Shannon Harris, The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023)
In 1997, twenty-three-year-old Joshua Harris’s ideas about dating and courtship became a national conversation with the release of his bestseller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He argued that Christians should spurn the secular institution of dating, which operated as “a training ground for divorce,” and should instead practice parentally supervised courtship in anticipation of marriage. The book sold over one million copies and rocketed Harris to evangelical celebrity. Joshua Harris was recruited as the protege of megachurch pastor CJ Mahaney and later took over Mahaney’s flagship congregation, Covenant Life Church. Twenty years later, after a listening tour focused on the harmful effects of his ideology, Harris recanted his books and his promotion of purity culture in a documentary called “I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” He stepped down from the pastorate and, in July 2019, announced on Instagram his departure from Christian orthodoxy. Later that month, he and his wife Shannon broke the news of their separation. Finally, it’s Shannon’s turn to speak. In August 2023, Broadleaf Books will publish Shannon Harris’s memoir, The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife.
The Harrises aren’t the only former believers to renegotiate their relationship to evangelicalism, or to write about it. A fresh wave of “exvangelical” memoirs is headed toward bookshelves: Jeanna Kadlec’s Heretic: A Memoir was published by HarperCollins in October 2022; Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, by Anna Gazmarian, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in March 2024; and former fundamentalist Tia Levings’s memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, will be released by St. Martin’s Press in 2024. Virgie Townsend explores similar themes in her 2022 short story chapbook, Because We Were Christian Girls (from Black Lawrence Press).
Thanks to Harris’s long tenure as a pastor’s wife in one of America’s most influential megachurches, The Woman They Wanted is uniquely situated to speak to issues of power and gendered expectations within evangelicalism. For nearly two decades, Harris lived as a mannequin on display in conservative Christianity’s window. She was advertised to evangelical girls like me as the ideal, the apex of what we could aspire to be. When I received a review copy of The Woman They Wanted, I screamed with excitement. I’d known about Harris for so long, but always secondhand – her book would be the first time I heard from her directly, without the filter of her husband or the church.
The book upended my expectations. In one sense, this is appropriate: Shannon Harris is done giving people exactly the version of herself they want to see. But on the other hand, her story is cluttered by an assortment of clichés and platitudes, language she grabs out of the closet of collective consciousness and is trying on for size. “Love should feel like love,” Harris asserts. “If it feels like something less, then it probably is.”
After spending so much time separated from her own voice, perspective, and autonomy, Harris struggles to shape a narrative out of her time submerged in evangelicalism. Harris’s project is to explore how the church hijacks women’s identities, intuition, and agency. However, The Woman They Wanted misses its mark, because Harris renders her story primarily in vague abstractions.
Both the diminishment Harris faced inside the church and the lessons she’s learned on her way out are summarized and presented in canned, unoriginal language. “To choose to leave the box—the tradition of church or family—is to do something brave,” Harris states. At first, I was flabbergasted by the generic quality of Harris’s prose. The few scenes included in the book demonstrate that Harris is a thoughtful and creative individual coming to terms with a protracted experience of self-alienation. Why, I wondered, was she still so reliant on the words of others—incorporating massive block quotes without interpretation—and still so comfortable with overstatements and pat conclusions? Then I realized: this style of writing is a direct result of her evangelical conditioning. Harris’s tendency to eschew specifics in favor of toothless, “big-picture” illustrations reveals a distinctly evangelical impulse, found in sermons and devotionals alike. She models a pastor’s eager assumption of the first person plural (“We betray ourselves because we believe we are getting something good in exchange,” Harris asserts) and projects her realizations onto the audience. She jettisons nuance in favor of oversimplifications (“My mother has never been wrong,” she insists). Harris spent twenty years ingesting these patterns of evangelical communication. It’s only logical that in trying to purge them from her system, she regurgitates.
