited Adam\u2019s sin. We are wonderfully made, and <\/em>we fall short of the glory of God. Both are true and do not war against each other. I think Harris rightly warns us against \u201cworm theology,\u201d but where she falls short is this: If we only emphasize our goodness and deny our sin problem, we lose our need for repentance, which means we lose the gospel, which means we lose Jesus.<\/em><\/p>\n One morning during her honeymoon, Harris says that Joshua was down with a migraine, so she decided to wander around on her own. Soon she spotted a man in blue jeans and a flannel shirt doing some woodwork through an open door. She writes of that moment, \u201cI couldn\u2019t remember the last time I had seen a man so attractive, and I stood in the doorway a few seconds looking at him.\u201d Then she admitted to herself, \u201cNow there\u2019s a guy I\u2019d like to have sex with.\u201d<\/p>\n This story is set in the context of early worries about her marriage as proof, I suppose, that there was already \u201ctrouble in paradise.\u201d But the truth is, if the genders in this story were reversed\u2014if a married man (say, Joshua Harris) was talking about how he stopped and stared at a woman through an open door, thinking about how he wanted to have sex with her during his honeymoon, while his new wife was in bed with a headache\u2014let\u2019s just say that Christian Twitter (sorry, X) would rightfully be in a tizzy.<\/p>\n Instead, many Christian readers of Harris\u2019s book who tweet<\/a> about<\/a> how poorly Harris was treated by the church (because she was), and reviewers<\/a> who write about how we should listen to her story (because we should), say nothing about the fact that Harris offers an entirely different gospel than the gospel of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n By the end of the book, Harris has sloughed off the entirety of human depravity, calling the original sin that brought Jesus to earth to die for us \u201cbrave\u201d and reframing Eve in the Garden of Eden as \u201ca woman who took initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n And while I can respectfully and compassionately listen to Harris\u2019s story and affirm many of her critiques of the modern church, I cannot endorse all her conclusions, especially when she dismisses our need for Christ and chooses herself, rather than the Holy Spirit, as her ultimate guide. In one chapter, Harris explains how she is now learning to trust her own \u201cintuition, inner voice, heart, [and] wisdom.\u201d To understand what she means by this, we might look to the very next chapter, where she labels Eve’s act of eating from the forbidden tree \u201cwisdom,\u201d asking: \u201cWhat if Eve did exactly right by taking the fruit? What if she was supposed to have wisdom?\u201d<\/p>\n Paul, anticipating our human tendency to abuse Christian freedom as a license to indulge our own flesh, warned the Galatian church that our desires and the Holy Spirit are often in \u201cconflict with each other\u201d (5:17). This means that we cannot always \u201cfollow our hearts\u201d and expect that we will naturally choose Christlikeness. We need help. We need the Holy Spirit, the \u201cHelper\u201d whom Jesus left for us when he returned to heaven. To deny this is to reject the very words of Jesus.<\/p>\n Many will respond to Harris\u2019s retreat from the church by asking, \u201cCan you blame her?\u201d After the horrible ways she was treated, why wouldn\u2019t she turn away? When reading stories like Harris\u2019s, we must grapple with the reality that, as Harris points out, her \u201cchurch experience is sadly representative of many others\u2019 experience.\u201d<\/p>\n We would be foolish and arrogant to dismiss her story just because she admits that she no longer knows if God exists. Many churchgoers, specifically women, are worn out, wounded, and finding more healing in therapy than the church.<\/p>\n Part of this is because the church has told them that they must\u2014like Harris\u2014fit themselves into a tiny box made by men in order to be a good Christian. We can recognize this, pointing to the church and its corrupt leaders, and tweet angrily.<\/p>\n But I think it is also time to soberly consider the ways we might have personally<\/em> contributed to pushing people out of the church\u2014people like Shannon Harris. People like your friends, who you mock for deconstructing their faith. Maybe everything they have seen and experienced in the church has nothing to do with Jesus, and they\u2019re walking away without ever having seen his face.<\/p>\n Rachel Joy Welcher is an editor at Fathom Magazine<\/span>. She is the author of Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality<\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/div>\nHandling \u2018heavy bricks\u2019<\/h5>\n
Women and \u2018worm theology\u2019<\/h5>\n
Rejecting the Holy Spirit<\/h5>\n