I was five years old when I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out (do the math), so I didn’t have personal experience with Harris’ teachings until I recently picked up a copy of the book to compare its principles to Catholic sexual ethics. American Catholicism doesn’t live in a bubble if a trend starts in Protestant circles, it’s bound to spread to some Catholic circles, as well. For better or worse, Protestantism has shaped American public discourse since the very beginning. As American Catholics, in particular, we live in a nation whose founders were almost entirely Protestant Christians. Look at John Paul II’s Theology of the Body! There’s no way this could affect us Catholics.” This is a naive and dangerous way of thinking. We are a part of the one, true Church founded by Christ himself. It can be too easy to look at the aftermath of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and think, “This is a Protestant problem. This past summer, Harris shocked American Christians again: In two separate Instagram posts, he announced that he and his wife were divorcing and that “by all the measurements that for defining a Christian, not a Christian.”
Over the past few years, Harris has publicly opened himself up to his critics, both in his discontinuing publication of the book and in a 2018 documentary in which he met with and listened to people who had been negatively affected by his teachings. The backlash against the book built up over the years, until the author, Joshua Harris, finally spoke up. Although the book’s principles worked for some people, many faithful Christians were deeply hurt by its teachings and those of the larger “ purity culture.” Among the ideas promoted in the book were saving one’s first kiss for the wedding day and following a courtship model of relationships (in which marriage is the primary goal of the relationship from day one) as opposed to a getting-to-know-you model of casual dating. For young Christians at the turn of the 21st century, it promoted an easy formula that nearly guaranteed God-honoring relationships blissful marriages and, most of all, effortless, completely fulfilling sex lives.
In 1997, a 21-year-old, unmarried man published a book that took American Christianity by storm: I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Towards Relationships and Romance.
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