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Josh Harris Announced "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" Was Discontinued


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https://www.prestonsprinkle.com/theology-in-the-raw/2019/2/11/723-joshua-harris-on-kissing-goodbye-to-i-kissed-dating-goodbye?fbclid=IwAR1f3GzXneQeeRi026HMILceaF0_NdiKCGnA-rl8xjQcCKGV75kSpvqv3Gw

 

This is a half hour interview Josh did about the documentary and how his views have changed. My takeaways:

Shannon's hashtags, specifically exvangelical & deconversion sound relevant to him as well.

He began questioning the formulaic box he lived in when he entered grad school, especially after seeing life not working out how it “should” for those in his church who were doing things “right.”

He has zero interest in ever being a pastor again and doesn’t believe he was all that good as a pastor. 

He has no contact with CJ Mahaney but thinks he’s pastoring somewhere in Kentucky. He has no interest in being part of SGM or anything they stand for anymore.

After listening to the interview I actually feel interested in seeing his life’s trajectory over the next 10+ years but now it’s out of respect for who he is becoming. 

My .02

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I couldn't get into that podcast to listen to it, @Giraffe, so thanks for your summary.  I read his second book again last night, and it seemed even worse.  There's a whole hideous, agonising chapter about stifling your sexual drive - not just in practice but in theory - until you've said the magic words.  He gives a long list of all the things he and Shannon weren't allowed to do, including cuddling up on the sofa, stroking each other's hair, giving back rubs and even thinking about each other sexually - it was the perfect example of fundies' obsession with sex.  Whether he was doing it to show off how holy they were, or really thought it was the way to go, I don't know; but he sounds like Mike Pence.

That he doesn't think he was that good at being a pastor is rather sad.   Looking at it I assume he was pushed into it by his Mum and Dad.  It's good he's managed to get out at last, but he sounds like one of those gay men who were told to get married to a woman to 'cure' them, and when they can't dodge the truth any longer they're 'great, but the structure of my life is gone so what the hell do I do now?'  Like a prisoner who's been released with nothing but a 'good luck mate' and the clothes on his back.

Is he gay?  Is he going to come out as an atheist?  Place your bets now!

OK, that was just a stream of consciousness, sorry, but got to catch my bus.

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@Spinosaurus I have no reason to believe he’s anything other than cis & hetero. I didn’t get any impression on why he & Shannon are separating. I did, however, get the impression that in looking back he doesn’t understand why he was given the platform that he was when he was so young and doesn’t believe he should have ever had it to begin with. He was overreacting to a breakup and his book started as a speech he had given (to his youth group, maybe? Idr)

Part of the reason I’m curious to see where this leads is I listen to a podcast called “Almost Heretical,” and it was started by two (cis/hetero) men who used to be pastors in similar circles as Harris but are now...well, almost heretical, and have completely transformed their belief system. Gives me hope that in time perhaps that’s where JH may end up.

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15 hours ago, louisa05 said:

If I recall correctly, the book I was talking about...advocated that single people just keep dating around casually until they suddenly know that one of these people is the one and then on to engagement and wedding asap. That's not much better than courtship. 

You've just encapsulated the whole premise of 'The Bachelor' and 'The Bachelorette'.

It usually ends up being a train wreck.

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I can feel for Josh Harris having been pushed into being a pastor. It is sad that he has to wrestle with the years spent doing something he felt he wasn't personally good at. Even the people with the most power and financial gain in fundie circles (male leadership) can still be very damaged by fundie teachings. Plus, Joshua Harris was one of the more privileged sons of fundiedom. What about the more "ordinary, humble" men and women left behind as each new fundie trend emerges? 

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My guess is that Josh is beginning to reconsider that things he was taught as a child. I’ve noticed that fundies like to tout how grown up and precocious their young adults are since they claim not to believe in adolescents, but we keep seeing how this mindset just produces immature, emotionally stunted, and smug individuals. He and his ex may be at different points in their questioning phase or they could have realized that they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.

