Shannon Harris says “goodbye” to the Evangelical purity culture

A new memoir is a backstage pass to a religious movement

In the 1990s, the Evangelical world made a big push to eliminate all premarital sex and dating. It was the era of the “Purity Culture.”

It was presented as so very divine, but after a few years, horror stories were being reported—like about the movement’s leader. In 2018, Joshua Harris, author of the 1997 bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, got a divorce, then left Evangelicalism.

Now Shannon Harris, his ex-wife, publishes a memoir. It’s a gruesome tale.

She thinks back wisfully on the woman she never became.

The Woman They Wanted tells the story of a girl with musical ability who thought she’d be on Broadway, or an act in Nashville. Instead she ended up at an Evangelical megachurch in Maryland. Like Alice in Wonderland, she writes, she “fell down a long and winding rabbit hole.”

If you want to forget who you really are, an Evangelical church will help. That became Shannon’s story: hiding from herself. She writes:

“People were telling me what I should think, do, and feel. I no longer felt the freedom to have the answers for myself. There wasn’t any following my heart. There was only follow the leader.”

Shannon had gotten a job at the church, and Josh asked her out.

I compare her narration to his version of the same events in his 2000 book, Boy Meets Girl. He wrote that he had no idea if she liked him, and that he was anxious to the point of panic in calling her: “Would she return my interest?”

She writes that she’d been flirting with him for a year.

Shannon wasn’t from a Christian family, and wasn’t a virgin. That was processed, in context, as “total whore.” If it seemed puzzling for the icon of Evangelical “purity” to marry an ‘impure’ wife, I realize, as I read Shannon’s book: it was a better story.

In “purity culture,” no dating is required.

The idea is that God guides a man to a spouse who has been selected in Heaven. Josh and Shannon were engaged in ten weeks. Their wedding ceremony was staged as another ad for “purity.”

On their honeymoon she knew something was wrong. She got sick and spent three days in bed, trying to process why she wasn’t attracted to Josh. Then he had a bad migraine, his first of many. They “managed to cure his virginity,” as she puts it.

It’s nothing like Josh’s treatment of the honeymoon in Boy Meets Girl:

“We rarely left our hotel room! We had stored up passion; we were full of anticipation and pure desire. Everything was new, fresh, and intoxicating.”

For years they put on public appearances before Evangelicals who were dazzled by them.

Shannon writes: “They believed we were somehow more holy than they were. Or that we had found the key to marital bliss. Or that we were wise beyond our years. We were none of those things.”

Josh remains a vague and distant presence in her narrative, as if he’s barely there. Maybe that’s how they really interacted. She depicts the marriage as sexually cold. As she writes: “I am not sure he found me any more beautiful than I found him desirable.”

Meanwhile, Josh cranked out bestselling books about their ongoing “purity” problems.

He played the Christian hero, trying to get by in this evil, evil world—by God’s grace! Shannon played along. They were well-known and well-off. Their show was popular.

Everything had a price. They lived with a big Evangelical eye trained on them—“Big church brother,” she puts it, with Orwellian flourish. Any missteps were punished. She came home once to find her CD collection had been trashed. She couldn’t drink wine. Her clothes were critiqued.

Her life was standing beside him, being silent.

It turned out that Josh’s church was covering up sexual assault.

A series of horror facts started to come out. Though not a central player, Josh was implicated and lost his job. In the fallout, Shannon developed severe PTSD. “I was a walking zombie,” she writes.

Then the show was over. Josh became a business consultant, and Shannon faced their new lives. She writes: “We weren’t famous or special. We weren’t needing to uphold the laws of someone else’s kingdom. We were just two ordinary people.”

She spent the next year in bed.

Then she got up, cut her hair, and changed her last name. She was now Shannon Bonne. “I stopped waiting for someone to give me permission,” she writes. She wrote and recorded a Pop album.

She says Josh stopped going to church even before she did. They got counseling, but divorce was inevitable. She writes: “Love comes in many forms and sometimes it looks like letting go.”

She mentions making some lesbian friends. But mostly she stops narrating her story. The final section of the book is a sermon she wants to preach about female self-empowerment.

“Call it my goodbye letter, if you want,” as she notes.

My thoughts drift to…myself?

Back in 2019, when Joshua Harris was being shamed across America, I was getting started here at Medium, and I decided to blog his divorce.

No reasons for the divorce were given, but I had the funny feeling it was a story about his wife. I looked up Shannon, and saw that she’d released her album in 2018, and that she’d sung about it all long before anything was in the newspapers:

“Try and understand but could you let me go? It’s just that I need something a little more free.”

I wrote a post about her, “Joshua Harris’s wife finds her voice”—now read 72k times. Josh ‘clapped’ on it, and Shannon wrote a kind note. It was a bit of encouragement on my strange journey. I’d thrash around in my mind a thousand times trying to process the fragments of the lives of Evangelical heroes who seemed, suddenly, to be strangers keeping secrets.

Is Shannon’s story now known?

I’m troubled by the curtain of vagueness that seems to descend when she’s leaving the religion. In her Instagram posts there’s more intense suggestion that she writes about. She posts about having “killed” her old Christan self.

Then Shannon’s personal style turned pretty butch. I wonder if there might be context to Joshua’s unusual statement amid their divorce drama:

“To the LGBTQ+ community, I want to say that I am sorry for the views that I taught in my books and as a pastor regarding sexuality.”

I wonder if the story of Shannon leaving ‘purity’ was actually a coming out story. But if she told that story, Evangelicals might not buy her book.

That was the very situation Joshua Harris had faced—whether to be a supplier of lies to a religion addicted to them.

Josh’s real story remains largely untold.

As Shannon barely talks about him, the ‘prince of purity’ remains a bit of a mystery. There’s been a few disclosures over time. In his 2017 TEDx talk, Josh evoked his actual motives for his “purity” crusade:

“Fear of messing up. Fear of getting your heart broken. Fear of hurting somebody else. Fear of sex.”

Then there was his sexual abuse as a boy—mentioned, once, in a sermon in 2013. But the Evangelical world does keep its secrets. I had to wonder, after awhile, if we even knew how to tell the truth. 🔶