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What happens when you put a 19-year-old in charge of setting the standard for Christian dating? Well, you get this
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book. That's right. I Kiss Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris. That's what we're talking about today. I'm Jacob
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Gooden and this is the Exhomeschoolers Club. [Music] So, let's kick this thing off. This is
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part two of the I Kiss Dating Goodbye series. Uh if you missed part one, go back. It's only a few episodes ago,
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okay? And uh and it'll be linked in the show notes. I'll do that for you as
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well. But um we talked last week on kind of what this book stems out of. We talked about the history of the Harris
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family, their involvement in like the Christian homeschool world. So why it plays a significant role to a lot of us
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homeschoolers. Um because even if you didn't read this book, this book came out, the quick history is this book came
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out in 1996, the year I was born. Okay? It didn't cease to be published until
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2019. So, this book has had an influence on what is today modern-day purity culture. Okay.
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Last time we talked about part one of the book um and that section was called I kissing goodbye. We talked on chapters
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1 through three and we talked about a bunch of different stuff in there, but it was kind of setting the stage for
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what is what is the alternative uh to modern day dating. This week we're going
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to look at part two which is called, let me pull it up here, the heart of the matter, and it's chapters 4 through 7.
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This week is going to touch more on like Harris's definitions of of like Christian love, right? Of true love uh
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versus like worldly love. Okay? And he kind of brought this up in in the earlier chapters where he he said talked
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a lot about how, you know, Christ love is like this unselfish thing and it it's always
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giving and it's it's all of these things, right? And that that then worldly love is
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is the opposite. It's selfish. It takes um and it and it considers nothing of
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the other people involved. Um and so we're going to see that. So, I mean, right off the rip, right? We're going to
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just let's get into it. Okay, chapter 4. Right off the rip, like many of the
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chapters in this book, he kicks it off with a story. And he tells this story of driving around with his buddy Jeff. Uh,
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it's summer. He's in the car with his buddy Jeff. They're driving around and
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Jeff is telling him like, "Oh, yeah. I've been going out with this girl
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Gloria." And, um, Josh is like, "Oh, yeah. I know her. You know, we're all
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friends, whatever." And um and Jeff basically confides in him like, "Hey, we
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like we really like each other and we just had sex kind of a deal." And he's
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kind of looking for this like pat on the back like, you know, like, you know, add
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a boy kind of a deal, like get some kind of a thing. And Josh does not give that
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to him. He's like the polar opposite. He's like, "Well, that's not really like
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I don't think that's the right way to do things." And they kind of get in a
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little tiff about it, but nothing too serious. And then like they just part ways. Okay. But at the end of telling
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the story, Josh talks about, you know, I come home, uh, I'm visiting from out of
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town and he's like, I run into Jeff. And Jeff is now engaged to a totally different girl. Uh, some girl named
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Debbie, right? So Gloria is long gone at this point. And Josh responds with, "That's great." I said, "My
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congratulations sounded hollow. I couldn't help it. I was thinking of Gloria. I hadn't seen her in a long
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time. What was she now? Three or four girlfriends back? Love, huh? And I read this and I was just like
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bothered by this, right? You should always be happy for your friends, right? Even if you don't agree
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maybe with their with their love choices, cuz I've had a few friends like that. But but you should be happy that
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they're happy, right? You should want them to be happy. And but the fact is we're years removed from the situation
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with Gloria and Josh is still hung up and can't even be happy for his friend
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who has moved on. Let alone the fact that like Josh is this big advocate, right, for doing it Christ way, doing it
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like the right way, which is get married, have sex. And his buddy Jeff is like going down that path. He's getting
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married. And Josh can't even like just reconcile in his brain like that maybe this dude
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has grown up. Maybe this guy has evolved and changed, right? So, just this weird really arguably like
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terrible friend behavior, let alone just like you're obsessing over something that is
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not your business whatsoever. We flash forward like a couple more pages. Okay. So he talks about
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the he he calls it in the section he calls it Aphrodite or Christ. And he says I cannot overemphasize the
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importance of gaining God's perspective on love. We can link all the negative
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habits of dating to adopting a fallen world's attitude towards love. And the
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conflict between God's definition of love and the world is not new. Christians have always had a choice to
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either imitate the master or slip into the more enticing pattern of love provided by the world. But again, Josh
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is equating like love as this like purely selfish thing. He's equating it to like
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basically sex always. Uh he he basically is like if you're not a Christian, love is only selfish. It is only self-
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serving. Uh he later goes on to talk about this on page 62 and he says first we must understand that all of the
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world's deceptions flow from the belief that love is primarily for the fulfillment and comfort of self. The
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world poisons love by focusing on meeting one's own needs first and foremost. We witness this poison in the
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boyfriend or girlfriend who pressures their partner into sex. You've heard the
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line, "If you really loved me, you do it." In other words, I don't care about
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you or your convictions um or how this could damage you emotionally. Meet my needs. Or what about the person who
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dates someone because it will boost his or her popularity but then dumps that person when someone of a higher social
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sta status comes along? Again, there are people like this. People will do these things. People are
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shitty. Okay? It it happens. But I would argue that most people if you ask them about what love is and what
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real love is, they would not say this. They would not say this selfishness of throwing aside one's own needs uh to
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meet the needs of other like only being selfish, right? We would talk about true
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love has this aspect of give and take, right? Like we do have things, we do have needs as humans. Um, Christians
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might not know that because we are told consistently that like not to listen to our bodies. Uh, that our bodies are
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wicked and evil things and that like the wants and desires of man are like awful,
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right? And and it leads to this weird mentality. I talked about it in the previous episode, but like for me it led
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to this weird I still struggle with what pleasure is to me, right? And doing things that make me happy. uh whether
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it's sexual, whether it's just like like actually like fun things of like playing
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a video game or reading a book or like taking time for myself, things that I need to recharge.
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Um I struggle to register when my body is telling me those things and I've gotten better at it, but it's it's a
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slow unlearning process. Okay. It's so strange to me like this like selfish like love thing because I
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remember hearing that as a kid. I do. I remember hearing about like that people outside of God's love really couldn't
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have rich fulfilling relationships and love because they didn't know what it
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was to love. They didn't know what it was to like sacrifice and give up themselves. Later in the in the chapter,
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he has a section called true love nullifies dating and he has this quote in here that
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um or he says a few things in here. He goes back to his Jeff and Gloria explanation and he says that they uh
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they often uh they unfortunately they often subscribed to the world's definition of love. First, their
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motivation was self-centered. Jeff went out with Gloria because she was pretty to all the other guys uh or she was
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pretty. All the other guys liked her and she satisfied him sexually. His criteria
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for pursuing a relationship with her compares to his criteria for choosing a pair of jeans. They make him feel good.
