Josh Harris, Marty Sampson: Why Some Christians Walk Away (…and why others, like Ken Ham, insist they have all the answers)

🔊 Listen to Post Over the past month, two rather prominent Evangelical Christians have publicly announced that they are walking away from Christianity. First there is Josh Harris. Back in 1997, a 21-year-old Harris wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye and became an instant celebrity within Evangelicalism. The book advocated courtship over dating, stressed sexual purity and abstinence before marriage, and became the focal point of the “purity culture” movement within Evangelicalism in the 1990s and into the 2000s. After a number of years as a pastor, Harris stepped down from his position, publicly said he regretted writing the book, apologized to all the people who had been hurt by the book, and then attended Regent College in Vancouver (where I actually attended in 1995-1997). And as of last month, he has announced that he and his wife are getting a divorce and that he doesn’t consider himself to be a Christian anymore.

The second person who has recently walked away from the Christian faith is Marty Sampson, a popular Hillsong songwriter. The gist of his reason for losing his faith was that he felt Christianity was largely just driven by emotions, that it was rather intellectually uncritical (i.e. science keeps disproving religious claims), and that it seems that Christians never really talk about the difficult and controversial issues.

Ken Ham Chimes In
Quite predictably, social media was a buzz with articles, post, tweets, and comments about why these two men left the faith: it was the fault of their churches who didn’t teach or guide them enough; they themselves had been seduced by secularism and postmodernism; they were just frauds, etc. Some Christians insisted that their story wasn’t over yet and maybe they’ll come back to the faith, and still other “ex-Evangelicals” used the news to express their own reasons for leaving Christianity, often in quite angry tones.

And, as to be expected, the YECist Ken Ham also took to social media to voice his opinion on the matter: these men, he said, left Christianity because Christian homes and churches today aren’t equipped to answer the skeptical questions of our day. And what are all those skeptical questions about? Science and evolution, of course! That’s why Ham built the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum! All the answers are there…in Genesis, hence the organization, Answers in Genesis. As Ham wrote on his blog, “These resources are available—many of them for free on our website!—if Sampson and others will just look.”

But sadly, neither Sampson nor Harris bothered to look at the Answers in Genesis resources. Instead, as Sampson apparently posted, he suggested looking to the likes of William Lane Craig, John Lennox, and Francis Collins—all of whom Ham says, “undermine the authority of God’s Word,” “compromise God’s Word in Genesis with millions of years” and are devoted “to getting churches to reject a literal Genesis and adopt evolution.” According to Ham, that’s why Sampson, in particular, lost his faith: he listened to those guys: “When you compromise God’s clear Word with man’s ideas about the past, you elevate man as the authority over God’s Word. And once you’ve opened the door to compromise, where do you stop?”

Ham then ended his post by telling his readers that Answers in Genesis was having a sale through August on all its resources—at least 20% on all books, DVDs, and other resources. The message is clear: don’t be like Sampson or Harris! Equip yourself with answers from Genesis and get 20% off.

My Take on Harris and Sampson
In all honesty, I have had hardly any connection to either Harris’ books or Sampson’s music. I remember back in 1997, during my first year as a full-time teacher at a small Evangelical high school in California, that a student brought Harris’ book to show me and told me it was just great. I read the back cover, skimmed the book, and quite frankly, wasn’t all that impressed. Even though I had never dated that much and I was trying to save myself for marriage, the premise of the book seemed to be a bit much and too over the top. Sure, I have always thought it was best to wait to only have sex with the person you commit yourself to in marriage, but no, I never was afraid that “dating” would cause me to slip up, have sex, ruin my life and have God hate me—or at least be really, really disappointed with me—for the rest of my life. And I certainly wasn’t so naïve to think that abstaining until marriage would guarantee a problem-free marriage.

In short, the book struck me as a rather silly and idealistic little thing that some silly and idealistic 21-year old wrote, and I never gave it a second thought. And honestly, I never had any clue just how popular that book became. It doesn’t surprise me that an idealistic 21-year old would strive for something like what he said in his book, but it really does surprise me that a major Christian publisher would promote it so much and basically hold up a 21-year old kid as some kind of wise sage of relationship and marriage.

As for Sampson, again, I never got into the whole Hillsong worship music. Frankly, I stopped listening to most Christian music around 1990. I still say that the Christian music scene in the 1980s was incredibly creative, insightful, and rooted in a lot of really good theology: Phil Keaggy, Bob Bennett, Amy Grant, Sweet Comfort Band, Petra, Keith Green, Daniel Amos…the list can go on. That music shaped my soul and informed my entire Christian outlook. It wasn’t anything like the elevator-music, sugar-coated fluff that passes for Christian music these days. I’m sorry, but I can tell a modern Christian worship song from a mile away: the very sound of it, and then predictable lyrics that have something to do with “thirsting for your water,” being “up on a mountain top,” or “wanting to feel your warm embrace”—essentially a bad Boy Band song with “Jesus” inserted for “baby.” It just is shallow, in my opinion. Much of it is to real music what Joel Osteen is to theological preaching: there’s just not a lot of depth to it.

To be clear, I’m not trying to disparage either one of them. I have no doubt they were sincere in what they were doing, but they just represented a brand of modern Christianity over the past 20 years that resembled nothing like the Christianity that I have discovered in my own life. Simply put, I just can’t relate to it.