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33 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

My guess is that Josh is beginning to reconsider that things he was taught as a child. I’ve noticed that fundies like to tout how grown up and precocious their young adults are since they claim not to believe in adolescents, but we keep seeing how this mindset just produces immature, emotionally stunted, and smug individuals. He and his ex may be at different points in their questioning phase or they could have realized that they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.

The homeschooling fundamentalists we follow are sure their kids are not typical and aren't capable of making the same mistakes (and learning from them) that normal children make (and learn from).  The parents of these kids think they are superhuman in some way and that they can prevent their kids from behaving like normal, learning kids would behave.  They seem so afraid of typical development and are unable to roll with the ups and downs of childhood and adolescence.   That is sure to create kids whose parents think they are more mature than they really are and kids who grow into inept adults who've not been allowed to behave like normal children do.  This Josh guy seems like a perfect example of that kind of upbringing.  Fear, it's always about fear with these people.

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I think it is difficult to understand Josh Harris or his life without understanding his parents. Gregg and Sono Harris were the influential IT people of homeschooling back then.  They had an enormous platform that they pushed Josh onto.  They funded his magazine, New Attitude, which I actually loved as a teenager.  It was irreverent and poked fun of homeschooling, though he lost some subscribers after a cartoon he drew making fun of women who wore headcoverings.   Just under the surface, you could tell that he maybe didn’t buy into all of this, but his parents did.  

I believe Josh was given too much of a platform by his parents. Instead of guiding him through his clearly painful breakup, his parents encouraged him to write a book(that they used their influence to publish and promote) and accompany them on their very popular speaking tours.  Josh should have known better, perhaps, but considering his family and upbringing, combined with his extremely young age at the time, I lay most of the blame on his parents.

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10 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Fear, it's always about fear with these people.

I've said this before here but most parents -- fundie or secular -- would do just about anything to keep their kids safe until they're grown. I include myself in this group. Moving through our kid's teenage years was scary.

That's why these parenting methods that guarantee success if you follow them exactly -- from John Rosemond to IKDG -- are so alluring. We all want to be absolutely certain that our kids will safely negotiate childhood & adolescence and reach adulthood as great human beings. Of course, the hucksters of these "how to" manuals take no responsibility for bad outcomes -- their response is always, "Well, you were doing it wrong."

@sableduck - you make good points about Josh's parents & his upbringing. I can't say that I'm very sympathetic towards him now but IKDG & his hubris didn't come out of nowhere. My sympathy is with their kids & with Shannon. I hope that these past few years out of the SGM cult and in Canada have changed their lives for the better, allowing them to see all of the possibilities for themselves and acquiring the tools to attain those possibilities.

 

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22 minutes ago, hoipolloi said:

I've said this before here but most parents -- fundie or secular -- would do just about anything to keep their kids safe until they're grown. I include myself in this group. Moving through our kid's teenage years was scary.

That's why these parenting methods that guarantee success if you follow them exactly -- from John Rosemond to IKDG -- are so alluring. We all want to be absolutely certain that our kids will safely negotiate childhood & adolescence and reach adulthood as great human beings. Of course, the hucksters of these "how to" manuals take no responsibility for bad outcomes -- their response is always, "Well, you were doing it wrong."

@sableduck - you make good points about Josh's parents & his upbringing. I can't say that I'm very sympathetic towards him now but IKDG & his hubris didn't come out of nowhere. My sympathy is with their kids & with Shannon. I hope that these past few years out of the SGM cult and in Canada have changed their lives for the better, allowing them to see all of the possibilities for themselves and acquiring the tools to attain those possibilities.

 

What’s crazy is that the more kids these quiverful parents have, often the less safe they become. When you have too many children, neglect creeps in more and more with each one born. We’ve seen this happen with a lot of FJ families. 

