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    The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
    The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
    The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife

    Written by Shannon Harris

    Narrated by Shannon Harris

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    About this audiobook

    As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became "pastor's wife."



    The Woman They Wanted recounts Shannon's remarkable experience inside Big Church—where she was asked to live within a narrow definition of womanhood for almost two decades—and her subsequent journey out of that world and into a more authentic version of herself. Entering conservative American Christianity was like being drawn out to sea, she writes, inexorable and all consuming. Slowly, her worldview was narrowed, her motivations questioned, her behavior examined, until she had been whittled down to an idealized version of femininity envisioned as an extension of her husband and the church. However, when Sovereign Grace Ministries fell apart due to leadership conflicts and Shannon found herself outside church circles for the first time in years, she heard her intuition calling to her again. As she began to shake off the fog of depression and confusion, that voice grew louder. In honoring it, she awakened to the realities in which she had been trapped and found her truest self.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristianAudio.com
    Release dateOct 31, 2023
    ISBN9781545924556

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    Reviews for The Woman They Wanted

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    • 5/5
      I personally don't have the level of audacity and arrogance it takes to say a dedicated pastor's wife of 20 years wasn't a real Christian.

      This feels like an authentic autobiography of self-discovery and a postmortem on how evangelical cultural noise obfuscates and damages a sincere connection with one's own faith and family.
    • 1/5
      What a sad story of a woman who it appears never knew God though was very involved in church! That's the problem here. There's no mention of her relationship with the Lord, only her husband and church leaders. That's not Christianity, they'd missed it all along!
    • 5/5
      As one who grew up reading the Josh Harris books, I was incredibly eager to read The Woman They Wanted when it came out. I am so glad I did. Shannon writes with poise and shares her story unashamedly. Every woman should read this book!
    • 3/5
      This is a true story of and by a woman who married the Pastor of an Evangelical church and married into the surrender of personal identity and freedom that goes with it, She ultimately regained control over her life, but at a cost and after many years.The story is a powerful one, yet the writing was not powerful. Maybe it was because I've heard similar accounts and was not surprised to hear hers that I did not feel particularly moved. Maybe it was because I know the ugly details of the church's backstory that she does not recount. I don't know; but I was just not taken in by this book.
    • 4/5
      Simplistic, well written journey of the author in her search for authenticity while dealing with an oppressive environment of patriarchy and submission through her church. I read this in less than a day, found it very riveting. Sad that it is non-fiction, but I have seen those situations in many relationships. The author recounts giving up her real self to conform to the expectations of her society and culture. I will mention she was not raised this way and her mother sensed and warmed her that this was a bad situation before she made any commitment. I gave this the rating as I felt the last quarter didn't keep up with the pace of the first 3/4s. Plus I wanted to know more about her husband and family reaction as she progressed during this period. I felt thaty part ofher journey was missing. I think this would be a good read for any woman of any faith belief.
    • 4/5
      Shannon Harris used to be the wife of Josh Harris, author of the infamous pro-courtship book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Here she reveals all she went through to reestablish her own personhood after two decades immersed in the misogynistic teachings of the Calvinistic mega church Sovereign Grace Ministries. She tried to be “the woman they wanted,” but, in doing so, she lost her authentic self.This is not a dramatic story, and Harris doesn’t dish much dirt. She omits any discussion of her own involvement in promoting “purity culture” and her family’s affluent lifestyle, which was bought and paid for by the success of her husband’s harmful books. Rather, in short chapters that resemble blog posts, she preaches female empowerment as she proof-texts 1990s feminist gurus such as Christiane Northrup and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. At times the book reads more like a series of self-help prescriptions than a memoir. This isn’t a bad book, but it was not what I was expecting.
    • 5/5
      Well written memoir by Shannon Harris and her involvement in a very conservative evangelical church. Her husband was the pastor., I like her first sentence in the preface.. " I have learned the hard way that fear is a miserable cage. ".
    • 4/5
      Many of us who grew up in conservative evangelical churches bear stark memories of how a culture can entrap people instead of empowering them. One prime way is through gender roles, in a form of patriarchy where only men are allowed leadership roles and a public voice. Decades ago, Shannon Harris married the best-selling author Joshua Harris (I Kissed Dating Goodbye) and quickly became a silent, unpaid role of a pastor’s wife. In this memoir, she tells her story of enmeshment and eventual liberation from being a “good Christian wife.”Importantly, Shannon did not aspire to become a pastor’s wife as a dream, but the church culture thrust this archetype upon her. She had professionally aspired to music and theater, but soon after marrying Joshua, her only role became singing church music and serving his needs as a pastor. Every other part of her life felt “policed” by church members. Those of us who grew up in conservative evangelical churches know such hen-pecking behavior too well.Not until Joshua decided to step down from his senior pastor role to attend a seminary in Vancouver did Shannon begin to deconstruct the decade-plus of unhealthy relationships oppressing her and her family. She discusses how she slowly came to a more liberating view with a more generous social ethic. She has evolved to view her marriage as an ecclesiastical responsibility thrust upon her instead of a love-based relationship. Today, she is deeply spiritual – probably more so – but seems less formally religious. Her marriage ended. Conservative evangelical control has ceased. She has embraced feminist empowerment as a tool for progressive, genuine healing.An evangelical resurgence around the turn of the millennium caught a lot of Americans up in the fervor. Many can relate to Harris’ story of overcoming the patriarchal control from this subculture. Like much that conservative evangelicals began in that era, her husband Joshua Harris’ empire has crumbled down in contradictions and self-destruction. The newly liberated Shannon now seeks to build a career in the performing arts, a venture long stymied by an unpaid job of a “good Christian wife.”This book appeals to readers interested in conservative American evangelicalism, either personally or from curiosity. Shannon holds a close view to many of its faults. Readers looking for healing or inspiration can find hope in her finding a sense of self from the abyss of church control. The chapters are short, mostly 1-3 pages, with perhaps too many blank filler pages. That makes this book an exceptionally quick read. It adds to a growing list of works by people seeking to recover from emotional and personal damage done by this movement. Shannon Harris shows that it can be done even though its hard and lonely. In so doing, she adds her voice, long suppressed, to a very human chorus.
    • 5/5

