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* * *
The No Shame Movement
“Some people write in and say I’m shaming people who choose abstinence before marriage,” said Laura P., an anthropologist and founder of the No Shame Movement,I a website that shares people’s stories of leaving behind conservative Christian beliefs about sexuality. “Which is funny,” she laughed into the phone. “Because in my personal life, I’m actually practicing abstinence. I turned thirty-eight yesterday, and I’ve really only ever had two physical encounters and have never had penis-in-vagina sex. But I used to be abstinent because I thought I had to be based on what I learned in the church. Now I’m abstinent by choice. I want to wait and have it with the right person and I just haven’t found them. Which used to make me feel really bad, but now I understand why that is.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Purity culture messaging . . . internalizing that men are predators . . . I’m recognizing it all now. One thing I appreciate about the No Shame Movement community is there are so many people in it who are in the same boat as me. That’s helped.”
Like me, Laura was part of the first generation of adolescents to be raised in the era of the purity industry. But Laura didn’t grow up in the white evangelical church like I did. Laura is African American and was raised in a variety of churches, including a predominantly African American church. Still, the same white evangelical purity messages that shaped my life, shaped hers. Our parents watched the same TV shows on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Our moms listened to the same nationally syndicated programs on our local Christian radio stations. And we got many of the same messages about sexuality.
But things changed for Laura when her family moved to Ghana while she was in high school. “In Ghana,” she explained, “the conservative Christian adults around me were convinced dating was a sin, whereas the adults in the United States were convinced dating wasn’t a sin. My fifteen-year-old brain had trouble reconciling these two conflicting views. I remember thinking to myself ‘Somebody’s lying.’ And then you would see other things in Ghana.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like public breastfeeding. Or, in the rural north, women who went topless because breasts weren’t necessarily seen as sexual, so it was no big deal.”
The discord Laura saw among the values she learned in US churches, the values she saw in Ghanaian churches, and the values held in other parts of Ghanaian culture made Laura question the claim that religious purity teachings were noncultural—that is to say, that they had nothing to do with race, ethnicity, region, et cetera. In time, Laura began to see religious purity teachings as distinctly cultural, and to recognize how the white American evangelical church had exported these teachings across the country and the world. The history of US-based purity purveyor True Love Waits alone offers an illustration: In 1995, they displayed 220,000 purity pledges from thirteen countries in Argentina; in 2004, they displayed over 460,000 pledges from twenty countries in Athens, Greece; in 2007, they hosted an international summit in South Africa and announced a $950,000 expansion of its abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zambia. . . .1
In her late twenties, Laura began engaging with people critiquing purity culture online, most of whom were, or had been, part of the white American evangelical Christian subculture. The conversations were helpful, but “as a black woman, I wanted to see myself,” she insisted. “I thought, ‘What if we had a tag for the rest of us? Black women—as purity culture is very much ingrained in black church culture as well—people who are queer, or plus-sized, or disabled, or don’t feel seen in the existing spaces for some other reason?’ ”
Laura launched the No Shame Movement in 2013 with precisely this purpose in mind.
“I don’t write a lot of original content,” she told me. “I’m very intentional about inclusivity and trying to find other voices to put up on the site. It’s tedious, and slow, but I do the work: I make Twitter lists, bookmark things, form authentic relationships with people in groups that are underrepresented on the site. For example, when I knew the site needed more queer representation, I went to a group in DC called Many Voices,” a black church movement for gay and transgender justice. “That group led me to another group; I read the things they wrote; I followed their voices; some of those people pointed me to other people.” Today, the No Shame Movement represents a diversity of identities and experiences.
I first learned about the No Shame Movement in the summer of 2016 when I came across an online roundtable discussion in which Laura participated.2 The discussion circled around the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Toward Romance and Relationships, which argues that the secret to maintaining your sexual purity is not to date. Ever.
This book came up a lot in my interviews.
“That stupid, stupid, stupid book,” my interviewee Meagan railed from across my couch, for example. “What was it?”
“I Kissed Dating Goodbye?” I asked, having had so many interviewees talk about it that it seemed a viable guess.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “If I ever meet that guy, I’m going to punch him in the face.”
“Who wrote it, again?” I asked her. “Joshua Harris?”
“Yes,” Meagan answered. “Have you met him?”
“No.”
“I’m going to punch him.” Meagan lifted her fists preparing for a mock fight, “Right! In! The! Face!” Then her fists fell onto the pillow on her lap and she collapsed back onto the arm of my couch. “I don’t know,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “I just took it very seriously. I wanted to be good and get into Heaven. And I didn’t have any sense of—I hadn’t learned to read things critically yet, right? So I was like, ‘Here’s this thing recommended to me by people I trust who are good. I should read it, and I should do it.’ I just took it in. I was like, ‘This must be true . . .’ ”
Before I Kissed Dating Goodbye, there were other books. Every good girl in my youth group, for instance, had to read Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion & Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control. But from what I can see, I Kissed Dating Goodbye blew those books right out of the water. It was so popular, in fact, that, like New Kids on the Block (NKOTB) and Justin Timberlake (JT), the book went by an acronym: IKDG.
