Josh Harris: I Kissed Jesus Goodbye

Josh Harris has started a marketing company called Clear & Loud, not to be confused with Loud+Clear, another marketing company in Canada. Click on the link and see a picture of him sitting on a couch, smiling, looking straight at the camera. Scroll down and see another picture of Harris sitting on a couch apparently discussing marketing with a woman. Scroll down some more past the testimonials and see another picture of him with arms folded staring at the camera letting you know that he uses Donald Miller's materials. Scroll one more section and see a smiling Harris standing in front of a group. You may notice that the same woman is in this picture too. 

Why am I pointing this out? Harris is a self-described "words guy". He apparently understands marketing and created a business that is all about him helping businesses with their messaging. When he comes out on Instagram and tells the world that he is divorced and no longer a Christian, he knows what he is doing; he has thought this out; nothing about this is off-the-cuff. I may be wrong on this, but it sure seems like it. It is one of those contradictions of life in which many things are swirling chaotically all around us, but we still try to control how we look to the outside world. We almost always look back on these times and recognize how little control we had.

He is framing the message, managing it so that he controls the narrative, or at least tries. Read his Instagram posts. He wants his readers to have compassion on him, and he wants any naysayers to look unloving and ungracious. This is not a surprise; everyone wants that. However, the point here is that we tend to see this kind of thing as just a way of communicating, of expressing what is going on with us. Most people who are not professional marketers or celebrities use social media to emote and report.

We may use photo filters and think about what we say sometimes, but most people are just spouting off most of the time. If I had a bad day or was frustrated at the way the store clerk acted or am mad at a friend, I just say it. Look at most social media posts as a whole; there is not much of a method. Then look at Josh Harris'; the colors are coordinated, the poses are perfect, the backgrounds, the wording. This is professional. Maybe everyone recognizes this, but it is important for understanding the situation. This isn't reality TV, it is scripted.

He has shown great integrity in saying he has left the faith rather than bending the Bible to meet his desires. At the same time much of what he says is nonsense. This may fly in the face of what I said above about it being scripted and well thought out, but think again. Both of those statements are true. It is nonsense, but it is the kind of nonsense that people love and don't question.

Here's an example: He refers to Luther's call to constant repentance. For Harris this means he's been repenting of everything he's ever done whether it was good or not. It sounds so good, so enlightened, so progressive, repudiating all those "evil Christian ideas". But Luther is referring to Jesus' call to "repent and believe the gospel" in Mark 1:15.

He is saying that it isn't a one-time repentance as is often characterized, but rather an ongoing practice of recognizing our need for Jesus, and, thus, for all our lives, repenting of our tendency to wander and live in the old self so that we can fully receive Jesus' precious grace. But we don't just repent; we must believe. We have to replace the empty space with something and that something is the Good News of Jesus.

This may explain some of Harris' problem in that he seems to have repented in an unbiblical way and doesn't seem to have been believing. The LAST thing Luther intended was for us to repent our way to faithlessness. Harris has actually taken that verse and quote and used it to achieve the opposite of its intention.

Another Instagram post you will see if you click the link is Harris with his teenage daughter. She is a beautiful young lady. My heart breaks for her. Her dad is famous; she is not. She is a young teen girl whose parents are divorced. Harris can talk of being friends with his ex-wife all he wants and can say all kinds of wonderful things about his daughter on social media. It won't fix the pain.

My parents divorced when I was 13. It is brutal. I can speak personally when I say, "Do not pretend that you are thinking of your kids when you get divorced; you are not." Parents getting along is only more confusing because it doesn't make sense why they got divorced. I'm not saying it is bad to be "friends", whatever that means; I am saying it is something that divorced people say when they have kids to make themselves feel better.

It is interesting that he anticipated people's assumptions by saying he hasn't signed a book deal or isn't arguing with people in public. I am curious as to how long that will last. I don't know him, but I can see a trajectory that is very unhealthy over the last few years. I will be surprised if he doesn't eventually write a book.

Harris was a big part of "Christian Purity Culture" which is being lambasted these days. I'm not sure what purity culture is, but apparently it had to do with courting and purity rings and other such teaching as laid forth in Harris' book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

I want to make sure that throwing that out is not the same as throwing out the biblical call to purity. God's best is for sex within a marriage between a man and woman. Anything else is sin. There is much more to it, but no less. I say this as someone who was a virgin when I married my virgin wife. I was not innocent and would not have called myself pure, but I am so thankful that I did not have sexual intercourse before marriage. There are no guarantees. I know people who married virgins and had horrible marriages that ended in divorce and people who had pre-marital sex with multiple partners and had good marriages and vice-versa and everything in between.

But the reality is that statistics show that, in general, when virgins marry, the marriage has a better chance of being successful. This isn't a surprise given that God created us and knows what's best for us. I could give many nuanced arguments, but suffice it to say here that even if statistics showed otherwise, God's way is still the best way. I think the problem was that purity culture, as Harris and others taught it, added to the Bible and that is never a good idea.

I am not a prophet so I'm not going to make a prediction as to where this is headed, but I do want to look at some options as to where Harris is heading.

Even now we must remember that he is dynamic, not static. He will be in a different place five years from now and a different place five years after that. We cannot make the mistake of seeing today as continuing on without changing for the foreseeable future. The only certainty is that Harris (and all of us) will continue on a path. We can veer from that path onto a new path, but we cannot stand still. Perhaps people-mover is a better illustration?

Dallas Willard talks about us being formed in Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ. Harris has been and is being formed as well. We have to keep this in mind as we consider his case and pray for him.