So What Are We To Make of This?
Now, what I’ve noticed over this past month in reading so many takes on Harris and Sampson, primarily by “ex-Evangelicals” and Fundamentalists like Ken Ham, is that everyone is trying to make sense of their leaving the Christian faith by filtering it through their own, very particular lens. They read their own experiences and agendas into the “deconversion” of Harris and Sampson.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of it.

I’m not going to try to explain why either one left the faith—I don’t know them at all. Does Harris’ background of very conservative Fundamentalist Evangelicalism and its obsession with “being certain” about everything play into it? Probably. When you’re taught that the answers are always clear and you can have absolute certainty, and then you find out that’s not always the case, and that life is still confusing and hard—yeah, that’s going to throw you for a loop. And my gosh, if you find yourself a 21-year old being heralded as Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil, and St. Francis of Assisi rolled into one—I don’t know who wouldn’t eventually crack under that kind of pressure and those kinds of expectations. And if my whole job was to write “worship music” that really did just appeal to the emotions and really didn’t tackle anything difficult or hard—I’d probably fizzle out too.

Maybe both Harris and Sampson represent in their own ways two very big shortcomings in modern Western Christianity. But in my opinion, it seems short-sighted to try to pin the blame on their leaving the faith to “the church” or to Evangelicalism, or to science/evolution. Rather, I’ve come to realize that no matter who one is—whether one grew up an atheist, Buddhist, Mormon, trust-fund baby, drug-dealer, sex-addict, or in a Christian home/culture (i.e. everyone!)—the Good News of the Gospel requires repentance, and repentance is a turning away from your old way of life. And that includes people who “grew up Christian.” Now, if you were an unbeliever who became a Christian, the external signs are obviously going to be pretty obvious: your life is going to look considerably different.

But sometimes it’s tricky if you grew up going to church and grew up in a decidedly Christian subculture. You’re already living among all the trappings of what it looks like to be Christian: you already go to church, go to youth group, etc. What do you do if you’ve grown up with all that, but then you’re faced with the clear Gospel message that to follow Jesus, one must repent and “crucify the old man”? What does that look like if you’ve always grown up in a very Christian environment?

I remember growing up, both in church and at my Christian high school, there was just this unspoken assumption that said, “Well, we are obviously all Christians; we’ve already said the sinner’s prayer when we were 8 (or whenever), got baptized when we were 12 (or whenever), and now have all the answers right in this book (i.e. the Bible). So, are you doing all the right things and saying the right answers? You’d better—they’re clear, everything is clear. Don’t be a compromiser, here are the right answers you are supposed to give. It’s easy. Just stick to the script and everything will be okay.” Nobody purposely pushed that, mind you. It was just the feeling that permeated everything.

Now, even though I grew up in a Christian home, went to church every Sunday and Wednesday night, and went to a Christian high school (and in a sense have been a Christian my whole life), it wasn’t until the summer after my junior year in high school that, after reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity that Christianity really started to challenge me and make sense. But that was also the same time that realized I no longer felt at home in the particular Evangelical trappings of my church and school. Sting’s song, “Consider Me Gone” was my personal song for my senior year. When I came to Christ and made Christianity my own, a part of me died to, indeed repented of, the Evangelical Christian type culture in which I had grown up.

It wasn’t necessarily bad or evil, mind you. But it was still the “Old Man” culture that I had to crucify in myself. Others might come to the faith and be brought into that Evangelical culture, and that is where God wants them. Still others, after their faith becomes their own, might stay within that Evangelical culture, but with a very different mindset and perspective.

I guess my point is that every church and every denomination is going to have its share of short-comings and failures. And at some point, if one who grows up in church does, in fact, come to Christ, there still is going to have to be some kind of dying to and repentance of that person’s former way of life…even it has been wholly in a Christian culture. Maybe Harris and Sampson are in the process of just that. I don’t know. But what I fear is something I’ve seen with a number of other former Christians (often self-labeled “Ex-Evangelicals”) who have left the faith.

Now, perhaps one of the biggest failures of Evangelicalism is this “myth of certainty” that gets far too many well-meaning people to believe the lie that the answers are always easy and clear, and that if you just follow the rules, everything will be fine. There is very little room for expressing real doubt and questions. Of course, if there is no room for searching, then there will be no hope of finding Christ. Unfortunately, what happens too often is that when some who grew up in the Evangelical tradition see that’s not the case, when they see that not everything is clear and certain all the time, they turn around and announce with absolute certainty that they are embracing that doubt and uncertainty by rejecting the faith, and often become quite angry and bitter about it.

But the thing is, there is a major difference between accepting uncertainty and finding the faith and courage to doubt, on one hand, and to reject with certainty the Christian faith one formerly held, on the other hand. That isn’t accepting uncertainty at all. That is just clinging to a different manifestation of the same myth of certainty. It is just a display of the exact same mindset one hand when one was that kind of Christian who was certain about everything, who had all the answers, who sang the worship songs of Hillsong and read Josh Harris’ book.

That kind of mindset does need to be repented of. It does need to be crucified. And I hope Harris, Sampson, and a lot of other people who’ve grown up within modern Evangelicalism do that. Whether they stay within Evangelicalism or find a home in a different branch of Christianity depends on where the Holy Spirit leads them. But what I hope doesn’t happen is something I’ve seen happen too often these days: people rejecting one label (i.e. Evangelical, Christian) in favor of another (i.e. Ex-Evangelical), but never repenting of that that same mindset and myth of certainty that undergirds both labels all too often, and inspires people, be they Ken Ham or the most recent flavor of the month Ex-Evangelical, to rush to condemn anyone who is not like them.