Biblical courtship assigned fathers authority over daughters’ sexuality until marriage

Evidence

A decade after McDowell’s book appeared, Josh Harris helped transform the purity message into something cool for the younger set. Harris was the son of pioneering Christian homeschoolers—his parents helped establish the Christian homeschooling movement, and his father’s 1988 book, The Christian Home School, was a Christian Booksellers Association bestseller. Harris got his start as a teenager publishing a magazine for fellow homeschoolers, and in 1997, at age twenty-one, he published his magnum opus, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Influenced by the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, Harris introduced a generation of young Christians to “biblical courtship,” the idea that fathers were charged with ensuring their daughters’ purity until their wedding day, at which point they handed unsullied daughters over to husbands who assumed the burden of protection, provision, and supervision. The book became the bible of the purity movement, selling more than one million copies. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 392

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘biblical courtship’ — a core term for understanding the purity movement and its patriarchal logic.
• SEED: The million-copy reach of I Kissed Dating Goodbye from a 21-year-old homeschooler is a strong data point for an essay on how the commercial purity economy built evangelical identity without pulpit theology.
• XREF: connects to: Biblical-era women were property bound to male kin and taboo-burdened; Western religion mirrors and reinforces the earthly father’s male authority over girls — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 701