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1 hour ago, Pecansforeveryone said:

I can feel for Josh Harris having been pushed into being a pastor. It is sad that he has to wrestle with the years spent doing something he felt he wasn't personally good at. Even the people with the most power and financial gain in fundie circles (male leadership) can still be very damaged by fundie teachings. Plus, Joshua Harris was one of the more privileged sons of fundiedom. What about the more "ordinary, humble" men and women left behind as each new fundie trend emerges? 

At some point in time, 75% of the kids at the Christian school declared that they were going into ministry in some way, shape or form. There's this whole evangelical culture of telling teens about how they have to "do big things for God" and "impact the world". It's a bit different than the Gothard/QF culture telling them to go have big families for God. People who just raise their families and have regular jobs are deemed to be kind of "lukewarm" and not changing the world for Jesus. And "lukewarm" is basically shorthand for "going to hell". (See Revelations chapter 3). 

The pressure in that whole culture is real and with his parents being leaders plus becoming well known at such a young age on account of the stupid book, I doubt if he ever felt as a teen and young adult that he had any other choices in life. 

 

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10 minutes ago, Spinosaurus said:

@Giraffe - I have zero gaydar, but I never got the impression he was anything but straight, just deeply frightened of his own sex drive.  I wonder/hope if he'll end up here:

http://clergyproject.org/

I know about the clergy project and wondered the same. I hope he’s part of it or that he’s part of groups like it. The same with Shannon. It’s hard out be a pastor’s wife, even if the wife agrees with the belief system. 

Edited by Giraffe
Wasn’t done talking.
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I don't think Josh is truly ok the other side of the argument that sex or even just physical contact is ok outside of marriage. He will not experience growth until he starts looking at this. 

"I think that I probably need to engage with some of those people — like I have people send me their e-books showing why premarital sex is fine, and I just don't have the energy right now. Like, I do not want to read your book. I do not want to. I do not want to engage in a massive, you know, theological expedition to think about all these things. So it just sounds really exhausting to me, honestly."

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Spoiler

Harris: I think that there's a push by some people to say being sex positive means — the kind of the historical sexual ethic related to sex outside of marriage, related to homosexuality, is basically laid aside, and embracing a healthy view of sex means just accepting all that as fine within the Christian tradition. … I do think though that, for me, in that change of interpretation of such a fundamental level when it comes to sexuality, it's just hard for me to ... In a way it's almost easier for me to contemplate throwing out all of Christianity than it is to keeping Christianity and adapting it in these different ways.

I don't know if that makes sense, but I think I've just been so indoctrinated in a certain way of interpreting scripture and viewing sexuality that it's just hard for me to see the scriptures and its kind of overall, you know, commands and principles and so on and see how that can be consistent.

...

But I think what you saw in that moment in the film is it is a real struggle for me. I'm really struggling with — I think that rethinking some of these things and having had my faith look so specific for so long that now as I'm questioning those specifics, it feels like I'm questioning my entire faith.

If your entire faith is causing people trauma and making you let sex abusers get away with it, maybe questioning it is not such a bad thing.

Spoiler

Harris: It can start to feel like you're like doing some move from the Kamasutra with the Bible. And I don't mean to be dismissive, it's just like from an intellectual standpoint, it actually feels more intellectually honest for me to say I don't know that I agree with the Bible in general than it is to get it to say these things. And maybe that's just because I spent so much time in a very conservative environment judging all these more progressive people that I'm now tempted to go past that [and] be like, forget it all.

But it can get to feeling, like, what are you holding onto in Christianity? Why do you need it still? ... I guess if we can with one generation make that radical a shift with the Bible, who's to say that another generation can't completely shift the Bible to, you know, to justify something that we would all think is horrendous? It starts to just be silly putty.

This sounds a lot like the things I thought about when I was in the process of losing my religion.

