Joshua Harris’s wife finds her voice

Is she the new pastor in the family?

He was the newsworthy one — the longtime star of Evangelical Christianity, a spokesman of the “purity culture,” and a megachurch pastor.

Then Joshua Harris, the bestselling author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, became as famous for the child-abuse scandal, then for his divorce, and for leaving Christianity via Instagram. But his wife, I’d noticed, a singer. She’d released an album in 2018. It told the story of the divorce.

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

Josh was always the one telling their story.

Evangelicals followed it along, book by book, speech by speech. They’d met her in 1997, shortly before I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published.

They began ‘courting’. They seemed the very image of the ideas he had advanced — that dating was bad, that God will lead you to your spouse.

He writes in Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship:

“I caught my first glimpse of her on the Sunday she got up in church and shared the story of how she’d become a Christian. Two and a half years earlier she’d had no interest in God. At the time she’d just returned to Maryland from college in New Hampshire, where she’d lived the typical party life. It was an empty life lived for herself-a life ruled by sin. Back home, she threw all her energy into her dream of becoming a professional singer. Soon a move to Nashville seemed the next sensible step up the ladder of stardom. That’s just the kind of person she was. Her parents had gotten divorced when she was nine, and her dad had raised her to be self-reliant.”

In context, “self-reliant” was bad.

He prompted to purge all her previous contacts with men.

His writing now feels less “pure” than panicked and insecure. “I needed to hear her tell me that she loved me and that her past relationships were meaningless to her.”

He kept telling her his sex drive was barely under control. He writes of asking her to change from a pair of shorts to pants. And she “quickly” obeyed.

There’s so many weird scenes in his books. Months before they marry, he debates with God over whether he can lay next to her in a hammock. Joshua is for it, but he has a dialogue with an accusing God:

“You’re lusting.” Well, she is going to be my wife in four months. “Well, she’s not your wife today.” God does not want me to stifle my sexuality! “Stifle, no. Control for the sake of righteousness, yes.”

Then I think of Shannon, laying there, watching the man she’ll marry having a debate with an unknown voice over whether resting beside her is divinely approved. It was a lonely road, I bet.

She watched her life happen from the sidelines.

As a pastor’s wife, representing “purity” to the country’s largest religion, her biggest job was to play the image of a perfect wife.

She began to realize she was doubting the religion.

“Healthy churches don’t use fear, bullying or shaming. They don’t need to manipulate behavior or manage image.”

She narrates her own story in a track called “Invisible.” She talks about it on a posting on Instagram: “Since I became a version of me that excluded some of my most vital and colorful parts, naturally I felt invisible.”

She began to doubt her husband’s work.

That the religion was in fact on the side of goodness and rightness was not apparent to her any more. It seemed more a tool for smothering her.

“My fundamentalist conservative Christianity experience taught me to ignore my inner voice,” she writes in early July. “I learned to distrust and override myself out of fear in an environment where those in authority held tremendous control over leaders and members.”

She posts a bit about the time when he lost his job and they moved to Vancouver. His storytelling was done. She writes:

“When we left, I think my body was in shock. My mind, too. I hadn’t had a moment to myself in years, and there was an overwhelming amount of material to sort through. There was also the sudden quiet.”

She cut her hair into a boyish style.

It was a sharp break from the religion and from every narrative her husband had written about her. She seemed to deeply grieve her youth, the girl who she was before the woman she never became.

She lately posts lyrics she wrote as a teenager, before she knew her husband. They’re glimpses of a girl who wasn’t represented in his depictions of her.

“minds that are free flower with imagination”

In her photos and videos she’s drifted into a very androgynous style, and one reflects on how far she’s come? In her new music video for “Invisible,” shot in San Francisco, there’s gay couples all around.

How much of the “reality” was true?

He’d confesses in his 2017 TEDx talk of his actual motives in his “purity” crusade. “Fear of messing up. Fear of getting your heart broken. Fear of hurting somebody else. Fear of sex.”

He didn’t talk about his childhood sexual abuse that he’d noted once, making (minor) headlines with a 2013 comment in a sermon: “Reading this past week about the allegations of sexual abuse was very difficult,” he said. “I know it is for anyone. But it is very personal for me because I was a victim of sexual abuse as a child.”

Then his storytelling just stopped.

Maybe hers will pick up the story. She promises a book and a musical. She would seem to have an amazing story to tell. She was a woman playing a perfect wife to a religious movement in its dying throes.

Her look can be unexpectedly butch. If Shannon is lesbian, I hope she preaches a sermon from Mary Rose D’Angelo’s scholarly paper, “Women Partners in the New Testament.”

What matters is love. Or that’s what matters to God. In its love of rules, love is something the “Purity Culture” never knew. 🔶