Against Evangelical Victim Culture (Stop Blaming Josh Harris for Your Problems)

2.) Scapegoating 

It may come as a surprise to many, but Josh Harris is not the sum and total of “purity culture.” He is, in fact, a single author who wrote a single book (at least on that specific subject). I have read that book, and found it somewhat helpful. It’s a course orientation, not an education. But the rush to impute this poor man with twenty years’ worth of emotional baggage from tens of thousands of people is utter insanity. I’ve been flabbergasted at the number of otherwise reasonable Christians whom I’ve had to remind that Josh Harris is not at fault for a pamphlet Bill Gothard published one time on sexual abuse.

Let me go ahead and admit that there was probably plenty of obsessive and unwise teaching going on at the local church level in the heyday of “purity culture.” And I know plenty of natives from Independent Fundamental Baptist Land who endured years of forced theatrical piety at the hands of ATI and similar organizations. Some of the rules and ideas imposed on them were just silly (though I’m still skeptical of the claim that any of them were genuinely “toxic” or “harmful,” as those on the homeschool survivor blogs like to insist). Gothard and Doug Philips (of Vision Forum) failed grievously, but those who directly link their failures with their teachings strike me as cynical opportunists indulging a little schadenfreude. Whenever a public figure they like falls from grace (Tullian Tchividjian, anyone?), these folks call it a personal failing. Whenever a public figure they dislike falls, they call it a result of his teaching. Heads I win, tails you lose.

But importantly, these ultra-conservative figures are not really in the same camp as Josh Harris or mainstream “purity culture.” Quite the opposite. Speaking from experience, I can tell you there were two distinct tribes among homeschoolers: the Focus on the Family kids who listened to “Adventures in Odyssey,” read Josh Harris, and bought DC Talk albums, and the ATI kids who thought we were going to Hell. Whatever Harris’ personal upbringing looked like, that was the way our world broke down. So it’s fairly absurd to blame whatever woes are supposed to have originated in the wigwams of the arch-conservatives on a leader in the “mainstream” of nineties evangelicaldom–a leader who, I might add–has never shared in their public moral failings.