Josh Harris has cameo role in my last novel, Looking for Dawn, when a dad named Scotty picks up a book his daughter is reading only to discover it's all about sex and dating--specifically, how not doing sex and dating is the Jesus way. Scotty reads just enough to be shocked, so different is the way of Jesus outlined in the book from the way Scotty himself grew up. I didn't name Josh Harris or the book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, because it seemed to me he wasn't the only advocate of this 21st version of spiritual celibacy.
Josh Harris, a "purity expert" some call him, argued that dating is harmful since it introduces a kid--boy or girl--to a way of life that made multiple partners an accepted thing. In his opinion (he was just a kid himself when he wrote it), true love not only waits, it doesn't even date. He was an advocate of what he called "courtship," an elaborate ritual that includes parental participation.
Harris, himself the son of a celebrated preacher, soon had his own mega-church. Maybe he gave his wealth away--I don't know; but when books like his fly off the shelf, they earn significant money. With three kids and a pretty wife, he'd reached the American Evangelical Dream. He was barely thirty years old.
Then, a couple of years back, he pulled the plug on just about everything he'd once advocated, said he no longer bought the goods he'd sold to the evangelical public. He resigned his pulpit and went to seminary, he said, to understand more about the historic Christian faith.
Those who bought his purity culture were leaderless. Must have been painful.
Now, just a month ago or so, as if to put the error of his ways into upper case, he announced that he and his wife had split, amicably, he said. They were seeking a divorce because, as most people say, they found themselves pursuing different courses or whatever.
Not only that, he went farther in an Instagram message: "The information that was left out of our announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus," Harris wrote. "By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," he added, "I am not a Christian."
What must have disillusioned, even angered conservative evangelicals even more is what he later added: that he regretted, even asked forgiveness of the LGBTQ community for believing and saying what he did as one of the fair-haired boys of the cultural conservative evangelical community.
Christians are just as susceptible to fads as anyone, maybe more so. Faith, after all, is all about being generous, or should be. Christians who are skeptical--think Thomas the disciple--generally pay a price for questioning things. Harris was, for sure, a fad for a time.
Here's another. I can't help but think of a really faddish way evangelicals have of talking about people, often their own children. You must have heard it. It goes like this: "I can't wait to see what amazing things God has planned for you." It's very sweet and encouraging, very "christian."
In the case of Josh Harris, whose parents might well have blessed him with the same words, is what has happened to him in the last few years "amazing"? Is his acceptance of gay marriage part of God's plan for his life, or was he on it only when he opened the word in that mega-church?
"By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," Josh Harris says, "I am not a Christian." That sentence does not mean God doesn't love him or he doesn't worship God. What it says is that he's discovered--right or wrong--that his old definitions no longer hold up for him. God is somehow bigger.
I don't share evangelical fear or sadness about what's happened to the faith of Josh Harris. He's forty years old now, not 23. Does anyone really doubt that where he is today will be where he is in faith when he's sixty? I don't. God doesn't change, but we certainly do.
A sovereign God does amazing things, but "amazing" can be a little slippery. I
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