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They make him look good. Gloria wasn't much better. So on the other hand, she
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liked Jeff because he was a prize. He was good-looking, athletic, and he owned a nice car. They met each other's
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emotional and physical needs and helped each other's image. Self-centered, right? As he goes on, our entire motive
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is transformed when we extract the poison of self-love. Now, I want to say this because this was a note I wrote
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down. I read this book as if I was like 14, 15, okay? Peak puberty, sexual feelings are awakening in you.
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If I had read this and seen poison next to self-love, again, it feeds into this whole
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narrative that like because we view self- loveve as selfishness, right? Now, I view it much more as like self-care,
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right? Listening to our bodies. Sometimes you just got to take a spa day. You just got to do a facial mask.
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You just got to pamper yourself a little bit, right? But I would have I would have only ever
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seen those words in a very negative context if this is the book I was going off of.
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All right, we are moving right along into chapter 5 of this book. It's called
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The Right Thing at the Wrong Time is the Wrong Thing and uh subtitle is how to keep impatience from robbing you of the
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gift of singleness. Now, the story that starts out this whole thing is he tells this parable of uh the magic thread and
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how this uh this kid named Peter gets this magic ball of of thread, okay? Or this magic spool of thread or something
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like that. And the way the thread works is that it Peter can go forward in time by pulling the thread and it will
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advance him in time. Okay? And so the parable goes that, you know, he goes to class one day and he's in school and
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he's bored out of his mind because he doesn't want to be in school. So he tugs
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the thread just a little bit and he flashes forward and he's not in school anymore. And as his life goes on, he
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continues to pull on this thread anytime there's anything boring. He just wants
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the excitement. He just wants the the enticing parts of life. And so he pulls the thread and before he knows it, he's
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pulled all the way through his life. He's pulled the thread to the very end.
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Now, the thing about the thread is there's no respspooling it and going back, right? It only works one way. And
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uh Josh uses this like as an example, right? To be like, we often young people often give up their
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like their singleness in pursuit of a relationship, in pursuit of this this adult thing. um and how sometimes it's
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actually good to sit in the like monotonous life, the monotonous day-to-day stuff. And um and I was like
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interesting. I don't totally disagree with him on this. Um, I think his some of the arguments for it are a
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little bit dumb, but I do understand that like idea of like life is a series of excitement and kind of some boring
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times and it it's this weird up and down roller coaster, right? Um, so I'm not
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going to totally disagree with the guy on all of it, but I do disagree with him on some of it. And uh specifically this
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he talks later in the book or talks later in this chapter about seasons and he says uh just as spring's role is
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different from that of fall so each of the seasons of our lives has a different emphasis focus and beauty. Totally with
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you right life is seasons. We cannot skip ahead or experience the riches of another life season any more
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than a farmer can rush the spring. Each season builds on the one before it. God has many wonderful experiences he wants
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to give us. He also assigns those experiences to particular seasons of our lives. In our humanness, we often make
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the mistake of taking good things out of its appropriate season to enjoy it when
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we want it. Premarital sex is a prime example of this principle. Sex in itself is a wonderful experience and he has in
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parenthesis from what I've from what my married friends have told me. But if we
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indulge in the outside of God's plan, indulge in it outside of God's plan, we
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sin. Like a fruit picked green or a flower plucked before it blossoms. Our attempts to rush God's timing can spoil
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the beauty of his plan for our lives. Just because something is good doesn't
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mean we should pursue it right now. We have to remember that the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing. One
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of the things that I struggled with growing up was God's will was talked a lot about when I was a
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kid. And I think I've brought it up on the podcast before, but I had kind of a different view of God's
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will than most of my friends did. A lot of them would they would pray a lot. They would read
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the Bible a lot and basically be asking God for this very definitive answer of like do this, do that. And sometimes it
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was for very arbitrary stuff that I was like this is a waste of God's time. And
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let me give you an example. Like it would be like should I join this club or that club? And now if I still believed
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that, you know, God was master of the universe, of course, you know, if I believed all the Bible stuff, I would
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still believe that, you know, God even cares about those little details. My difference of opinion came from uh
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when I was young, my mom had me read the Westminster Catechism, and one of the first sections of that book, it was
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basically these teachings on the Bible. Um but one of the first sections and themes of that book was this idea that
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in order to do the will of God, what is the will of God? The will of God is that
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you glorify and honor him. And in doing that, you get to you get to spend eternity with him.
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And I was like, interesting. Okay. And so from then on, I kind of had this different view of like I don't really
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need to bother God with all of the questions of all of the like, should I do this club over that club? I should
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just make a decision. And if I'm doing it and I'm honoring God while doing it
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and I'm being in a light to the world, I'm doing the will of God. And how does this fit into what I'm talking
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about here? I think so many people waited for this like God to tell them now is the time to date, right? Now is
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the is the time to do this thing. And I think Josh pushes this a lot too because
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he pushes this certainty within dating. And we're going to get we're going to
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see more of it as we go further in the book, but he pushes this certainty of like dating
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is bad because like you should be the person that you pursue, you should want to like pursue them for marriage and be
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like kind of almost certain about it. And I remember there just kind of being this because broken hearts are bad,
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right? Getting hurt is bad and hurting other people is bad. But that's just not how life always
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works, right? We get hurt, we get knocked down. And so I think I viewed dating in a different way because I
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viewed it as like I'm interested in this person. Let me date them. Let me meet
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them. Let me experience them. And Josh is going to argue you do this as friends without the romantic stuff. But I I
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disagree. I've always disagreed on that. I think that the romantic stuff can add
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a seriousness to it. Um like let me give you this example. When I dated my wife, pretty early on in
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our relationship, we were friends before we were lovers. Uh, but when we were friends, we talked a lot
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about like what we want out of life. We hung out with a lot of different people.
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And then as we started dating, one of the things that I told her very quickly was that I was not dating to just have a
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girlfriend. I had an intention behind it. I wanted to get married. I wanted or I wanted to find a partner. It wasn't It
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was less about getting married. It was more about I wanted to find someone that I wanted to do life with.