The author was just twenty-one years old when he wrote it—handsome, single, sexually abstinent, and even more conservative in his understanding of sexual propriety than most conservative Christian parents were. Josh’s parents were pioneers of the Christian homeschooling movement and when he was in high school, Josh founded a magazine for fellow homeschooled teenagers. But it was IKDG that launched him into evangelical stardom. In the book, he suggests that in order to avoid physical intimacy before marriage Christians should refrain from dating. Instead, he suggests his readers select their “intended” and engage in a period of courtship with the involvement of both sets of parents. He further suggests that Christians manage even their “guy-girl friendships” carefully, avoiding physical, and even too much emotional intimacy before marriage.
Josh was just what the purity industry had been waiting for.
IKDG quickly became required reading for white,II American evangelical adolescents, teenagers, and young adults who were serious about their faith, selling over one million copies.III Josh, meanwhile, became one of the bestselling evangelical authors of all time. He wrote many more purity culture favorites and eventually became the head pastor of a megachurch.
I knew IKDG was huge among people who looked like me, but when reading the transcript of the roundtable in which Laura had participated, it hit home for me just how many more people were impacted by this book in particular, and by white American evangelical purity culture in general, than I had previously understood.
Another one of the roundtable’s participants, Rev. Verdell A. Wright, is a preacher, teacher, and scholar working in the American black church. Verdell assured me that, whe
ther or not the churches he works with are considered “evangelical,” many of them teach evangelicalism’s purity message and push books like IKDG as must-reads.
“There are definite distinctions between American evangelical communities segregated by race and ethnicity,” he explained. “A professor of mine once said, ‘Whenever you talk about Christianity, it’s incorrect. Whose Christianity? Which one? It’s always Christianities.’ But the body theology in black and white churches is similar, and there is a reason why that is.” In short, white supremacy. Verdell explained how people of color have historically had to adopt white values and affects in order to assimilate and survive within the dominant white culture. “So everything starts to taste like vanilla ice cream,” he summarized. “The ice cream comes in different colors, but the flavor is the same.”
Another of the roundtable’s panelists, Dr. Keisha McKenzie, grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist Caribbean immigrant church in London before moving back to her family’s homeland of Jamaica. In both of these environments, she told me in an interview, the white American evangelical purity message came in loud and clear. “The sad thing about religious colonialism, which I see IKDG as part of, is that it doesn’t respect borders well,” she said in the roundtable. “I would never have known Joshua Harris’s name was it not for this book and his elevation based on it. Even though I didn’t see myself as his primary audience, I and others like me reaped the consequences of his work. The US church was afraid of sex and sin, and so we became afraid too. That didn’t serve us well.”
In an interview, Keisha further explained: “The Christian church is rendered as a trans-national movement—beyond your race, ethnicity, gender. You’re suddenly ‘in-Christ,’ which supposedly subsumes your ethnic/racial/gendered experience. Even in the United States, instead of being a black Christian, you become a Christian—which is defined with white, male, straight assumptions, including those about sexuality and the body. And internationally, whatever the indigenous, often majority, experience is, it’s overridden, including the indigenous approach to the body.
“Access to the Internet saved me in so many ways,” Keisha continued. “Web forums, reading things on the general Web, and social media where I meet people who I would never meet in person. There are people I talk to weekly, but have never met face-to-face. And there is an expression of concern among us. If any of us is having a rough day, we can come to one another and be received and seen. We didn’t all grow up within American evangelical purity culture, but religious patriarchy is a common language that has affected us all. Our alliances do not have to be drawn by race or subculture anymore. They can be drawn by shared pain. Shared rage. Shared hurt. Shared healing experiences. And a shared desire and actions taken to heal others.”
If the purity movement places stumbling blocks before us, coming together—as those in the roundtable did, and as those on the No Shame Movement website continue to do every day—is what helps us hurdle them. It allows us to point the stumbling blocks out to one another—to say, “Hey, watch out for that one, it’s a doozy”; to help each other back up when we fall; to catch one another; and to be caught—sometimes by someone across an ocean from us.
It isn’t simple. It isn’t easy. The virus of religious sexual shaming does not affect us all in the same way. White women, for example, experience gender-based subjugation, but enjoy racial privilege and will never really understand the way in which racism and sexism interact and impact women of color in this country. Straight women enjoy many privileges queer people do not. Cisgender women enjoy many privileges trans people do not. Those who have never been raped or assaulted enjoy many privileges that those who have been do not. And so on.
Yet we come together.
Some, to heal the church.
More, to heal ourselves.
And whether or not our conversations are intended for the church’s ears, some in it are listening.
Including Josh Harris.