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4 hours ago, Pecansforeveryone said:

I can feel for Josh Harris having been pushed into being a pastor. It is sad that he has to wrestle with the years spent doing something he felt he wasn't personally good at. Even the people with the most power and financial gain in fundie circles (male leadership) can still be very damaged by fundie teachings. Plus, Joshua Harris was one of the more privileged sons of fundiedom. What about the more "ordinary, humble" men and women left behind as each new fundie trend emerges? 

 

ISTR reading that he was from a homeschooling and fairly patriarchal family where he and all his siblings had been brought up to believe in doing 'great things' -- weren't his brothers fairly prominent at one point, with their own blog and all (back when that was a thing).

So I expect that his father played a large role in his trajectory - as there doesn't seem to be much of gap between him leaving home and then being trained up to be senior pastor at SGM. 

The other thing that sprang to mind was an op-ed I read a while back by him in the wapo, where he said he had been influenced by Elizabeth Elliott's book 'Passion and Purity' - and my own impression is that away from stuff like "Through the Gates of Splendour" she cuts a somewhat bizarrely otherworldly figure (somewhat like Jonathan Edwards), which is to say that I can well imagine someone coming up with a bunch of strange ideas after reading her books.

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3 hours ago, hoipolloi said:

I've said this before here but most parents -- fundie or secular -- would do just about anything to keep their kids safe until they're grown. I include myself in this group. Moving through our kid's teenage years was scary.

That's why these parenting methods that guarantee success if you follow them exactly -- from John Rosemond to IKDG -- are so alluring. We all want to be absolutely certain that our kids will safely negotiate childhood & adolescence and reach adulthood as great human beings. Of course, the hucksters of these "how to" manuals take no responsibility for bad outcomes -- their response is always, "Well, you were doing it wrong."

@sableduck - you make good points about Josh's parents & his upbringing. I can't say that I'm very sympathetic towards him now but IKDG & his hubris didn't come out of nowhere. My sympathy is with their kids & with Shannon. I hope that these past few years out of the SGM cult and in Canada have changed their lives for the better, allowing them to see all of the possibilities for themselves and acquiring the tools to attain those possibilities.

Ironically, it seems to me that the fundy parents who are the most controlling are most at risk of having one or more children go completely off the rails (from their perspective).

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The more rigid rules you've got the more opportunities there are for your kids to disappoint you.

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On 7/20/2019 at 2:26 PM, Rinny512 said:

 

15 hours ago, Giraffe said:

https://www.prestonsprinkle.com/theology-in-the-raw/2019/2/11/723-joshua-harris-on-kissing-goodbye-to-i-kissed-dating-goodbye?fbclid=IwAR1f3GzXneQeeRi026HMILceaF0_NdiKCGnA-rl8xjQcCKGV75kSpvqv3Gw

 

This is a half hour interview Josh did about the documentary and how his views have changed. My takeaways:

Shannon's hashtags, specifically exvangelical & deconversion sound relevant to him as well.

He began questioning the formulaic box he lived in when he entered grad school, especially after seeing life not working out how it “should” for those in his church who were doing things “right.”

He has zero interest in ever being a pastor again and doesn’t believe he was all that good as a pastor. 

He has no contact with CJ Mahaney but thinks he’s pastoring somewhere in Kentucky. He has no interest in being part of SGM or anything they stand for anymore.

After listening to the interview I actually feel interested in seeing his life’s trajectory over the next 10+ years but now it’s out of respect for who he is becoming. 

My .02

Joshua Harris comes over much better in both these recent interviews than he did on the PBS interview, the TED talk. or in the documentary.

He is putting a different spin on his earlier interviews.  He is now saying that he was still on his "journey" getting input and listening to people when he said all that, and failed to say he was sorry.

But there is one take away thought that I had.  Whatever Josh Harris now regrets about his past actions, writing, and pastoral career with Sovereign Grace (wherein he covered up sexual abuse, let's not forget that) -- none of it was his fault.  And I expect his marriage failing wasn't his fault either.  Everything is always somebody else's fault. 

