Purity Culture Icon Joshua Harris Says That Premarital Dating Is Fine, Now That He's Getting Divorced
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Josh Harris, who wrote the incredibly influential evangelical purity culture book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye before later renouncing it and admitting that yeah, premarital dating is probably good, has announced that he is getting divorced and, furthermore, that he has ceased to be what he recognizes as Christian. He has also apologized to the LGBTQ+ community.
Harris was famous in the evangelical world for his book, published when he was 21 after a childhood spent in the cloistered Christian conservative homeschooling world. I Kissed Dating Goodbye urged not just garden-variety premarital abstinence, but went even further, encouraging a commitment to parent-guided “courtship” rather than dating. It helped foster the turbo-charged evangelical purity culture of the last 20 years. It made a lot of people completely fucking miserable.