An article has been making the rounds in which Shannon Harris, ex-wife of 90’s purity culture icon Josh Harris, claims that complementarian theology caused her harm and trauma. In the late 1990s, purity culture emphasized abstaining from sex until marriage while often employing a lot of unfortunate fear and shaming tactics along the way. Fast forward to 2018. Josh Harris disavowed the book and apologized for the harm he says he caused with his writings. A year later, he announced he was leaving Christianity completely and ending his marriage to his wife, Shannon. That’s where our episode today picks up. Shannon is now speaking out about her own deconstruction and about the harm she says she suffered while living as a Christian wife in a complementarian church environment. In today’s episode, Alisa and Natasha talk about some of her claims and her understanding of complementarian theology that she believes is so harmful.

So much happened while we were on hiatus this summer! In today’s episode, Natasha and Alisa hash through all the stuff we missed. We talk about drag queens taking the #1 spot on Christian itunes, Oliver Anthony going viral with a modern day protest song, the Barbie movie, Taylor Swift Eras tour, and the strange Christianity today article that praised Barbie and Taylor Swift for bringing us all together while panning Oliver for dissing welfare.

Should Christian parents send their kids to public school in order to be a light and influence on their local campus? What do we do about people who claim that their new age practices or beliefs from other faiths have produced long term good changes in their lives? How do I have any right to tell someone to live more like a Christian when I am a sinner? And finally, Paul said in 1 Timothy 2:12 "And I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man, but to be in silence." How does that apply to two women co-hosting a podcast and speaking at a national conference? These are the questions we're going to tackle today in a rapid-fire manner.

Whether you’re a Christian, a secular humanist, a Muslim, a Mormon, or anything else, you almost certainly agree that love is one of the most important values for humans. In recent years, love has taken such pride of place in the American culture that it has ousted pretty much every other value. People have boiled everything in life down to a singular focus on love, and in a very practical sense they have made it their religion, effectively claiming that if everyone would just choose love, the world would leave behind all its current divisions. Today, Natasha and Alisa respond to several quotes and memes around the theme that love is all that matters—particularly because it’s a claim that people often use to oppose biblical doctrine, morality, and Christianity in general.

Jesus often clashed with members of a Jewish sect called the Pharisees, who were strong opponents of His ministry. The Pharisees strictly kept the law given to Moses centuries earlier and followed an elaborate system of oral tradition to help them do so. Today, many people have an inclination to label a Christian a “modern day Pharisee” when they don’t like what that person has to say. The Pharisees are trotted out for all kinds of claims that have nothing to do with the problems Jesus actually had with them. Natasha and Alisa talk about several of these myths to clarify what the problem actually was with the Pharisees and how that’s very different than how many people speak of them today.