Category: Puritanism
Still, Small Voices
I think it was 1997 when my youth group attended a seminar at another church near the org. In my memory, the church was packed. It felt like about 500-600 teenagers. We sat in the balcony on the far left, and watched for hours as a single, attractive young man took the stage alone to speak passionately and eloquently about God’s plans for our lives. He was 7 years older than I was, and based on the rapt silence punctuated by un-varying giddy laughter at all the punchlines of varying quality, it was clear that pretty much all of us had a bit of a crush on this guy.
One still, small voice inside said, “So this is what girls are attracted to? No problem. I can do that. I guess I’ll become a Christian speaker.” Of course, that voice was not acknowledged at the time. If I would have admitted it was there, I would have mislabeled it “Satan”, when its given name is really “Testosterone.”
As it turns out, refusing to acknowledge Jamin’s internal voices just makes them more powerful, because they still get to exercise their persuasive powers in the background, completely undetected by Jamin’s conscious brain. Then, those voices do, in fact, become Satan when they are constantly marginalized and allowed to mature outside the community of the other voices that have other motivations.
The other still, small voice – the one I called the “Holy Spirit” – said, “This Godly man is a modern prophet to this young and wayward generation.”
The Pitch
The way we took it, the message was essentially a sexual savings plan: Resist spending any hormones now. Save them up for later, and, because of God’s orgasmic compound interest, your eventual, heterosexual, American marriage will basically be heaven on earth – everything God intended between a man and a woman. The longer and harder you wait, the more pure you’ll be, and the more explosive your Godly marriage will be.
At 16, equally Christian and pubescent, all other voices were drowned out. God and Satan agreed: “Follow this man into sexy, sexy Jesus bliss!”
We bought the message, hook, line, and paperback. The young man’s name was Joshua Harris, and he defined sexuality for a large segment of young people in the 90’s, pop-Christian, American culture. While “the world” gave into their sinful desires with deviant abominations like Boyz II Men and 90210, we kept it in our pants with Joshua Harris.
If I recall correctly, there was an altar call at the end of the event for the youth who had already put parts in holes, so they could cut their losses and wash their crotches in the disinfectant of Christian public repentance. (I don’t put this on Harris. Based on my experience, it seems there may have been a federal injunction to end Christian youth events this way in the 90’s.)
We walked away from the seminar, excited to be the least-sexually active – the most pure – youth the world had yet seen…and happy about it! Our abstinence from hormones would serve two purposes:
First, it would give us the assurance that God approved of the way were using these confusing appendages, holes, and feelings that begged for stimulation. Secondly, it insured that all that pent-up begging would pay off in the ecstatic release of the perfect relationship we had earned.
You see, the problem with relationships, according to a scary number of youth leaders of the 90’s – the reasons that couples like our parents fought, cheated, or divorced – is that the two people were impure; not able to fully follow Christ. If God was directing both of them, how could they possibly disagree? Love = unity = agreement. (Amos 3:3)
If two people could fully devote themselves to God, giving up their own desires, wishes, and plans, and if they weren’t bringing in baggage from their past, there would be nothing holding them back. There would be nothing to fight about. There would be no reason to cheat.
This made perfect sense to us virgins, who hadn’t been in a marriage, or even a long-term relationship, since we hadn’t even been long-term alive yet. So we determined to aim for a marriage of two humans perfectly in the service of a perfect God, experiencing all the perfect bliss God planned for humanity, as tools in His hands for His delight; like God giving himself a handjob that we got to be a part of.
The Book
A radiant bride steps methodically down the aisle on her wedding day, her eyes locked on her man waiting, just 20 more steps away. “It’s finally happening!” she keeps thinking. From her flowers to the light blue bridesmaids dresses to the string quartet, the day is just like she had imagined a million times as a little girl.
As the couple begins to say their vows, a young hottie in the congregation stands up and saunters toward the groom. Without saying a word, she takes his hand, proudly interlocking fingers with him while staring daggers at the bride. The bride is startled and starts to intervene, but then another girls joins the first at the altar, and another, and another, forming an ominous chain down the aisle and wrapping around the church.
The bride’s eye dart between her almost-husband and these unwelcome wedding crashers. Her betrothed seems frozen in place, his eyes registering more disappointment than outrage. Tears begin to well in both of their eyes, and she wants to scream, “Why don’t you do something?!” but the only words she can form are “Who…who are these girls?”
“Girls from my past,” he answers, equally full of shame and terror. He tries to persuade his bride to continue, “They don’t mean anything to me…anymore. But I can’t make them leave because I gave a piece of myself to each of them in the past. I want to give the rest of myself to you, but…I’m not a complete man.”
Just then, the bride wakes up, relieved it was just a nightmare, but also terrified: how many women owned a part of her man? She still has a chance to avoid making this nightmare a reality, but she will need to stay pure, and pick a man who has stayed pure as well.
