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

3.) Tall tales

This is where we get down to brass tacks. If Josh Harris ever said or wrote something like, “women are responsible for the way men look at them,” or “your worth is tied to your sexual history,” or “if you’re extra good and keep your virginity until marriage, God will give you super hot wedding night sex and a happily ever after” then let’s see it! Give me a page number, perhaps a video or audio clip of Josh Harris saying these things. But if you can’t produce it, even after having ample time to search, I am going to call baloney.

Extraordinary claims, as atheists so regularly remind us, require extraordinary evidence. This is especially true when it comes to accusations against fellow Christians. These types of charges are serious, and anyone bringing them should be able to back up their assertions. Yet with startling uniformity, everyone I talk to who levels wild accusations against Josh Harris in particular and “purity culture” in general becomes strangely defensive and evasive when I ask them for their sources. No matter how hard I press, I get nothing but the occasional Bill Gothard quote and movie clip from “Courageous.” 

This is where I think we get into dangerous territory (by “dangerous” I mean libel and slander, which are forms of lying). In certain circles composed of onetime adherents to a popular movement, usually a few years after the cause fizzles out and loses relevance, it becomes not only acceptable, but downright noble to ritually straw-man the movement and burn its leading figures and artifacts in effigy. Those flagrantly misrepresenting and exaggerating it feel vindicated in doing so because, well, they know the inside baseball of the movement’s leaders, and can tell you what they really meant, regardless of what they actually said. And so you get the ex-Catholics who say that what their priest really meant when he said abortion is wrong was that God hates women. You get the ex-Calvinists who say that what their pastor really meant when he told them God predestines us is that Calvinists think they’re better than everyone else. And you get the ex-“purity culture” members who say that, regardless of what Josh Harris actually wrote in his book, what he meant was that it’s okay to dehumanize women.

I shouldn’t have to explain to adult Christians that this sort of behavior isn’t okay. But when it comes to the “purity culture” pendulum, I find myself doing so regularly. And the things folks will extrude when pressed hard enough for proof of their extravagant claims are truly awe-inspiring. In one recent Facebook discussion, I pressed a friend who claimed that “purity culture” tells women “they should be ashamed of their bodies” to show me just one author, pastor, or speaker who had said this, or at least something that could reasonably be interpreted to mean this. He finally told me that his wife told him that when she was in college, an anonymous person posted a note on a hallway bulletin board that said women should be ashamed of their bodies. I kid you not. That was his proof. (I’m surprised his wife’s-aunt’s-hairdresser wasn’t involved in there somewhere.)

Folks, truth matters. In books, in juries, and on the Internet. And leveling accusations you can’t even begin to back up is not something truth-tellers do. It’s what the other kind of people do.