Published at the height of the 1990s purity movement, which emphasized the spiritual, physical, and psychological importance of abstinence before marriage, I Kissed Dating Goodbye became a phenomenon in conservative Christian circles. It inspired both praise—from the likes of purity matriarch Elisabeth Elliot and Focus on the Family—and book-length rebuttals. Harris was already a popular speaker at conferences for Christian home-schoolers and had started his own magazine, but the book’s influence quickly outpaced its modest built-in audience—it has sold more than 1.2 million copies to date.
I Kissed Dating Goodbye made abstinence seem both romantic and noble. You weren’t just not having sex, you were adopting “a revolutionary pattern of living” that would make you both a better Christian and, someday, a better spouse. It was even better not to even kiss before you got to the altar, Harris suggested, and beware of “emotional hookups,” too. He shared scary and supposedly true stories like Ben and Lisa’s: Christians who dated seriously, had sex, eventually broke up, and years later still “expressed emotional trauma and guilt.”
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