The Tragedy of Joshua Harris: Sobering Thoughts for Evangelicals
Tags: Josh Harris, Joshua Harris

The evangelical world has been roiled by the headlines concerning Joshua Harris. First came the news of his divorce, and then came the news of his departure from the Christian faith. It’s hard to imagine more sobering news.

We have to go back to 1997 with the release of a book entitled, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The book was by Joshua Harris and it became an evangelical publishing phenomenon, eventually selling 1.2 million copies. The central thesis of the book is that evangelicals have been flirting with disaster by their involvement in the dating culture. Harris spoke of his own experience and prescriptively began to outline a shift from dating to a model of courtship.

This represented a significant evangelical cultural pushback in the 1990s to the sexual licentiousness of the culture in general and the fact that a very loose dating culture had indeed brought a great deal of sin and grief to so many young people. Harris effectively called for an end to the entire system of dating among adolescents and young adults. Instead, he pointed to a more ecclesial and family-based model of courtship.

And of course, one of the issues we have to face here is that when you have a popular book with this kind of influence, you sometimes have people who take the argument even further. The push-back against the dating culture grew radical, and many evangelicals reveled in the radicalism of the movement.

It's helpful in this case to go back to the biography of Joshua Harris. He is one of the seven children of Gregg and Sono Harris, and they were very influential long before Joshua Harris emerged as a young author. They were mostly influential within the burgeoning homeschool movement of the 1970s and ‘80s and beyond, and they and their movement were located in the Pacific Northwest.

Joshua Eugene Harris (born December 30, 1974 in Dayton, Ohio) is an American author and former pastor. Harris is widely known for his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), in which he laid out his ideas concerning a Biblically-based Christian approach to dating and relationships. I Kissed Dating Goodbye "helped shape purity culture" for many Christian millennials.[1] Harris was lead pastor of Covenant Life Church, the founding church of Sovereign Grace Ministries, in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 2004 until 2015. In 2018, Harris disavowed I Kissed Dating Goodbye and discontinued its publication. In 2019 Harris announced he was separating from his wife and was not a Christian.