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

4.) Goalpost-shifting

Usually at this point, the sharper crusaders against “purity culture” will switch gears and resort to auxiliary charges. “Okay, Josh Harris never said those awful things in so many words,” they will admit, “and maybe he didn’t personally mean those things, either. Maybe he’s an okay guy. But he wrote some really careless stuff, opening his work up to abuse by others.”

Or they’ll say something like, “He may not have meant to imply that women are worth less than men, but that was the general impression I got,” thus relocating the debate around their inaccessible subjective feelings. Or they’ll say, “Harris was just too young and inexperienced to write a book on dating and courtship.” Or perhaps, “I wasn’t personally wounded by “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” but I know a girl…” thus striking a heroic and selfless posture.

The outcome is the same: a kind of motte and bailey argument that allows them to lead with outrageous, indefensible claims, then retreat to the safety of more defensible or non-falsifiable claims when challenged.

The problem with this sort of attack isn’t just that it imputes the guilt of careless readers to the innocent author (see point 2). It’s that it can be used to vilify anything, even the Bible! Surely if we judged Scripture on the basis of how people have distorted and misused it over the years, there would be no more wretched book in history. Think of the cults, the wild-eyed apocalyptic suicide pacts, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the hatred toward Jews, or the modern stupidity of Westboro Baptist. Think of Steven Anderson, for heaven’s sake!

Yet we impute no fault to the Bible or its authors. Why? When I used this example, several friends actually insisted that the Bible is immune from this type of criticism, because it’s inspired and inerrant. Which strikes me as the logical equivalent of trying to lift a bucket while you’re standing in it. Of course we believe the Bible is inspired! But isn’t its internal coherence, defensibility, and benefit when rightly interpreted part of our reason for believing in its inspiration? “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” is not a candidate for admittance to the canon. But surely we ought to approach it no differently than we’ve approach the Bible when it comes to hermeneutics and reading comprehension. The author of both meant what he actually said. He did not mean what your wild-eyed former youth pastor said he meant.