For years, I surrendered my time, my relationships, and my plans to the God who I trusted to take better care of them than I could. I responded to the altar call, I prayed for salvation and forgiveness, and I sincerely believed that I had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The countless late-night conversations about faith and hope and love? Regardless, the conclusion is clear: anyone who leaves the faith must never have been a Christian in the first place, and despite my endeavor to give the benefit of the doubt to everyone–including Christians–this argument always makes me deeply angry. But if the apostates were always just “whitewashed tombs,” hiding their depravity behind a veneer of obedience, then the true Christians can rest easy in the assurance of their salvation. If apostates suffer eternal damnation, then so, too, could any Christian who allows their faith to waver–a terrifying thought. If an ex-Christian’s faith was, at one point, genuine, then the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints–the idea that salvation is irreversible–comes into question. It is worth noting that this argument is often not made explicitly as a personal attack, but rather as a visceral response to the implications of apostasy. Gilbert repeatedly accuses Harris of “deceiving” his friends, his family, and his audience, lamenting the immorality of pretending to be Christian for the sake of the “income that will stream in from the book deals, interviews, and so forth.” they are dead, sleepers, and without any hope at all. They did and said Christian things and yet.

Referring to those who have “fallen away,” he writes, I’ll skip over Gilbert’s flippant mention of “the sexual anarchy that is homosexuality,” and the part where he implies that ex-Christians in general are adulterers and sexual predators, because there is another quote which seems more emblematic of the kind of reasoning I regularly encountered in the Church. I want to talk about the fact that a few years after having publicly apologized for his book, Harris has recently revealed that he is amicably divorcing his wife, and that he is in the midst of a “deconstruction” of his faith–and many Christians are not happy.Īmong many responses, both positive and negative, I am particularly struck by this article by Grayson Gilbert, an aspiring pastor.

I could write a whole article about purity culture–and one day I might–but today I want to talk about something a little different. Many of us who grew up in the Christian Church are very familiar with Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a 1997 book which codified many of the core tenets of modern purity culture and put them into the hands of impressionable teenagers.

I kissed christianity goodbye