This is my parody of the intro to Joshua Harris’s book “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”. The foreword was written by super-duper Christian 90’s singing sensation Rebecca St. James. And if you can’t trust an unmarried pop singer about a healthy marriage, who can you trust!? A back cover blurb also highlighted Elizabeth Elliot’s approval of Harris’s ideas (to over-generalize, she was the Joshua Harris of the 70’s and 80’s).
We had no trouble interpreting this nightmare: your mistakes stick to you forever. All the boobies and vaginas and wieners from your past will haunt you in your marriage.
The New Plan
According to this new instruction manual for our genitals, “dating” was a training ground for divorce, because it trained people to just give up any time a relationship got tough. Instead of “dating”, Harris proposed that we ditch the term, the ritual, the desire; and desire something better: courtship.
Courtship is the parent-involved, marriage-focused ritual where two Christian people determine whether or not God has called them to the same path, and decide whether or not they should partner together in this life for the glory of God. It’s the initial business meetings to assess a potential marriage, which is a spiritual business deal; a life-long human merger for the benefit of the Kingdom of God.
And don’t worry about even thinking about touching parts. When you’re ready, and your parents have approved, and the Holy Spirit has led you, and you’ve remained pure, and you’re completely inexperienced and ignorant and have the highest expectations possible – just trust me; trust Joshua; trust God; trust Rebecca St. James: all the sexual stuff will just click perfectly in place…flawlessly…effortlessly, because a perfectly satisfying sex life is basically just a natural byproduct of loving Jesus hard enough. (Never mind that none of those advice-givers were married or sexually active at that point.)
Until you’re ready to make a marriage commitment, don’t defile yourself with the opposite sex (and certainly not with the same sex…that goes without saying!). Because, in “worldly” terms, when you cut your Jesus drugs with cheap fillers like dating, you ruin the high.
The Application
After the outing, we drove home, read the book, re-read the book, and, just like any good Pharisees are compelled to do, we added to it. If purer was better, we were determined to write the map of propriety and locate the fountain of couth.
To start, we already knew we were the “family of God” (1 John 3:1). We wouldn’t dare say a dirty word like, “incest”, but we implied it, as we explicitly ruled each other out of mating interest on the basis that we were brothers and sisters in Christ (Matthew 12:48). I mean, we weren’t legally related, but since we’re all “adopted into God’s family” (Ephesians 1:5), they were like spiritual step-sisters or something.
We “hugged” our Christian ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ with a six-inch rule. Yes, it looked exactly like you’re imagining it. It was stupid. We were insufferable. Someone should have slapped us.
If I accidentally made contact with any part of a girl from our morally superior clique, it wasn’t uncommon that she’d say, “I’m saving that for my husband.”
I was no better. Given my propensity toward extremism, I would guess I was worse.
If a girl behind me in the lunch line tapped my shoulder to get my attention, I would wheel around in righteous indignation to inform them, “That’s my wife’s shoulder.” I was 16. You’re welcome, future wife. I protected your property for you. That shoulder will be all yours to use in whatever sexy ways God wants.
You Break It, You Buy It
Of course, the fix for infidelity [to the wife you don’t yet have] was immediately obvious to anyone with an in-tact limbic system: touching boobies is okay, as long as you end up marrying the person. The nightmare doesn’t come true as long as you are the only two people at the altar.
Speaking as a person with an inexplicable fondness for boobies, this bit of logic might as well have been written into Harris’s book. But then it would have been explicit, and it would have to duel with opposing arguments. But this still, average-sized voice would rather bypass all that conflict.
The Org and the Message
Joshua Harris’s message wasn’t impactful because it was so revolutionary. It was impactful because it resonated so strongly with the black-and-white system we were already embracing. The courtship doctrine didn’t teach us how to act extremely. It gave us permission to. This product was just a new way to earn God’s approval, and that’s a product that has forever been in demand, with people of all ages.
The org continued to promote the philosophy in the church and the school, at least until the day I left in 2020. Perhaps in kindergarten a boy would be temporarily allowed to say a classmate was his girlfriend, but guy-girl relationships from puberty until marriage were conspicuously sterile. Only a handful of parents I can remember specifically encouraged their high school kids to try a normal boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. Those students’ pursuits were always belittled, and the parenting they were receiving was seriously doubted, but less so to the faces of the staff members whose kids wanted to date.
For the majority of the student population: no dating, no kissing, no touching. This caused more than a little “what-the-hell” attitude from the kids who were forbidden from a romantic relationship,
“But what about Jojo and Tito!?! They get to date just because their parents are staff members?!”
The response was usually some form of,
“That’s none of your business. You don’t understand their situation. Trust me – you don’t want what they have. It’s not as fun as it looks.”
There wasn’t much the trinity could do about the staff kids except complain to each other and the other staff about how difficult it was to enforce appropriate behavior, when those staff members were letting “their kids flaunt their raging hormones” wherever they wanted. They graciously condescended, “Parenting is tough. Not everybody wants to do it…to make the hard decisions…to say ‘no’. It’s so much easier to just say ‘yes.'”
