Joshua Harris finally tells the truth about the ‘Purity Culture’
The one-time Evangelical leader spills the beans
Published in
6 min readMay 4, 2021
Back in 1997 he wrote an era-defining book, telling Evangelical kids that dating is evil. A generation blamed him for ruining their lives.
The saga of Joshua Harris haunts Evangelical culture. In 2018, he ‘unpublished’ his books, including I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and apologized for it. The next year, he got a divorce from his wife—and Christianity.
Now he’s doing a blitz of interviews, and dropping details — like that I Kissed Dating Goodbye was largely contrived.
Joahua Harris’ story never exactly made sense.
The book tells the story of what appears to be a regular high school kid who falls prey to the ways of the world. He moves from girl to girl — alarmed at feeling hardened to the rising carnality.
The problem was, he had been homeschooled all his life.
This was a very public fact. With his father, he’d been a homeschool activist.