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And I set that intention very early in our relationship. And it didn't scare
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her off. She was like, I'm interested in that, too. Now, we also added all of the handholding and
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the kissing and that was an aspect of figuring out if this was the person that I was compatible with. Again, I think
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Christians got it wrong. They got scared of someone along the line was like sex equals bad. And I think Josh is one
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of these people where we even see in the in the first chapters and and I I read his follow-up book to this as well. I
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think Josh got hurt while dating because even though he doesn't talk about it a
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whole heck of a lot in the books, Josh does mention the fact that he dated a lot of girls. He kissed a lot of girls.
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He never uh was he never uh lost his virginity, which I even hate that term, but
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but he he was not like a pure guy. like he he had done the thing and then he got
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frustrated with it. And I think part of that is just the fact that like I think he got hurt one too
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many times and he was like there has to be a better way instead of just actively pursuing
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more out of it, right? And like actually I don't know maybe looking at the situation differently. And this is a
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little bit of an aside. This is not in my notes, but I'm I'm realizing as I'm
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talking about this that I'm like there's so many things and Josh, I would love to
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have you on and maybe I could just ask you this question, but was it that you got hurt and you were
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like, okay, screw this, I'm going to figure out a better way, which was like,
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I'm going to make it look cool to be single, or was it an unwillingness to learn that
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maybe you were the problem in a lot of these relationships? Did you have areas that you needed to
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grow as a person to to fulfill whatever it was you were going to get to? I don't think it's a bad thing to
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want to date somebody with the intention of marriage, with the intention of finding a life partner. I also don't
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think it's bad to date people with the intention of I like having somebody to
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go get drinks with, to go to the movies with, to have like a partner in crime kind of person. and maybe they're not my
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forever person, but they're just somebody I'm vibing with currently. I don't think that any of that's bad. I
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just think it's all about like the intention and the communication of those things right off the rip so people don't
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get injured. Does that make sense? Anyway, I could ramble on this for a long time, but let's let's move on.
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Okay, a few pages more. He says, "While you're single, dating not only keeps us
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from preparing for marriage, but it can quite possibly rob us of the gift of singleness. Dating can tie us down in a
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series of pseudo relationships, but God wants us to maximize our freedom and flexibility to serve him. Any season of
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singleness, whether you're 16 or 26, is a gift. You might uh you just might do
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God a disservice by wasting its potential on a lifestyle of short-term dating." I talked about this in the last
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episode, but this idea that like when you're in a relationship, you can't like
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be serving God, right? Like you can't or you can't be preparing for marriage.
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It's like really [ __ ] weird. And I'm sorry I cursed, but like it's really
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weird, right? There's a lot that goes into marriage. There's a lot of things I
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didn't know that I was going to need to do as a husband that I that I had to
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learn, but some of them I learned beforehand. Okay. I learned about like the difference of personality, right? I
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learned about I need to do certain things. I need to take care of my partner in certain ways that I had
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not ever thought of before. I learned about the fact that like my words held different meaning or the tone of my
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voice held different meaning than maybe I intended. I still learn this on the daily. Um and it maybe hurt feelings or
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made people feel a certain way. And I don't think I would have learned those things if I wasn't
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I mean like I said I'm still learning those today but like I learned a lot of
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them while I was dating while I was like exploring a romantic partner was like the way that we interacted and the way
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we like learned how to take care of each other and what we needed. Right. I brought up in my last episode that like
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I had surgery while I was dating my my wife. We were not even close to being engaged. Like I had surgery. I couldn't
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take care of myself. It was in an awkward part of my back, my lower back, and like I couldn't replace the gauze on
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my own. I needed help and I needed her help cuz I had nobody else. My family didn't live nearby. Nothing.
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And she could have easily been like, "Nah, don't do that. That's like not the level
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of our relationship." But she cared about me and she said, "No, I'm going to
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take care of you and I'm going to like do this for you." And she would push me to when I wanted
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to just kind of be like, you know, do things that were, you know, the doctor was telling me, "You got to take it
00:23:01
easy." She helped hold me accountable to following doctor's orders as opposed to
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me and myself. I would have been like, "No, I can do XYZ and I can do this on
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my own and I don't need anybody." I would have had this very independent
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streak inside of me. And she didn't have to do that. But but I learned to accept
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that and I learned to communicate better when I'm sick what I need. And I'm a super needy patient, by
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the way. Um, but I don't like this argument that he continues to make that like when you when you're in a
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relationship, you then like are like losing out on this opportunity to like learn how to be a spouse. Like I just
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think that that's like I think it's just like flipped to be honest. Like like you
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actually can't really learn how to be a spouse until you're in a relationship
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and you're actually having to like you're closing that intimacy gap, right?
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You're closing that gap of like it looks different to be intimate with friends
00:24:04
than it does with a partner than it even does with a spouse. Like it's just very
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very different and that's okay. Like it just and it's okay to explore that. I also
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wanted to bring this up because I put this in my notes again. Early on in this book, he was talking about how he wanted
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to go back to dating as if it was in the 1800s. Now, if we look at historically like
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dating and we look at dating even within the Bible, one of the reasons I think the Bible doesn't talk a lot about
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dating is because at the time women were like bought and sold, right? They came with dowies. They like it was a lot of
00:24:47
times it was these plays within families to strengthen themselves. Talk about selfish love, man. It was families plays
00:24:54
to like strengthen their their worth, their their value, their standing in society. And it's like
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Josh, why are we going back to that? Because now we're coming out of that and
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we're coming into a place where women can have a say. Women can have a voice
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and they can say, you know, I value these things in a partner. Before they couldn't do that, it was just like, you
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know, dad would arrange something. mom and dad would arrange something or you know you hear about arranged marriages
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people still to this day have arranged marriages I'm not totally knocking that
00:25:28
just FYI but I think it's interesting this push within Christianity specifically in this book
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but I think by so many to kind of go back to this like maledominated 1800's view of of romance
00:25:48
as opposed to we're in a different place now. We've evolved as a society. We've
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changed the rules. We evolve, we change, we grow, we become better. And um yeah, it just honestly
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feels very like patriarchical um and nasty to be quite honest. So that's chapter five. We're going to move
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on to chapter six because I mean I could talk about every paragraph of this book
00:26:19
and my disagreement or agreement with it. Uh most of it's disagreement. Um but yeah,
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let's jump in. Chapter six, the direction of purity. Subtitle, how to get on the road of righteousness.