4 hours ago, sableduck said:

I believe Josh was given too much of a platform by his parents. Instead of guiding him through his clearly painful breakup, his parents encouraged him to write a book(that they used their influence to publish and promote) and accompany them on their very popular speaking tours.  Josh should have known better, perhaps, but considering his family and upbringing, combined with his extremely young age at the time, I lay most of the blame on his parents.

I find IKDG forgivable.  His later career at Sovereign Grace and entanglement with Mahoney, much less so.  And he never specifically blames his parents and his upbringing as far as I can see.

That is probably wise, because I wouldn't have much patience with a 44 year-old adult and father chucking his own parents under the bus.  Whatever his upbringing, he needs to take responsibility for a good 20 years of adult bad decision-making all by his little self.  He jumped from Sovereign Grace like a rat leaving a sinking ship and has never admitted any culpability there.

So he ran away to graduate school.  Going to Regent opened his eyes and exposed him to different ideas.  And he no longer wants to be a pastor.  Well, good.  That is probably also very convenient because he has burned his boats with Sovereign Grace and a lot of other Fungelical churches.  

It really does sound as though he is now questioning his faith these days.  Good luck with that Joshua.   And I mean that very sincerely. 

3 hours ago, DarkAnts said:

 I don't think Josh is truly ok the other side of the argument that sex or even just physical contact is ok outside of marriage. He will not experience growth until he starts looking at this. 

"I think that I probably need to engage with some of those people — like I have people send me their e-books showing why premarital sex is fine, and I just don't have the energy right now. Like, I do not want to read your book. I do not want to. I do not want to engage in a massive, you know, theological expedition to think about all these things. So it just sounds really exhausting to me, honestly."

Yes, indeed.  He should go back to square one and consider what he taught his children about dating.  And engage with others in theological discussion however "exhausting" he finds it.

Still, I was feeling quite sympathetic towards Joshua until I figured out his solution to unemployment was to take a four day course and then market himself as a "StoryBrand Certified Guide" and self proclaimed expert at marketing.

Quote

I’m Joshua Harris and I know how to use story to reach an audience. I’m a best-selling author, TEDx speaker, and documentary filmmaker. I’ve reached millions of people through my books, articles, videos, and social media platforms.

And as a StoryBrand Certified Guide and Copywriter I’ve helped businesses like yours reach more customers.

Don’t waste another dollar on marketing that doesn’t work. Schedule a call today and find out how clarity can get real results.

https://clearandloud.com/

Yes, best selling author of books he now says were not correct.  TEDx speaker saying that IKDG was wrong.  Documentary filmmaker of one film all about Josh Harris's journey to admitting that he may have been mistaken.

Testimonials please, Joshua.  What is your actual business marketing experience.  Do tell.

I will say, he is certainly good at marketing himself!   

Edited by Palimpsest
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1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

The more rigid rules you've got the more opportunities there are for your kids to disappoint you.

Exactly. And when you feel like you are constantly disappointing your parents and you can’t do anything right, a possible response is to just say “fuck it all! I’m not even going to try.” 

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@Palimpsest A 'StoryBrand Certified Guide'?  What in shit's name is that?  (And don't even with eliding 'Story Brand' into one word to make it look cool.)

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Storybrand sounds like a fancy way of saying, I make up bullshit about your product

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"I make up bullshit about your product"

Surely you mean BullShit?

Edited by Spinosaurus
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On 7/20/2019 at 9:49 PM, louisa05 said:

I just read that interview as well. This quote jumped out at me: 

I know so many people who have left those groups who have done just that. They trade one set of black and white rules for a new set. 

What I read in this whole interview is someone whose entire faith was based on making and following a set of rules and who doesn't know how to function as a person of faith without that. 

Yes. He seems very much like a person who is still in the process of reconfiguring what he believes, or at least is making tentative steps towards doing so

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  • Coconut Flan changed the title to Josh Harris Announced "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" Was Discontinued

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