Joshua Harris on re-evaluating the purity culture, women in leadership and legalism

If you're in conservative/homeschooling circles, you've probably heard about Josh Harris, author of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye". He has recently separated from his wife after many years, and has been slowly backing away from the authoritarian, toxic culture of Sovereign Grace Ministries. Harris was taken under the wing of CJ Mahaney and became the lead pastor of Covenant Life Church, the flagship of SGM.

While I'm deeply saddened by the breakup of their marriage, I think that Josh is starting to see how the authoritarian/patriarchal culture has led to the sort of life-sucking culture that pervaded at CLC.

Here is his perspective on the problem with many churches today:

… I think in our setting, though, the thing that I would say is that we had a very restricted view of the role of women. That's one of the biggest things I regret in my time of being a pastor is the way we taught about women in the church, women in leadership, in the home, and so on. And I think there are massive indications when you don't have a female perspective in in policymaking and decisions related to something like that. Like, I think that we would have made better decisions if there had been women in on those moments. 

But it's not quite as simple as saying that … I think there were also theological problems related to our view of the role of pastors and our view of the role of the faith and ways that were, in our case, unique to our movement: the low view of psychiatry or therapists and those types of things, and the idea that pastors should be able to help you with any kind of life issue that you're facing. 

When it comes to something like sex abuse, we just did not have the training. We needed to be calling in other people, we needed to be, obviously, making sure that — and we did report many cases of sexual abuse, but in some cases obviously we made huge mistakes.
So there's sort of a web of problems. But I do think that a very patriarchal, male-centered, low view of women has connections to sexual abuse in different cases.

I think this is a great perspective on the legalism that develops, even around something as wholesome and worthwhile as sexual purity - I think one can argue that this pervades the RPCNA - there may be an underlying desire to defend pure and undefiled religion, but it can easily turn into a legalistic, shaming culture:

Well one thing I would just say is that I think that the problem with my book and the problem with a lot of the churches that I was a part of is that you can have kind of historical Christian sexual ethics and think things about the goodness of marriage, the goodness of fidelity when it comes to sexuality, all those types of things. But if you if you surround that with a culture that places high demand on the execution of that and creates structures of accountability, reward for those that do it well, a sense of shame for those that don't do it well, it's not it's not just a sexual ethic — it's also the sort of environment around it. And those sort of high-demands religious environments ... that has a massive impact on your experience of that sexual ethic — the way that that's enforced, the pressure that's put on you. So I think that is a big problem with my book, the big problem with the church environment it came from: how the ideas are applied and how the shame culture that can be built around it is a big part of its unhealthiness.

I truly hope he gets the space he needs to spend time with God - not the one he was taught and was modeled for him in a legalistic, shame-filled church, but the one whose yoke is easy and burden is light. It is a hard journey.

https://sojo.net/articles/questioning-faith-after-purity-culture-conversation-joshua-harris