00:26:35
This book, this chapter, man, kicks off with a disgusting story again. But this story, he talks about, so he talks about
00:26:46
going to church camp and he talks about the pastor that was leading the thing saying, "Hey, we're going to fill out
00:26:52
these anonymous note cards and we're going to rank where you sit on the um the levels of physical intimacy um and
00:27:02
their seriousness kind of a deal." And so he's like, "Hey, if you've ever like
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kissed somebody, so it's like a 0 to 10 system is the way he outlines it. So,
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you know, zero would be nothing, right? Done nothing. One is like like kissing and then 10 would be sexual intercourse.
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And so Josh is like, "Okay, so we fill them all out. We drop them in the thing,
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you know, and we leave." It was like the end of a service and then they were
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going to talk about it uh in a different in a future thing. And he's like, "As
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I'm walking out, like some of the guys are all chatting about like, "Oh, what'd
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you score?" And you know, and they're like, "Oh, I got to like a six, but like
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almost a seven kind of a deal." And I'm like, I'm sitting here going, "Weird weirdo
00:27:49
behavior." Again, this is the kind of stuff if you never went to church youth group, if you never
00:27:55
did like the summer camps and things like that, these are the types of things that would happen at places like that
00:28:00
where it's like this weird like telling of things to the adults in the room, but
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then ultimately it's going to come down to them shaming us into feeling like wicked people,
00:28:17
resulting in us repenting of our sins. and asking God into our hearts, right? Asking for forgiveness, asking God to
00:28:24
come live inside of us so that they can report their numbers back to the church when we get back and say, "Hey, 150
00:28:30
students committed their lives to Christ or something like that." But anyway,
00:28:34
these are like just weird controlling church behavior that is just like Anyway, I wanted to also talk about this. He
00:28:46
says, "Like countless Christians, my two friends foolishly viewed purity and
00:28:50
impurity as separated by a fixed point. As long as you didn't cross the line and
00:28:55
go all the way, they believed they were still pure." True purity, however, is a
00:29:01
direction, a persistent, determined pursuit of righteousness. This direction starts in the heart and we express it in
00:29:08
a lifestyle that flees the opportunities of compromise. I grew up believing the same thing that
00:29:14
like purity was kind of this like fixed thing, right? So, I talked last time about like sexual sin not being
00:29:21
classified, right? Like of like what is too far and everybody's definition is
00:29:26
slightly different, but we can all agree that having premarital sex is like that
00:29:29
is way beyond the line and nobody should be going there. Um kind of a deal. And then on the lower half of it would be
00:29:38
the kissing. I personally probably would have ranked like masturbation down on the lower part. Um maybe even some like
00:29:45
pornography. Um I don't know. People would probably disagree with me. They'd probably be
00:29:51
like porn and masturbation go higher on the list. But like I know that for me I viewed it very much in that fixed
00:29:59
point of like until I had sex I was like I'm good. I'm good. I got this. Now,
00:30:11
mentally, I had decided in my brain, I had determined that I was like, I think that the Bible's views on sex are wrong
00:30:20
or the things that I had attributed to biblical standards of sex were wrong. And I had determined that
00:30:28
I was like, I don't think that premarital sex is sinful. Disagree, agree with me, whatever you
00:30:34
want. I don't really give a [ __ ] That was what I had determined. But my body was so used to being told
00:30:42
that sex equals bad that when I did have sex that was outside of marriage, it was
00:30:49
great in the moment. But the shame and the guilt that came after were awful. And so even though in my brain I was
00:30:58
like telling myself I was like no, this is okay. Like this is fine. Like you should not feel guilty for this. This is
00:31:02
like normal natural you know like you're learning. You're exploring. this is a
00:31:06
part of the human experience like you should you know be enjoying it all these types of things because my body had been
00:31:13
told so for so long that like this is bad this is bad this is bad I just had so many issues with it
00:31:20
but when it came to anything else I was like well that's not crossing that line
00:31:28
I knew that like watching porn maybe masturbating was sinful but it was not like at this definitive
00:31:35
Like it it almost felt like having premarital sex was like you it's an instant go to hell card, right? Like in
00:31:41
Monopoly you get the like go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass. Like it felt like maybe that was like the case.
00:31:47
Like and I've only ever really felt that way about two things inside of Christianity.
00:31:52
One, sex is like the instant go to hell card and homosexuality is the instant go
00:31:59
to hell card. And it's just wrong. It's just wrong. It's like it's just a [ __ ] up belief to be
00:32:07
quite honest. And um it doesn't make you less of a person. It doesn't like
00:32:13
dehumanize you. It's it I I I don't even know like I can't even the words aren't
00:32:21
even there to express my feelings on this. But I just agree with the idea that that was what we were being taught
00:32:29
of like purity sits within these fixed points of like you're either all the way
00:32:36
at a zero where you are like extremely pure um because you've done nothing physical or you're all the way over here
00:32:44
and then there yeah there's all this stuff in in the middle but it's all like
00:32:48
redeemable. You can be saved from that. So, without further ado, I'm not going
00:32:53
to I'm not going to ramble too much longer on that. I do want to jump ahead a few more pages uh to page 89. And he
00:33:01
starts talking about good old King David. And one of the things I'm just going to say
00:33:08
this now because I'm going to bring this up again later, but the the story of
00:33:12
King David, this particular story with him at Ba Sheba is from 2 Samuel chapters uh 11 and 12. If you're not
00:33:19
familiar with it, here's the cliffnotes version. Okay. King David, king of Israel, goes out on his rooftop, sees a
00:33:26
beautiful woman taking a bath on her rooftop in all of her nakedness, is like, "I want that woman." So, even
00:33:33
though he's a married man, uh has multiple wives cuz he's king uh of Israel. Um he sends his guards to go get
00:33:42
her, bring her to him. He seduces her, they sleep together, she gets pregnant. What he doesn't know at the time is that
00:33:48
she is the wife of one of the generals of his army. And uh what ends up like happening is that he ends up killing her
00:33:56
husband so that he can be with her. But the reason I bring up this story is is one I want to highlight something. You
00:34:04
know, Christians will always say like God uses imperfect people. They'll use
00:34:08
that as an argument. David is considered by the church as one of like the guys. He is one of like the ultimate god
00:34:15
followers and he's a man to be respected. He's a man to be uh admired, to to imitate, all these types of
00:34:24
things. And I was rereading this story cuz I read it the more than just in this book. I actually opened my Bible and
00:34:31
read this story and I was reminded that I'm like, this is a man who does everything that you guys disagree with.
