A Prayer for Joshua Harris

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, from the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Dr. Andrew Newberg, research psychologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, devised an experiment: have people draw a picture of God. It’s disarmingly simple once somebody else already thought of it: don’t tell me your denomination, show me your God. Adults offered various pictures, including an eye, hand, or both in the sky; planet Earth; the Milky Way galaxy; a mirror; blooming trees and flowers; a blank page, because you can’t draw what doesn’t exist; and more.

Children, by contrast, consistently presented the same picture: an old White man with a long white beard, the image we recognize from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. According to Newberg’s book How God Changes Your Brain, this applied to children of both biological sexes, all races and national backgrounds, all religions, and no religion. Children have a consistent view of God.

I couldn’t help recalling Newberg’s experiment upon learning the news that former pastor Joshua Harris had announced his marriage ending recently. Harris wrote the 1997 Christian bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, the manifesto of Purity Culture that permeated White Christianity in the late 1990s and 2000s. Like many religious people, Harris devised a system that worked for him, then imposed it on everybody, believing his experience was portable and universal.

Except, obviously, it didn’t really work for him.

After writing his name-making book at 21, and marrying his wife at 24, Harris became an East Coast megachurch pastor, heavily supported by his book’s durable reputation—few pop Christian books receive a second printing, but his remained available for over twenty years. But this created tension, because he couldn’t change his religious views from those of early adulthood. He couldn’t leave the old White man for the mirror, trees, galaxy, or whatever.

Stuck in the religious views of a fervorous 21-year-old, who preached a black-and-white theology of “purity,” his own moral straight-jacket apparently began strangling him. In 2015, he left his pulpit after it became common knowledge that his congregation buried sexual abuse allegations, an increasingly common accusation anymore. In 2018 he asked his publisher, Multnomah, to remove I Kissed Dating Goodbye from publication (they agreed), and apologized for its very existence.

Purity Culture taught young Christians they were either pure or impure, either holy or fallen. Like the Temperance Movement of generations gone, which separated Americans into Wet or Dry, Purity Culture had a Manichaean edge, and told adherents that once you turned apostate, forgiveness was impossible, or at least incomplete and conditional. Not only couldn’t Purity Culture youth have premarital sex, they were deemed “impure” if they even kissed or held hands before becoming engaged.

I somewhat understand this impulse. Harris’ book dropped less than one year after a Friends episode where Chandler and Joey disparaged Ross as “a freak” after it transpired that Ross had only ever had sex with his wife. Former pastor Harris and I are only months apart in age, so I understand, from direct experience, the strong Christian revulsion to what we probably both perceived as profligate sexual mores in 1990s culture. So he reacted against it.

Former pastor Joshua Harris

But by taking mores to an opposite extreme, Harris created a public ethos based on shame and accusation. He made young Christians intensely self-conscious, telling them their sins were so heinous, they couldn’t be forgiven. Many Christians of Harris’ (and my) generation continue to struggle with internalized guilt, believing minor sexual transgressions are so complete that God will hold them forever accountable, even as adult faith tells them otherwise.

Essentially Harris tied an entire generation to Michelangelo’s old White man. Twenty years of Christians, mostly White, mostly conservative, weren’t free to start seeing God in transcendent, galactic terms, because doing so would’ve made them formally Impure. To change, in Purity Culture, is to fall. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s jibe that one mustn’t trust priests, because they’re required to believe at eighty the same things they believed at eighteen.

That includes Harris himself, who has announced he no longer considers himself Christian.

Harris is probably being too hard on himself. Christianity is still open to him. He just needs to see past his homeschooled straight-jacket. The harm he’s caused probably means teaching and preaching are forever gone from him, but Christianity is a relationship, not an absolute. He just needs to stop believing the lies he’s told himself for over twenty years.

God isn’t an old White man. Nor is God a galaxy, plant, or mirror. But importantly, God also isn’t a pastor, something Harris and others still need to learn.