Josh Harris’s Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship was pretty formative for me back in 2000 when I read it. His 1995 short story “The Room” was also a favorite of mine (and a fascinating early example of a viral e-mail gone wrong). I did read I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), but it didn’t have as much of an impact on me as BMG. I didn’t think my own short courtship (engaged after 3-4 months of dating in 2003) was unwise in part because of Harris’s work. Indeed, it turns out that my own courtship was actually 2-6 weeks longer than Josh’s (!).
I was absolutely shook back in 2019 when the Harrises announced their pending divorce, and even more shook when Josh announced his departure from Christianity altogether. Shannon initially held on, but eventually made her own exit from Christianity. (And if you’re familiar with my story, you know that my own short-courtship marriage was—like the Harris marriage—doomed.)
In actuality, BMG’s message was in bad shape within a few years of its publication as several of Josh’s “successful courtship example” couples were already divorcing. At least one of his example couples had an extremely messy and ugly divorce. [1] But this was not widely known, and I don’t believe Harris ever revised the book to use different couples. This has now been completely eclipsed by the news of the author’s divorce, but these marriages that made a speed-run to failure should have been the canary in the coal mine that “courtship” doesn’t work.
Josh has said little publicly since 2019, but Shannon published a book last year on her side of things, which I’ve now caught up with. Here is my review of The Woman They Wanted by Shannon Harris (Hendrickson / Bonne), which I give ★★★☆☆ stars.
I graduated from high school in 2000, and I have been reflecting a lot lately on how much national evangelical youth leaders of the late 90s lied to my generation. Elisabeth Elliot had a terrible marriage [2], Josh Harris had no idea what he was talking about, and it’s not clear anyone was shot at Columbine for saying they believed in God [3]. Sifting the good I was taught in that era from the bad feels like cutting mold off of artisan bread.
We know now that Harris’s “courtship” proposal was a catastrophically bad idea. But what does healthier Christian dating look like? Can we teach abstinence before marriage without teaching guilt and shame? Can we teach young Christians how to spot red flags so they don’t wind up in awful marriages that they feel like they can’t get out of due to passages like Matt 19:9? And should a talented young Christian ever be rushed into the pastorate of a large church without formal theological training like Josh Harris was?
I don’t know the answers to all of these questions, but they are worth pondering.
For my own part, the second time around, I dated my future husband for about a year and a half before getting engaged, and we both understood that what we were doing was dating.
[1] I remember reading about these divorce cases years ago, but unfortunately, search engine results are now saturated with the news of Josh Harris’s own divorce, so I have been unable to find them to link to. If you are able to locate them, feel free to provide me with the links and I will update this article.
[2] See “Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage,” by Liz Charlotte Grant, 6 February 2024. Incidentally, Elliot’s first marriage to slain missionary Jim Elliot didn’t sound that great either, and her second marriage to Addison Leitch seems to have started as a quasi-affair while Leitch’s wife was dying of cancer. Yet Elliot was the woman that purity culture evangelicals held up as proof that if you followed their counsel, God would write you a beautiful love story.
[3] Back in 1999, in the wake of Columbine, claims were made that slain students Cassie Bernall and/or Rachel Joy Scott had been asked by Dylan Klebold and/or Eric Harris whether each believed in God, and upon answering in the affirmative, the girl in question was fatally shot. A book was even released about Bernall called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, with evangelical leaders running an accompanying “She Said ‘Yes’!” campaign, asking students to pledge that they would take a bullet for Jesus. I personally attended an event at Creation West ’99 where a speaker was selling “She Said ‘Yes’!” t-shirts (he told us we could have the shirts for free if we did not have any money to purchase them; that promise was quickly rescinded as a mass of students showed up asking for free shirts). Columbine investigators have since shown that Bernall was fatally shot by Harris without being asked any questions at all. Rachel Joy Scott’s death is more difficult to reconstruct as, of the four parties present (Harris, Klebold, Scott, and Richard Castaldo), only a grievously wounded and paralyzed Castaldo survived. Castaldo was in a coma on the day of the shooting, and he later said he had no memory of telling anyone about an exchange on God between Scott and Harris or Klebold. In contrast, survivor Valeen Schnurr was asked about her belief in God, which she did affirm, but she was shot before being asked, and not after. You can read her story in her own words here. I heard Scott’s father Darrell Scott speak in early 2002 or 2003 and, to his credit, he was up-front about Castaldo being unsure whether Scott made a profession of faith before her death.