00:34:40
Not only does he have multiple wives, which a lot of Christians would argue is bad, he has an affair with a married
00:34:50
woman. He gets her pregnant and then he kills a guy as a result of it. I just don't understand the justification for
00:34:57
King David. To be honest, I think that's the main p pull from there that it just
00:35:03
always irks me that I'm like, why are we talking about this guy? Because I'm not going to get political. I'm just
00:35:10
going to leave it at that. But why why why do we do that? It just seems dumb to me. Okay. There's plenty of other people
00:35:17
in the Bible who are better examples, more faithful examples of of their faith than King David. That's all I got. I'm
00:35:25
going to leave it at that. I want to point out this other part of this book. Um it's always interesting to me. He says
00:35:34
this in the in the book of Proverbs, the seductive spirit of impurity and compromise is symbolized by a weward
00:35:39
adulteress. We are warned that many are the victims uh many are the victims she has brought down. Her slain are a mighty
00:35:48
throg. And then he goes on. He says, "Though King Solomon wrote these words
00:35:52
hundreds of years ago, this woman continues to lurk all around us today. She snares the innocent with promises of
00:35:57
pleasure, but she truly desires nothing but her victim's destruction. She has
00:36:02
ruined countless lives, both male and female, with her treachery. And I just wrote this in my notes. I said, "Why
00:36:09
does the Bible always portray like the bad guy as like a woman? Like, why is it never why is it never a
00:36:18
guy? It's always like a woman." Um, I don't know. Something to think about.
00:36:23
That's all I got to say there. Next up, page 93. We're moving. We're moving.
00:36:30
Purity and action is what this section is called. I'm just going to read this.
00:36:35
It has a a bit in here. It says, "Respect the deep significance of physical intimacy. Many non-Christians
00:36:41
view sex as bodily as a bodily function on the level of scratching your back. They engage in sex whenever and with
00:36:49
whomever they want. While this lifestyle is an affront to biblical values, many Christians treat lesser expressions of
00:36:56
physical intimacy with the same lack of respect. They view kissing, holding, fondling uh as no big deal. While you
00:37:04
may hold higher standards uh while we may hold higher standards than our pagan neighbors, I'm afraid we too have lost
00:37:11
sight of the deeper significance of sexual intimacy. I wrote in my notes, I said viewing sex as the same as
00:37:18
scratching someone's back is like a wild thing to say. Like that's how he views
00:37:24
the world's idea of like love and sex, right? It's like we we don't differentiate between like scratching
00:37:31
your back or having sex with someone. It's all just bodily, you know, our body
00:37:35
is telling us we need something, so we just fulfill it. There's so much more to
00:37:38
it than just that. Like sex is so much of a bigger thing than just scratching your back. Like
00:37:45
I would just I would argue that people don't view they view sex as a special
00:37:50
connection between two people. And I don't think they would put it on the same level as scratching the back. Like
00:37:58
also he mentions in here that he says later in this chapter he says physical intimacy is much more than two bodies
00:38:06
colliding. God designed our sexuality as a physical expression of the oneness of
00:38:11
marriage. God guards it carefully and places many stipulations on it because he considers it extremely precious. He
00:38:18
doesn't back up this statement with any Bible verses. I mean, this whole page
00:38:23
right here, both these pages, I mean, there's one little Bible scripture here
00:38:26
that says, "Do not let your heart uh turn to her ways or stray from her paths."
00:38:33
But there's no other scripture in here that's backing up these stipulations
00:38:37
that supposedly God has. That's why I said earlier, uh, you know, where the bi
00:38:42
where the story of King David is. If you want to check it out, second 2 Samuel chapters 11 and 12.
00:38:51
Where where is your proof? Where is your backup? That is something that I realized as I read this book.
00:38:59
Many Christian books bet on you already having an understanding of the Bible, having
00:39:06
already been to church, having already have this knowledge in place to just then go along
00:39:13
with them saying stuff like, "Well, we all know that this is the way God views
00:39:17
it. We all know that this is in the Bible. Where? Tell me where. Show me where."
00:39:27
Okay, I didn't think much of these types of things until I read um When Religion
00:39:33
Hurts You. And as I was reading it, one of the notes I took on that book was I was like, everything is cited. There's
00:39:40
links to everything. There's references to books and all these things. They're
00:39:44
all listed, not only in the actual writing, but there are annotations in the corners to say, "Hey, you know, go."
00:39:51
And in the back there's an entire reference sheet of everything that's referenced throughout the whole thing.
00:39:58
I would respect this book, I think, a lot more if he actually had sources to back it up and maybe sources more than
00:40:07
just the Bible. Even though this is a Christian book, of course, the Bible is the whole truth. Nothing but the truth.
00:40:15
So help me, right? Like I get it. But like the more you just rely only on the Bible for
00:40:25
everything. As a non-believer, it gets harder and harder to like kind of buy into the [ __ ] so to
00:40:33
speak, because if I don't believe it, you got to hit me with other sources that maybe I respect more. That's all
00:40:39
I'm going to say about that. Moving on, he brings up Billy Graham. Thought this
00:40:43
was interesting. My family has a connection to Billy Graham. My grandfather used to work for Billy
00:40:47
Graham organization. One of the things that Billy Graham historically did, and I saw this play
00:40:53
out in my own lives as well, but in the early days of his ministry, Billy Graham
00:40:58
experienced deep concern over the public's distrust of evangelists. How could he preach the gospel to people who
00:41:04
assumed he was fake? As he considered this question, he realized that most people who distrusted evangelists did so
00:41:11
because these evangelists lacked integrity, particularly in the area of sexuality. To combat this, he and his
00:41:18
close circle of men who ran the crusades avoided opportunities to be alone with women who weren't their wives. Now, I
00:41:25
grew up in a household and with people in my life who kind of lived by similar principles, who would leave the doors
00:41:32
open. I had a grandfather, like I said, who worked for the Billy Graham organization. He had to follow some of
00:41:37
these rules. Here's what I understand about this that I can kind of get behind. I understand the wanting to to
00:41:46
for there to never be a question about what happens behind closed doors. I I get that. Here's where I kind of
00:41:55
disagree. I believe that this perpetuates the idea that men are uncontrollable hormone
00:42:03
monsters. The way that purity culture is set up is so that men don't have to take
00:42:11
accountability for their actions. And that's a really dangerous message to tell young boys specifically
00:42:21
that we get to blame. We get to put we get to shift blame to to women a lot of times for well they wore this thing
00:42:31
which results in us being like well they were asking for it. They you know said or did this thing or
00:42:37
they gave me this look and and you know whatever. It's their fault not mine.
