An endorsement for Joshua Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Multnomah, 1997) has come from an unlikely source: Donna Freitas, a feminist and liberal professor of religion at Boston University.

In the August issue of Christianity Today, Freitas is interviewed in the story “Zipping It,” which spotlights the rising interest in modesty and relational caution at one liberal college. Students, Freitas says, are growing disillusioned by the cultural status quo and being drawn towards modesty and sexual purity.
 
Near the end of the interview, Freitas discusses her course, her textbooks, and the surprising effect it all is having on her students. “Almost all the students were as liberal as liberal can get,” she said. But after reading a book on modesty, she said, her class began talking of modesty positively, as a virtue, and began to discern the vulgarity of the campus. She says, “I actually had students who for their final project proposed a modesty club. I’m sitting here thinking, This is Boston University.”

She continues,

At different points I have received flack from scholars for the in-class resources I use. You’re not supposed to teach Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye [and others] because they’re not “ivory tower material”—except that it’s in these books where robust conversations are happening about the things students care about. I’m a feminist and a liberal, but this is something beyond ideology. It’s not a Left or Right issue. It’s about responding to young people who are struggling. It’s a mistake of many people to tense up about ideology in the middle of this kind of conversation. Part of my job is to figure out what professors do about the issues students are struggling with. They want modesty. And we can give them rich resources on modesty. So why don’t we then?

To learn Josh’s book is included in the college curriculum at Boston University is shocking and thrilling! But these words also reveal that students at a liberal college are questioning the cultural and campus standards of relationships and sexuality. As I reflect on my conversion in 1972, I can relate to their disillusionment with the status quo of dating and relationships.

Upon my conversion from the drug culture and into the church, I found myself perplexed at the apparent absence of the church’s critique of cultural dating standards and an absence of a biblical alternative. From my limited perspective, the evangelical church seemed to leave unchallenged numerous assumptions about dating and its importance before marriage, failing to sufficiently recognize the temptations to selfishness and sexual sin present in the culture of dating.

At the inception of Covenant Life Church in 1977, we sought to teach and apply a biblical alternative to the sinfully selfish and lustful approach to relationships that characterized many of us prior to conversion. We sought to preserve sexual purity, to apply the gospel message, to teach the “one anothers” of Scripture in light of relationships between men and women, and to protect and preserve the emotions of a woman for her future husband and of a man for his future wife.

So from the beginning of the church we were responding to this seeming widespread acceptance of dating by the evangelical church and seeking to build an alternative in theology and practice. We were young (I was in my early 20s), zealous, and no doubt arrogant as well, in our reaction to what we observed in evangelicalism at the time. Having previously come from the drug culture of the world, and having sinned and felt the consequences of that sin, we desired something relationally distinctive, informed by Scripture, not culture.

Little did I anticipate that, decades later, Joshua Harris would make his way to Covenant Life Church having just finished his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Joshua’s book was one of the first in print to challenge these cultural assumptions and provide a biblical alternative (along with Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity). And after having written the book, Josh transitioned into a church that had already modeled the content of his book for the duration of his own lifespan. It was a sweet providence that God would place him in a church in wholehearted agreement with the teaching of his book.

When Joshua wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I told him he was writing a conversation-defining book for the church. Years later, it remains that very thing. It has now for several years defined the discussion for those who agree with the book, and for those who disagree, within the church. It will continue to shape the substantive discussions within the church (provided the discussions do not drift into unnecessary debates over the use of the word “dating” or whether one agrees with all the practices Josh recommends). May this book continue provoking discussions within the church about gospel-centered relationships and what Scripture reveals as the wisdom of God for Christian relationships prior to marriage.

But little did I anticipate how this book would affect a liberal classroom, transcending liberal/conservative animosity, and provoking students to challenge cultural and college campus assumptions about relationships. Perhaps they—like those of us saved from the drug culture many years ago—have felt the sting of the cultural dating status quo, the effect of sin, and are looking for something different.

May the church and its pastors take note of a Boston University classroom and be freshly challenged to start substantive discussions, and to challenge the cultural assumptions of dating relationships and sexuality prior to marriage.