Think. Don't Think. #IKDG (Project)
“Do you want to take the long way back to school?” he asked.I was cold. And I needed to pee.“OK.”“I know we have been talking about how we really appreciate each other as brother and sister, but I need to be honest with you that my feelings for you have grown into more than just being your friend. I don’t know if there is any possibility that you could feel the same way about me, and if you don’t, I want you to know that I will still be your brother and your friend. I just didn’t think it wouldn’t be fair to me, or to you, if I didn’t tell you how I feel.”
Silence.
“It’s mutual,” I said. “But I don’t feel like I would really want anything to change.” But he knew I was interested. Now I felt bound to him. I felt like I needed to know I could marry him before allowing myself to know him.Much of the hype on the web indicates this kind of thinking has been caused by Joshua Harris and his illustrious book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. See the following examples: Is Josh Actually Taking Responsibility?, Recovering from I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and Lifeafterikdg. This book unintentionally deeply hurt many men and women from the Christian homeschool culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, there is much more to take into consideration before simply blaming Harris for that pain. The readers themselves were responsible for how they received and reacted to the information placed before them.A vast majority of the audience of I Kissed Dating Goodbye were homeschoolers. Though not all homeschoolers were affected negatively, the general culture was a perfect target audience for this book for several reasons.
1. The conservative Christian culture that existed prior to the book being written was already leaning towards similar ideas and was highly attentive to what the Harris family taught.
Harris’ dad published The Christian Home School in 1988, highly impacting the homeschool movement. Kids growing up under the teaching of a homeschooling mom or dad were taught things that the Harris family taught before the kids ever heard of the Harris’. At the entrance of his book into the homeschooling community, Joshua Harris already had credibility through his dad, leading the book to easily become popular.
2. I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published at a key point in history.
The purity movement was not something that just came out of nowhere, it was a reaction to the immorality that preceded it. Roe vs. Wade, teen pregnancies, and the shift from traditional gender roles of the 1950s were huge precursors to conservatives response to Harris' book. They were looking for ways to counter what they felt were liberal ideas and the book was a popular and easy answer.
3. When a new idea is presented logically from a source that is deemed trustworthy, it is natural human nature to accept and believe.
When Harris provided the alternative of courting, the people welcomed it. They easily accepted Harris’ teachings because of respected leaders’ influence upon them as they grew up. One of the top reasons for homeschooling is to control what a child is learning. If parents main motivation is to teach kids only what they want them to believe and follow, then how will a child learn to think for his or herself? How will a person learn to take two different ideas, concepts, or beliefs and weigh them with Scripture?
4. Homeschoolers are functioning members of a conservative ecosystem.
An ecosystem is a community of organisms that interact with each other in their environment. For an ecosystem to survive, the organisms within the environment need to stay the same. When children moved into a new ecosystem, their worldview was shattered. They could not survive in this new place the same as they did in their previous system. The old ideas had to go.
5. Many homeschoolers didn’t see Harris’s ideas as just things to think about.
Rather, they made Harris’s ideas into a list of rules to obey. People like to feel that they are good. Doing and teaching others the things in this book made people feel like they were doing dating right. Sometimes we would rather have a rule to obey that allows us to feel good than to actually think about what we are doing, simply because it is easier.
6. Abiding by this mental list made people feel safe.
People thought they could keep themselves safe from hurt over broken relationships. They could feel safe from doing something wrong. If you don’t have any relationships at all, you certainly can’t have any broken ones. Don’t date. Problem solved. Not really.
An Invitation to Think
I do not write to persuade my readers that we are who we are today, and the pain we struggle with is because of the brief reasons I have given. I write simply to present something to think about, with the hope that anyone who resonates with anything I have said will take it and wrestle through it for his or herself with the Lord and with Scripture. I’ve been trying to figure out the mess I come from for several months. I still don't fully understand it all. But I’m still trying to think. I invite you to think with me.