      This was a great book. I really appreciated the author's insight and reflection on what was/had happened to her during her time in the church. It truly shows the psychological and emotional damage evangelical purity culture and the evangelical conservative Christian movement has on women and girls. The chapters are short, but compelling and I had a hard time putting it down. I'm passing it around to my coworkers who have watched "Shiny Happy People" on Prime Video and want to know more about purity culture and the Joshua Generation.

    • 4/5
      *Free e-book ARC made available by the publisher through Edelweiss Plus - thank you!*Shannon Harris, the ex-wife of former pastor and author Josh Harris who some evangelical folks of a certain age will remember as the author of [I Kissed Dating Goodbye], recounts how she became involved with an ultraconservative Christian church that had a very specific role for women, how she became disillusioned, and ultimately left it all behind.When I was scrolling through ARCs available through Edelweiss Plus, I immediately knew I wanted to read this. I was a teenager when I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out, and my homeschooled friends and I even studied it together as a book group (ironically, by the time we were finished, many of them were dating each other). So when I saw that Shannon was writing a memoir and that they had divorced, I admit, I was interested in finding out about what happened.In the prologue, she does clarify that while this was her experience at a specific church, she does not condemn Christianity in general. The church she attended had a very narrow view of what it means to be a woman, and when she became a pastor's wife, she was even more under a microscope than ever. Shannon is introspective and focuses a lot on her emotions and intuition, but does give some concrete examples of the ways in which being held to this standard of a stay-at-home wife and mother who gives up her dreams and helps her husband became ill-fitting and something needed to give. While neither of the two churches I've been a part of had been quite that brand of "submission," I could very much relate to the church culture expecting women to fit a specific identity and realizing that who you are didn't fit that mold.* I'd be curious to know what our book club some 15 years later would make of the follow up.