00:42:45
And so we're teaching these young men that like they have no self-control, right? It's unavoidable.
00:42:55
I get really irritated by this because I know that I was that way for a long [ __ ] time. I thought that I was just
00:43:08
uncontrollable. And I'm thankful. I I said it in episode one. I'm going to say it again. My dad
00:43:16
had told me that there is a time and a place for sexual things. We grew up in California. We go to the beach. you're
00:43:22
going to see women in bikinis. He's like, "The beach ain't a sexual place.
00:43:25
We're not here to be hooking up. We're not here to be ugly. We're not here to do it's not sexy
00:43:32
time." And that helped. I'm not going to lie. I think it I think it gave me a breadcrumb
00:43:40
of learning about self-control and learning to like harness that. One of the things that I chose to do, and I'm
00:43:48
just going to take ownership for all of this, is that I masturbated a lot as a teenager. I did. It's disgusting.
00:43:56
Trigger warning if that grosses you out. I get it. It grosses me out sometimes, too.
00:44:03
I did that because the alternative was popping a boner left and right for any little thing. the wind would blow,
00:44:13
I'd have a boner. Doing that early in the day, kind of taking care of myself, so to speak, it
00:44:21
alleviated sometimes the embarrassment of that happening when I was with other people.
00:44:29
And so, even though I felt a lot of guilt and shame about it, right, I felt like I was on the spectrum, right? We
00:44:34
talked earlier about the 0 to 10. Even though I felt like I was sitting in there and I was doing something I
00:44:39
shouldn't have been doing, I like I chose to do that because I was like, I would rather that happened than me be
00:44:50
embarrassed when I'm with my friends and someone comment on it or just feel a
00:44:56
certain way or feel awkward because there I am. Like men can't hide it, right? we get a boner. It It's external,
00:45:07
right? Women get turned on. You guys can hide it a little bit more, right? So, I just like I chose to do that. I ch
00:45:19
that was a self-control thing for me. Now, of course, I had problems with pornography.
00:45:26
I had I had some issues with some of that. Uh but it kind of helped. Like in a weird way
00:45:34
it kind of helped because when I did get to the point where I no longer viewed masturbation as bad, right? And I no
00:45:42
longer viewed premarital sex as bad. Um I had learned that I also needed to have
00:45:49
self-control. I had learned that like sex is not going to happen all the time. Anytime the wind blows and I'm like
00:45:57
wanting it, right? It it's it's a partnered thing. It happens between two
00:46:01
consensual people. What I started to realize was that other guys I knew were not that way. They were pressuring women
00:46:11
into having sex. They were pressuring women into uh giving them hand jobs and [ __ ] and like getting them off. They
00:46:18
were like uncontrollable and they would like like I said, we would be at things and like it was just whatever. But they
00:46:26
were they wrote it off as like well that's just me. that's just guys being
00:46:32
guys and you know and then making gross comments about things that women would wear and
00:46:38
like all of these things and they would write it off as like that's just dudes
00:46:41
being dudes and that's like what we're supposed to do. It's like no it's not
00:46:44
[ __ ] what we're supposed to do. Like we are supposed to be gentlemen. We are
00:46:50
supposed to know the time and the place the appropriate measures to take in these circumstances. And
00:46:58
it just irks me when I see these things. And we're going to get into it even more because I mean the
00:47:06
next section of this book is like guys versus girls responsibilities. And like I mean literally he lists all these
00:47:14
things that are like the guy's responsibility, right? He's like, "Guys,
00:47:17
it's time we stood up to defend the honor and righteousness of our sisters. We need to stop acting like hunters
00:47:21
trying to catch girls and begin seeing ourselves as warriors standing guard over them. How do we do this? We must
00:47:26
first realize that girls don't struggle with the same temptations we struggle
00:47:29
with. We wrestle more with our sex drives while girls struggle more with their emotions. We can help guard their
00:47:35
hearts by being sincere and honest in our communication. We need to swear off flirtation and refuse to play games that
00:47:42
lead them on. We have to go out of our way to make sure nothing we say or do stirs up inappropriate feelings or
00:47:48
expectations. Few things I want to say on this one. Of course, I would argue it's a good thing
00:47:58
to be a man that's willing to stand up for a woman. I think most I'm not going to say everybody, but I
00:48:06
think most people would argue that that is a good thing. The thing that I disagree with is like down here it talks
00:48:14
about we wrestle more with sex drives while girls struggle more with their emotions. I don't I don't think that's
00:48:19
true. I think that we are at a point where men have been programmed for so long that our emotions are like negative
00:48:27
things and we shove them deep down inside. Like we don't cry, we don't show
00:48:32
weakness. Our emotions are weakness, right? We've been told that lie for centuries at this point and it's just
00:48:40
programmed into us that like emotions equal weak and and thus because women are emotional and women tend to be more
00:48:50
in touch with their emotions. They're the weaker species. I think it's the polar opposite. Like I
00:48:56
I genuinely am at a point in my life where I'm like I think it's the polar
00:48:59
opposite because like I will be burning up inside with emotions and unable to cry, unable to do things because I just
00:49:07
haven't gotten there yet in my therapy and and growing as a human being because
00:49:13
I struggle to do those things. I struggled to show emotion because it still registers in my brain as weakness.
00:49:20
So even though again mentally I can tell myself it's okay you can cry, it's okay
00:49:25
to be sad, it's okay to feel this emotion, there's a part of me that's like but
00:49:30
that's not manly that's like weakness kind of a thing. What he doesn't mention
00:49:36
in this section is dressing appropriately. He mentions nothing about clothes for the men. But
00:49:45
yet when we get to the girl section says girls you have an equally important role. Remember the weward woman we
00:49:51
discussed earlier. Your job is to keep your brothers from being led astray by her charms.
00:49:57
Please be aware of how easily your actions and glances can stir up lust in a guy's mind.
