Teen pregnancy rates peaked in the US in 1991 and the issue continued to be the subject of public health promotion. Harris’ book, published in 1997, with its marketable title landed on fertile ground previously tilled by Christian sexual abstinence and purity campaigns, which Harris suggests influenced his writing. Yet there’s a bigger issue at stake, outside Kissing Dating Goodbye, or Surviving Kissing Dating Goodbye. It’s this: The Evangelical subculture is not immune to another such episode, because there is little rigorous theological evaluation or accountability for popular products, and personalities. The documentary, I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which was released at, follows Harris on a listening tour as he engages readers, authors, and other observers regarding the impact of his early book. Twenty years later, the author, Joshua Harris, who was 21 when he wrote the book, would come to apologize for the fallout from the book. As the youth pastor, I was left to unravel the social and spiritual fallout. The book purportedly espoused a Biblically principled model of courtship but it strained relations within our group between those who dated and those who (newly) did not. It was the late 1990s when the bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye arrived in our church with teenage missionary zeal, imported by some youth who had attended a summer teen camp together.
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