(If anyone would know, it would be my parents, whose favoritism toward by brother and me knew almost no bounds. While my brother was a senior and I was a junior, he broke the school’s otherwise-unflinching 6-inch rule so frequently with his girlfriend Rebekha – who he neither dated nor called his girlfriend – that I was seriously concerned for the eternal destiny of his soul. While I never saw their skin touch – no kissing, no holding hands, nothing normal – they played footsie and sat shoulder-to-shoulder and fell asleep in class together with limb intertwined constantly. I complained to my mother-principal so many times, with so little intervention, I eventually wondered about her soul as well. Parenting is tough. Not everybody wants to do it.)
Ideally, the good kids would engage in no passing of notes, no hanging out, no flirtatious behaviors. At least, those were the kids who were following God most whole-heartedly. Everyone was to treat each other like brothers and sisters in the family of God.
I heard from many parents how much they loved that part of the atmosphere. I can understand why. Not having to deal with your child’s normal sexual development had to be so relieving that it almost felt…Godly! “I wish I had had this when I was their age,” they would say. “No, you don’t,” I would think [not nearly often enough].
Repression, suppression, and unsuccessful restraint ran rampant. And the expected shame, inferiority, self-loathing, and depression plagued many (if not most) former students for years and decades.
Publicly, the students were shining examples of devout asexuality. Secretly, all the normal sexual tension leaked out, often more creatively, because of the great pressure to keep it hidden. But whether it was sexting or the blow jobs in the bathrooms or the weekend porn habits, the trinity were determined to find it, expose it, and punish it. (More on public shamings later.)
After-school romances were usually monitored nearly as closely. Ryan regularly accessed social interactions that happened on school-monitored devices. But even without access to those devices, parents often brought the trinity their kids’ personal devices to pry into their kids private lives. I don’t recall ever hearing a Coller expressing any boundary whatsoever in this endeavor, regardless of whether the “child” was still a student, or long-past drinking age.
The trinity prided themselves on their sleuthing skills to dig up non-puritanical web histories, chat messages, and locations of their clients’ kids, whether the clients wanted that service or not. In fact, they often gained access to the parent’s devices that way as well.
Did you lie about the church attendance requirement this week? They knew. They saw the Sunday night messenger conversation between you and your boyfriend about how great the morning sex had been.
Did your laptop battery die and you used your kid’s Chromebook because they were asleep? I’ve seen the personal messages and dating profiles that Ryan scraped and Mrs. Annette printed. (More on those files later.)
The org would be a place of purity. Sterility. Holiness.
To be fair, this brand of courtship is exactly how Pastor and Ryan believed they chose their mates (many onlookers have expressed that it had to do more with subjugating the youngest legal hottie possible in the guise of spirituality, but I suspect that those motivations were largely a subconscious Satan behind a very intentional Holy Spirit). And their relationships, on average, were only 20% less successful than “the world“, on average.
At least they lived what they preached. But, as Liam from 90210 would say, “Let’s make a deal: once you fix your own life, you can tell me how to run mine.”
Sadder But Wiser
The book wasn’t all bad. It reinforced several messages that I hope my own kids receive when they’re horny teens, like:
- Deep, emotional bonds are hurtful to break,
- There are some things you can’t un-remember,
- A lifestyle of sexual promiscuity doesn’t seem to be without its own consequences,
- Marriage should neither be entered into, nor dissolved, lightly, and
- Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.
I’ve been blessed to have a couple, very brief, virtual interactions recently with this man who had such an impact on my life. In fact, I see – perhaps because I want to see – a lot of similarities in our lives. He grew up in a Christian home and took the message as literally as he was told he should. He followed it to its logical end, and a lot of people followed. A lot of people were hurt. A lot of people got angry.
I don’t think Joshua Harris gave in to the pressure of the crowd, but he did give in to the pressure of his conscience. He un-published his book and has been on a beautiful, painful, awkward, honest journey of publicly being unsure of the things that so many people want him to be sure of.
It’s been an important thing for me to witness. His is one of the voices that has encouraged me to publish my messy, complicated journey as well. For anyone else who has messed up and is more comfortable owning it than denying it, I’d say,
You’re allowed to recant. Or to recant your recant. You don’t have to agree with your past self, and you don’t have to be right. You can’t be Right. You can only try to be honest. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Those Who Are Selling Something
Looking back, I can’t help but notice that this brand of puritanism also fed nicely into the trinity’s self-permission to cut off relationships of all kinds. When relationships broke, it was easy to blame the other party for the conflict, since the trinity were sure they were following God. If those who were exiting were also following God, the trinity reasoned, there would be unity instead of division (1 Corinthians 1:10). This was the same reasoning they expressed as Ryan waved his pity-filled goodbyes to his wife too.
But sometimes, instead of saying, “I’ll graciously forgive you if you decide to be a good person and come back to God, so we can have a perfect relationship the way He intended,” they should have said something like,
Where did we lose our way
It’s driving me insane
And I know I just need one more chance
To prove my love to you
If you come back to me
I’ll guarantee
That I’ll never let you go– “On Bended Knee”, Boyz II Men
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