New Series on Rape and Sexual Assault in Christian Dating Books: “You Are Not Your Own”

If you’re a regular reader from my old address at SarahOverTheMoon.com, or if you follow me on social media (and if you don’t, check out my Facebook page and Twitter account!), you’ve probably heard me about a research project that I’ve been working on since January for my undergraduate capstone. I’ve been reading Christian dating books and analyzing the messages that they send (or fail to send) about rape, sexual assault, and consent. My project is called “You Are Not Your Own: Rape, Sexual Assault, and Consent in Evangelical Christian Dating Books.”   

For this particular project I read and analyzed four famous and infamous evangelical Christian dating books: I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris; When God Writes Your Love Story, by Eric and Leslie Ludy; Dateable, by Justin Lookadoo and Hayley DiMarco; and Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll.

I’ve had many people reach out to me over the past few months asking if I was going to make my findings available for everyone to read. The answer to that is yes!

Now that I’ve finally finished my research (though I’m currently working on polishing it up a bit so I can submit it to an undergraduate academic journal), I’m announcing a new series on my blog about my findings. I’m naming it “You Are Not Your Own” after the title of my paper.

In this series(which may be a long one since my paper was nearly 40 pages), I’ll be blogging through the important findings that I came across in my research. I’m going to start by sharing what I learned from doing my literature review–the background research that I did before I started reading the actual dating books themselves. That background information is important, not only for understanding these dating books, but also for thinking about other trends in Christian culture. After that, I’ll be sharing what I found in the Christian dating books themselves.

At some point in this series I’ll be issuing a call for guest posts. I will give more information at that point, but if you read any of the dating books listed above, or any other Christian dating books, and think you’d be interested in writing about how they’ve affected you–for better or for worse–email me at [email protected] or send me a tweet at @SarahNMoon.

I should have my first post in this series up some time this week. I’m really excited to start talking about this.