Speaking out against Christian patriarchy
Review of "The Woman They Wanted" by Shannon Harris and "Rift" by Cait West.
“Imagine waiting until the minister says, ‘You may now kiss the bride,’ for your lips to meet your husband’s for the first time,” Carly said dreamily. We sat in a circle, cocooned in our sleeping bags on the church floor. Carly was the beautiful, vivacious older girl in our Pentecostal youth group, while I was a mousy pre-teen trying to wrap my mind around the looming and alluring horizon of dating. I knew I wanted romance, and I knew I wanted to avoid heartbreak at all costs. Carly told us about her dreams of purity and courtship, inspired by the new bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye by courtship guru Joshua Harris. A few weeks later I found in its pages the formula for the marriage I wanted.
Three years later, Harris introduced the evangelical world to Shannon, his bride, in his book Boy Meets Girl. I once again devoured his book and held it as a guideline for how to establish a healthy marriage without the baggage that dating would inevitably bring.
But the idealistic courtship and fledgling marriage was not all Harris’s books made them out to be. Years later, after more than a decade in ministry at a megachurch and towards the end of a degree at Regent College (Vancouver), Harris announced that he was no longer a Christian. A few months after that, he declared on social media that he and his wife were separating. Until this year, I had never heard her side of the story.
A suppressed pastor’s wife
In The Woman They Wanted, Shannon Harris describes her experience of converting to conservative evangelicalism, marrying a Christian celebrity and being slowly manipulated into the role of the quiet, submissive pastor’s wife.
While her adult life and identity largely revolve around her Christian celebrity husband, he surprisingly fades into the background of the story. Both Shannon and Joshua Harris are portrayed as puppets in the will of C.J. Mahaney, the charismatic megachurch pastor Josh works under. C.J. and Josh reflect a broader evangelical agenda that dehumanizes women and reduces them to servants of their husbands. C.J. and his wife, Carolyn, quickly become a mentoring couple to the Harrises and seem to almost function as puppet masters throughout the courtship, ensuring that the spokesperson for purity culture gets married young and quickly in order to model the values of the movement. Josh Harris continually lives in the shadow and influence of C.J., and C.J.’s wife and church matriarch guides Shannon to be the perfect godly helpmate, with increasingly high expectations. Shannon finally begins to subtly resist the overwhelming demands of her role by refusing to be pressured into joining the Five O’clock Club, an accountability group where members (mostly mothers with young children) commit to waking up before their families to spend time in personal devotions.
Shannon addresses some of the criticisms that she and Josh have received for eventually leaving their faith. She talks about dismissive statements such as the suggestion that if they don’t believe now they never really did – and it was all an act for selfish ambition. Shannon’s dedication to what she was convinced was God’s calling stands in stark contrast to her critics’ disparaging projection. The story we get is instead of people so imbedded in a worldview that when they began to untangle it, the only way forward was to cut it away completely. Christian readers would do better to hold this story as an opportunity for reflection and compassion than the easier option of contempt.
The book reads as therapeutic writing for Shannon, but also as a gift of solidarity and encouragement to others who have lived in this place of suppression. Her style is very accessible. She often ends chapters with a reflection on how she sees things now. However, she creates a relatable, courageous narrative of how she slowly broke free from a legalistic, misogynistic church culture and rediscovered her passions and independence.
While Shannon’s story at times feels a bit disjointed and scattered, it gives voice to a woman who was constantly silenced by a religious structure that saw her entire identity as revolving around her husband. It’s evident from the first page that she’s moved far from the place she was trapped in. She invites others to find the same freedom to believe their gifts and individuality are worth pursuing.
A trapped stay-at-home daughter
Cait West’s recent memoir, Rift, also tells the story of living under the oppression of a misogynistic Christian community. Both Shannon and Cait examine what it was like to be indoctrinated by the evangelical patriarchal ideology of the 80s and 90s, Shannon on the early cusp of this movement and Cait in its later stages. Both were shaped by fundamentalist movements which condemned mothers who worked outside of the home, prescribed home-schooling, outlined father-approved courtship as God’s design for romantic relationships and held that women be quiet and subservient. However, Shannon was caught up in the early iterations of the purity movement in the 90s while Cait was raised in it. While Shannon depicts the burden of being the trophy of Joshua Harris’s nascent model of courtship, Cait’s story reveals the ensuing impact of the teachings of Harris and others as espoused in theologies that romanticize and dogmatize traditional gender roles.
Cait West tells the story of growing up in a devout Christian family that grew increasingly fundamentalist when her father encountered Patriarch magazine and Vision Forum and bought into their teachings. Cait’s family withdraws into a small church community (which she later identifies as a cult), and she plays the role of the perfect daughter, following her father’s instructions and allowing him to oversee her courtships while she stays at home and serves her family into her early twenties. The ideals of Christian courtship fall apart when she actually falls in love and realizes the unreasonable and emotionally abusive expectations imposed by her father.
There are a remarkable number of similarities between these memoirs. Both examine the damaging effects of Christian patriarchy and the emotional manipulation exercised by male leaders who wield scripture to keep women quiet and submissive. One controlling dominating pastor looms large, empowered by his own self-righteousness and devotion to the cause of bringing the Church back in line with their oppressive, exclusionary and legalistic worldview. Both women fall into depression as they slowly realize their passions and dreams are collateral damage in a culture war they never chose to fight.
These memoirs have a choppy format of memory vignettes connected loosely in a chronological flow. The abrupt transitions create the sense of cognitive dissonance, of a self trying to paste together fragments in order to make sense of what she has been told to be. There is a lack of cohesive identity but a sense of orientation and completion grows as each narrator slowly breaks free from patriarchal dogma and finds herself, independent but whole. Escape is not a dramatic moment but a slow, gradual realization and reclaiming freedom through pulling away. While for Shannon, her marriage officially ties her to an oppressive religion, for Cait marriage is the vehicle which brings her to freedom from it.
In Rift, Cait West explains that “When I tell my story, some Christians will say, ‘That wasn’t really Christian. Your church wasn’t really Christian.’ It’s easier to call my story an anomaly than to face the reality that Christians have caused both great good and great harm.” She encourages readers to listen to these stories and to acknowledge harm done in the name of faith, in the name of God. While it can be difficult for Christians to read stories like Cait’s and Shannon’s, we can recognize their bravery in bearing witness to spiritual abuse.
Reading these two memoirs felt like meeting someone at a party who went to the same weird summer camp. I haven’t lived their experiences, but I recognize the insider language, the obscure references, the kinds of charismatic people who pull you into their vision of a better life based on an idealized past. I’ve known the same failed promises that if you follow the formula (a formula that doesn’t occur in scripture), you will get rewarded with the best marriage and love life you can imagine, only to find that the formula itself creates dysfunction and heartbreak. They articulate the ways that women and men are defined within church patriarchy, and then demonstrate the damage that comes from such limits. Thankfully, these stories can now help guide us as we work to repair the hurt that has been done, and seek to build Christian communities where women thrive and find freedom to be who God has made them to be.
Thank you for this writing. Perceptive, clear.