* * *
The roundtable discussion on IKDG I mentioned earlier? It didn’t come out of nowhere. In the early 2010s, Josh Harris’s megachurch, Covenant Life, was named in a sexual assault case. A woman who attended Covenant Life as a toddler said she was molested by a male babysitter from the church. When her mom told their pastor, she reports that the pastor advised her not to call the police. Instead, the alleged victim was required to meet with her babysitter and forgive him. Years later, the now-grown child and her mother found others sharing stories of similar experiences on a blog called Sovereign Grace Ministries. Together, some of these individuals filed a class-action civil lawsuit. Civil lawsuit attorney Susan Burke told WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, DC: “We are alleging that a group of men, pastors, conspired together to cover up ongoing sexual abuse of children.” The suit was later dismissed, in large part because a judge ruled that the alleged victims had to sue within three years of turning eighteen and many were older than this.4
But in an interesting turn of events, in January 2015—five years after Covenant Life was named in the case, and a year and a half after Josh revealed to his church that he himself had been a childhood victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by someone in the church—Josh announced that he would be leaving his pastoral post to attend seminary.5 He said he made the move because he wanted to learn how other religious leaders handled complex issues like child sexual abuse, admitting that the decision not to go to the police may have been a mistake.6
In other words, after twenty years of having people listen to him, Josh was ready to listen to others for a little while. And some of the voices he heard when he did that were those from the online anti-purity movement.
“I never went to prom. #BecauseFundamentalism,” tweeted Elizabeth Esther, author of the memoir Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future, in May 2016.7
“@elizabethesther my school wasn’t allowed to have a prom. Because @HarrisJosh lol,” one of Esther’s followers tweeted back to her.8
And then, Josh stepped in: “. . . Sorry about that, Jess,” he tweeted.9
From there, a group discussion began:
“Honestly, your book was used against me like a weapon. But now, I just feel compassion for the kid you were when you wrote it.”10
“I’m sorry. And I’m planning to dig into that in the next year or two. Again, I’d love to chat.”11
“Add me to ur IKDG victims. 37, never married, now infertile . . . Many regrets!”12
“Kristine, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry for the loss you’ve experienced and ways my book contributed.”13
“This tweet made me cry. Had to see if I read that right. Thank you.”14
“I gotta say, fella, you don’t get off the hook for the enormous damage you caused by just saying ‘oops, sorry.’ Unbelievable.”15
And on and on and on.
That Twitter conversation catalyzed the online roundtable I mentioned earlier, and inspired the hashtags #KissShameBye, #IKDGStories, and #LifeAfterIKDG. Josh began soliciting stories about the impact of IKDG on his readers via his website, and another story collection siteIV launched in response, targeted at people who wanted to tell their stories but did not want to agree to Josh’s terms.
A few weeks after the story collection page on Josh Harris’s website went live, I copied the stories featured on the site into a Word doc.16 The document was 162 pages long. It included stories from the United States, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, South Africa, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, France, Singapore, Mauritius, Canada, Wales, and the Philippines.
From my count, about a quarter of the reviews were positive with people writing things like: “This book helped shape my standards on building godly relationships and friendships,” and “I believe by the grace of God, and the help of your book, I was spared from YEARS of heartache and chasing the dating game.” Another quarter of the reviews were what I categorize as “it’s complicated.” Most of these reviews included both positive an
d negative commentary.
Half of the reviews on Josh’s site, meanwhile, were negative (to say nothing of those who posted on the alternate site created for those who didn’t trust Josh with their story). Some focused on IKDG, saying things like “If there could be one book that I could unread it would be this one,” and “This book was easily the worst thing to happen during my four years of high school.” But many spoke about purity culture in general, naming IKDG as just part of the damage the larger culture had done to them: “I found myself deep in a pit of self-loathing and fear. I became a fearful and untrusting person. I struggle to this day with the damage I caused myself in my formative years from adhering so precisely to the ideals set in the book. I regret putting myself in chains. I mourn the untapped freedom of learning to love, to forgive, to trust, and to care.”
In August 2017, Josh Harris and a fellow seminary student completed a Kickstarter campaign to create a documentary that promises to tell us where he landed at the end of his listening tour. I hope Josh has meaningfully grappled with the stories of those who have been hurt by his work and that this will be reflected in the film. But whatever conclusion this one author reaches about whether this one book (he does not appear to be questioning any of his other books on the importance of purity) was more helpful or harmful, it doesn’t change what those of us who shared our stories know to be our truth.
And the fact that a major evangelical thinker even publicly considered that perhaps some part of the purity message may not be so great for people is illustrative of what I believe is a shift in evangelical culture that activists like Laura, Keisha, and Verdell can take a lot of credit for. As Laura said: “I’ve seen an increasing number of conservatives who are still shaming but saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be shaming so much.’ Even five or ten years ago, you didn’t see that in the same way. We did that.”
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