00:50:03
You must realize that guys most commonly struggle with our eyes. I think many girls are innocently unaware of the
00:50:10
difficulty of a guy that a guy has uh to remain pure when looking at a girl who is dressed immodestly.
00:50:18
Now, I don't want to dictate your wardrobe, but honestly speaking, I would be blessed if girls considered more than
00:50:25
fashion when shopping for clothes. Bro wants girls to dress like they're in the
00:50:29
1800s. Like, what the [ __ ] is wrong with you, Josh Harris? You're going to sit
00:50:34
here and you're going to be like, one, you're going to spew off [ __ ] about women being more emotional than
00:50:40
men when that's just programming that needs to be broken down. And then you're going to say that men
00:50:46
struggle more with their sex drive than women do. I've talked to enough girls at
00:50:49
this point about about their [ __ ] teenage years and being horny all the time and whatever. Like again, as men,
00:50:58
we can't hide it. We have an exterior appendage, right? As penis hvers, we have an exterior appendage, right? For
00:51:05
the vagina havers, you guys can hide it. Like you like but you put everything on the girls of
00:51:13
like you you know when you dress a certain way and you act a certain way and you flirt a certain way it makes
00:51:19
guys fall into temptation into lust. And yet the guys take no responsibility of this. I mean like
00:51:32
we're taught that like we have two options in those circumstances. We either give in to that emotion of like
00:51:41
lusting after a woman or we run like extremely far away. And I I just think that there's a weird I think that
00:51:49
there's a middle ground in there where it's learning to like accept the situ
00:51:55
that the situation isn't sexual. And that's not running away. It's not
00:51:59
removing yourself from the situation. It's a it's recognizing. It's a
00:52:02
recognition as men, as penis hammers, that like this is not a sexual situation and I'm not going to make it that. Okay,
00:52:12
women, you are allowed to wear what you want. Okay, you like dress how you want.
00:52:18
Like, just do it. He also doesn't talk about the fact that like as guys, we wear clothes that maybe turn girls on,
00:52:27
right? I could go on and on and on about this. I don't have the time to do that.
00:52:33
Okay, so we're going to move on. Chapter 7, last chapter. It's called a cleansed
00:52:38
past, the room, how Jesus can redeem your past. He kicks it off talking again in a
00:52:48
story. He talks about the room. This is where the title comes from. And he shares kind of
00:52:54
having a dream. And he wakes up in this room. And in this room, there's all these um kind of like mini file cabinets
00:53:00
for index cards. Okay. And uh and each one is labeled, right? And so there's
00:53:06
different things in there like uh like one says friends, and then the next one too, it says like friends I've betrayed,
00:53:11
and he's got other stuff that's like books I've read, lies I've told, comfort
00:53:15
I've given, yada yada yada. And then he gets to one that's called songs I've
00:53:19
listened to. And this is what he says. I realized that when you pull it out that
00:53:25
it would expand uh to to meet like however many cards were in there, right? And so uh the cards were packed so
00:53:34
tightly and yet after two to three yards I hadn't found the end of the file. I
00:53:39
shut it shamed not so much at the quality of music but more by the vast amount of time I knew that that file
00:53:45
represented. He feels shame for time spent listening to music because you know what that time could
00:53:53
have been spent preparing for marriage or could have been spent glorifying God in some way or could have been spent
00:54:00
like that's his argument as he gets down here. That's his argument is that what
00:54:06
if I what if I hadn't have wasted all of this time on all this other stuff on
00:54:11
living life, right? Living just living life, being a normal human being. What if I had not wasted all my time on these
00:54:17
things and instead I had just solely focused on God? I'm sorry, but what a boring life it's going to be if all you
00:54:24
ever do is read the Bible, pray to God. Like, I'm sorry. That's not exciting. We
00:54:30
are meant to do so much more than that. We set the intention of what we want our
00:54:34
life to be. We set value to things. We set intentions of the things we want to accomplish and do and whether we what
00:54:41
the impact is that we want to make in life and the messaging that we want to leave behind for the next generation of
00:54:47
people. And as I read this, it made me really upset because it reminded me so much of
00:54:58
my relationship with my grandfather and how, like I said, my grandfather worked for
00:55:04
the Graham organization. He had uh some seminary degrees or had gone to seminary
00:55:09
multiple times. He was a chaplain. He was never a pastor as far as I know, but he was a chaplain. And so when I
00:55:16
graduated high school and I went to college, I went to a Christian college, uh, but I was not studying religion. And
00:55:23
he would always tell me when I would talk to him, you should consider getting a minor in religion or you should just
00:55:29
double major. And then he's like, when you're done, you should go to Asbury
00:55:32
Seminary and get, you know, a full seminary degree. And I was like, that's not really what I want to do, Grandpa.
00:55:40
Like that's not intriguing to me. It's not interesting to me. And he's like,
00:55:44
"Yeah, but it's like a good thing to have in your back pocket so when you
00:55:47
like become a pastor or you, you know, whatever." And I was like, "I don't want
00:55:50
to be a pastor. I don't want to do that." So the value there was just not
00:55:55
there for me. Um but also one of the things that we disagreed on so so adamantly was the idea of what
00:56:04
evangelism looked like. And he would talk about going out and preaching to the people and all of these types of
00:56:12
things. and standing on stages and and shouting, you know, the words of God and whatever. And my view on it has always
00:56:19
been relationship based. It's always been about meeting people where they're
00:56:23
at, not pushing God down their throat. And this is still, I think, how I live my life, too, of just like you can't
00:56:32
always just start the relationship with like, well, what do you believe? Well, this is what I believe. Like, it takes a
00:56:38
while. You got to ask dumb questions. You got to ask the like, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite
00:56:42
movie? What's your favorite day of the week? Like, you got to get through those
00:56:46
questions, the dumbass questions, to get to know somebody. And and to get to have
00:56:51
a relationship with that person. That's why I think Josh's take on this is so
00:56:56
garbage, right? He's sitting there pulling out this box and it's all the
00:57:00
songs he's ever listened to and he's upset because he's like, I could have
00:57:02
spent this time doing something so much greater for God. What if those songs come up in having these conversations
00:57:09
with people, right? you meet somebody who is a music afficionado, right? And you can list off all these bands you've
00:57:15
listened to. You can list out all these things, you know, who produced and who did that and yada yada yada, right? All
00:57:21
of these things, right? You can have a conversation with people. And that's why
00:57:25
I'm so like I'm such a big advocate for like have the things that you're
00:57:30
passionate about and like learn them and learn them really well. And like uh I talk about this all the time within the
00:57:37
homeschooling world of just like my parents knew that I loved pirates and they built a whole curriculum around me
00:57:42
loving pirates and they pushed me to learn that. Right. When I got really into music, I learned a ton about music.
