Josh Harris on social media enjoying a delicious looking rainbow pastry at Vancouver Pride.

One of the things we’re seeing happen lately is more attempts by various people to climb up the heap to be the alpha cultural enforcer. Now that both Debi Pearl and Nancy Campbell are getting older and Lori Alexander isn’t far behind them a crop of younger ladies are vying for the position atop that precarious peak. This one recently popped up on our notice by attempting to promote her blog by a) defending Roosh V, an admitted rapist, and b) promoting her blog as the answer. Meet one Kathryn of Joy for the Journey.

Whatever happened to Lori Alexander’s notion that only older ladies were to teach? I hate it when people of little life experience try to tell everyone else what to do. When Kathryn came to NLQ she linked to a piece that was basically just her ripping into Patheo’s Libby Anne from Love, Joy, Feminism.

In this piece Kathryn is busy trying to tell everyone how not to divorce, how to divorce proof your marriage. She spends reams of words on it when it actually boils down to one simple thing. Learn to communicate, talk, express your feelings like an adult. There’s really no fool proof way to divorce proof your marriage but you can cut the odds by talking.

I’m not going to take on all of her misstatements on how to keep a marriage together, just this one rather glaringly wrong subject.

Instead Kathryn goes right to the most recently proven to be a wishful statement at best, or a patent falsehood – courtship.

Another way to prevent a bad marriage and avoid divorce is to be sure we marry wise, mature, God-fearing men. Don’t just take a man’s word for it that he is a Christian – actually observe and analyze his life. All too often we ladies get carried away by our emotions and we ignore the very obvious red flags about a man’s character. This is why it is so, so important to have a wise, God-fearing man (hopefully your father!) be involved in your courtship!

A father (or if that is not an option, another God-fearing man) can get to know a young man in ways a young lady cannot. He knows what red flags to look for and he won’t be wearing rose-colored glasses (so to speak). He will be able to see the good, bad, and ugly and can warn his daughter. A wise young lady will listen to the counsel of her parents and wait for the right man.

In the wake of Josh Harris renouncing his own book on courtships, the failure of his marriage, the failure of all the marriages outlined in his other books I would say courtship has been proven time and again to not hold any greater record of preventing divorce than any other man-made method. Make no mistake, it is a man-make method, not Biblical mandated. In fact, if the divorce rates by Pew and Barna are anything to go by there are more divorces in Evangelicalism than in any other people group.

Why would that be? Hmm, let’s see, you have very sheltered young people with no life experience expected to morph into fully functional sexual adults at too young an age would likely be a contributing factor. It’s not their fault, they just have not had the chance to change and develop into adults. No matter how ‘wise’ their fathers are. Their fathers will not be living in that unique partnership that is marriage. They are the ones that will ultimately pay the price for their young marriage.

If brain development does not complete until people are in their twenties, it’s folly to expect teenagers to marry successfully. You might as well demand your cats do the laundry, or your toddler cook dinner. They aren’t capable of it. That’s to say nothing of physical development, social skills, education or the many other things you must develop and navigate to be fully an adult. Why handicap your kids before they even have a chance?

The thing about all these cultural enforcer want to be’s is that their advice, like this advice, harms others. It has a body count, and that body count keeps rising as good Christians attack those that leave to save themselves.

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