My reaction to the book now turns on this recognition. Even as Harris claims to have separated from her former faith, she continues to perform the communication patterns she learned there. In this way, the book enacts its own point: this is what it’s like to have your voice distorted by years of conditioning. The Woman They Wanted serves as a multidimensional study of thwarted potential. In its pages, the reader encounters a woman whose personal development, self-realization, and critical thinking have all been stunted by years of restriction.
During her marriage, Harris was expected to not work outside the home, to raise and homeschool their three kids, and to host, support—and occasionally chasten—other women in the congregation. The explicit nature of these limitations may be shocking to some readers, but all too familiar to others. “Men made things happen,” Harris says. “And women? Well, women waited.” These expectations emerged from a theological position called complementarianism, which states that men and women have intrinsically different but “complementary” roles. The church where I grew up unironically described men and women as “separate but equal.” “Men were called to the work and women were called to help with the work,” Harris clarifies. Complementarianism masquerades as a benign power structure, but it functions to sever women from their essential personhood. If a woman is given nothing to do for twenty years but to be content making mint pies and sewing gingham curtains, of course her other capacities will atrophy.
“There are traps that will keep a woman from becoming herself,” she writes, but fails to probe what those traps are. Harris repeatedly makes blanket assertions on which she refuses to expound. As a result of her sparing specificity, the narrative contains significant unaddressed gaps. While the reader waits for Harris to explain how she became enamored with Covenant Life Church after a largely areligious childhood, she furnishes a non sequitur. Mere pages after declaring that she “didn’t believe in God and […] never would,” Harris suddenly joins the church and starts working there, deferring her plans to move to Nashville and pursue music. “When I go in, I go all in,” Harris tells the reader, with characteristic banality. To prove her point, she says that during the course of writing the book, she procrastinated by taking up perfumery. This might well explain something, but maybe not what Harris intended.
This evasion of critical details permeates the entire book. “It’s easy now to see the precise moments I should have trusted my gut,” Harris says. It might be easy for her, but the reader can only see what Harris tells them, and the stories Harris shares seem capricious and random. Is the story devoid of specifics because Harris can’t provide them, or she doesn’t want to? In one offhand illustration, Harris recounts slipping her finger into a Bible, seeking divine direction in the form of a verse. “I think it was Jeremiah 29:11,” she recalls, “but I can’t tell you for sure because I threw that Bible away a few years ago along with all of my church books and a banker’s box of sermon notes.” For a second, the reader glimpses the excruciating pain of leaving behind a community and belief system that has structured one’s life for decades—the immeasurable loss that lies at the heart of the story.
Alternatively, perhaps Harris avoids giving details because she wants to protect others. Covenant Life Church, where Joshua Harris pastored, was implicated in a massive sexual abuse cover up. While the scandal occurred under previous leadership, its repercussions led to Joshua Harris’s resignation and ultimately contributed to his decision to leave ministry. (He spoke about this in an interview with Mike Cosper on a bonus episode of the podcast, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.”) Maybe Harris is still acting out an internalized desire to please others and therefore avoids writing scenes that would make someone look bad. Whether Harris is working to protect actual victims with her evasiveness or to avoid the sensationalism and vulnerability of revealing intimate details, she keeps the reader in the atrium of her four-thousand-square-foot suburban colonial home: an impeccably maintained, curated stage masquerading as a personal space.
As a woman who grew up in the church, I’ve spent years weeding out my own evangelical conditioning. I suspect that after decades of being submerged within a high-control, coercive religious context, Harris is still unearthing herself. She’s building up the courage and self-assurance to unleash the funny, brilliant, scathing voice that peeks out of certain corners in The Woman They Wanted. Even with its limitations, the book documents the halting process of disentangling oneself from internalized behaviors. I’m grateful for Harris’s contribution to the canon of post-Christian literature, and I can’t wait to see what she writes when she’s a little further removed.
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McKenzie Watson-Fore is an emerging writer and established liquor store cashier based in Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Pacific University, and her work has been featured in Glasstire and is forthcoming in CALYX. She can usually be found drinking tea on her back porch.
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