00:57:49
They allowed me to listen to like Eric Clapton and BB King and all these guys that they might not have agreed with
00:57:56
everything they did. I mean, are you kidding me? Eric Clapton has a song called Cocaine that's about doing
00:58:00
cocaine. Like I just I'm so sick and tired of this like thought process of like it's such a
00:58:08
waste of time to do anything outside of basically like study the Bible because like I'm at a point in my life
00:58:15
where like I think I view a lot of evangelism as somewhat of a pyramid scheme. Now I'm
00:58:25
saying evangelism and not Christianity because I think they can be separate things. Okay, they go hand in hand, but
00:58:31
I think they can be separate things. So I just want to say that I want to clarify that. So when I talk about
00:58:36
evangelism, I view it now more as a pyramid scheme a lot of times because I think of it as this person shares the
00:58:44
gospel with these people who get saved who then go share the gospel with these people who then it's a pyramid scheme.
00:58:50
It's like Lulao, right? It's like any of these knockoff pyramid scheme companies
00:58:55
where you know you you sell this product and you you get all these other people to start selling that product and you
00:59:02
get a commission off of it and then yada yada and it goes all the way down, right? And then it implodes because it's
00:59:06
not a system that works. Like I said, my idea of building relationship with people and now as someone who's not a
00:59:16
religious person, I would classify myself as more spiritual person. My view of building relationships
00:59:26
before entering into like the spiritual conversations has paid off so much more.
00:59:30
It allows me to be friends with people of all different denominations. It allows me to have conversations with
00:59:35
people of all kinds of different walks of life. and like to ask stupid questions, but to be knowledgeable in
00:59:42
things that like are interesting and whatever. And we can have relationships that don't revolve around religion. We
00:59:47
can have relationships that revolve around our interest in music, our interest in books, our interest in
00:59:51
movies, our interest in podcasting, like whatever it is. Like I could build relationship on those things.
01:00:00
And I think so much of what I saw growing up was building relationship on just Christianity being the thing. And I
01:00:09
don't know that that's enough of an interest to really build solid relationships on
01:00:15
any longer. So, oh my gosh, I think we made it. Let me see if I have any other notes. Any other
01:00:24
little tabies in here? No, that's it. We made it to part three. The next part is
01:00:30
going to be called building a new lifestyle. It's going to be a few more chapters. This has been interesting.
01:00:36
This doing this um series has been so interesting for me because I read this book and I read it a while ago
01:00:48
and I really sat with it and I I took notes while I read and then now it's been a reflecting on those notes and
01:00:54
figuring out what I really think and feel about those things. And boy oh boy, um, I don't know how
01:01:05
much got left in, but I definitely can get pretty heated about some of that stuff. I know that getting through the
01:01:12
rest of this is going to be tough, and that's part of why I kind of have split
01:01:16
them up a little bit where there's maybe a gap in between. So, if you don't like
01:01:20
this content and you're just like, I just want the interviews with people, it's okay. That that content is going to
01:01:26
be coming in between. um episodes kind of a uh a pallet cleanser, so to speak. But I have so much more to say about
01:01:36
this stupid book. And I know that this next section we're going to start getting
01:01:42
into, I think, more of the practical applications of how he views how he sees things like courtship starting to work
01:01:49
out and how relationships actually will get formed and things like that. So, it's going to be interesting. Um stay
01:01:54
tuned for that. Um, you know, if you're listening from way in the future and
01:01:58
it's already out, you know, just click over to that new episode. But, um, I appreciate you guys and I appreciate
01:02:05
you guys listening to me rant and rave about my experience reading this book and my experience within purity culture
01:02:13
and where I am today. And I know that I'm probably not, no, not probably. I know that I'm not a perfect person and I
01:02:22
know that I'm continuing to grow and that's something I want to remain committed to is growing and evolving and
01:02:28
changing and being better as time goes on. And that's why I make stuff like this because I want to talk about the
01:02:35
people that we used to be the people the person that I used to be um and how we can change and evolve and be better uh
01:02:43
and and be stronger. And that's not scary, right? It's a good thing. Um it's
01:02:48
a good thing to change. It's a good thing to like evolve and we can allow our thinking to change. We can allow our
01:02:55
ideas to change. We can allow our beliefs to change and it's okay. There's
01:02:59
nothing wrong with that. So, with that being said, one of the great things that came out of episode one of this series
01:03:07
was that a couple of you reached out to me. You sent me messages on whether it was a DM, whether it was an email and we
01:03:13
talked about things and I would love that again for this episode. So, if you have purity culture stories, if you've
01:03:20
got stuff to say about Josh Harris, if you've got stuff to talk about with church drama or just with homeschooling
01:03:28
drama or whatever you want to chat about, uh, I want I want to talk to you. So, couple ways you could do that. Shoot
01:03:35
me an email, [email protected]. Shoot me a DM. Uh, exhsclub on uh I'm on Tik Tok, threads,
01:03:44
Instagram. I think that's about it, but uh yeah, or go down in the show notes
01:03:49
and there's links to all that stuff as well. And um yeah, I want to I want to
01:03:53
hear from you. In addition, if you're listening to this, whatever platform, whether you're watching, whether you're
01:03:58
listening, whatever you're doing, do all the internet things that you pretty much
01:04:02
should already know how to do. Like this episode, leave it a review, leave a comment in the description, share it
01:04:07
with a friend, do what you got to do um to get this out to more people. I appreciate that. The show appreciates
01:04:14
that. It's so much bigger than I would have ever hoped. We're almost a year in.
01:04:18
I think we are a year at this point in to this podcast and uh it's been incredible. It's been an incredible
01:04:23
journey. I'm so stoked for what's coming down the line. Uh and we're just going
01:04:28
to keep going. We're going to keep sharing stories. We're going to keep doing stuff like this, hanging out,
01:04:33
getting to know each other, and uh yeah. All right. Till next time, this has been
01:04:37
Jake. Peace. [Music] [Laughter] [Music]