The Woman They Wanted by Shannon Harris (book review)

I first met Shannon Harris in her husband Joshua’s book Boy Meets Girl. That was the sequel to his mega-bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye and told the story of how he and Shannon met, courted, and married. As a naive, hopeful teenager dreaming of my own happily ever, and immersed in the messages of evangelical purity culture, I devoured both of Josh’s books and dreamed of my own love story.

Fast forward twenty years, to the breakdown of my marriage and my growing realization that advice like Joshua’s contributed to the relationship mistakes I made as a young adult. As I began to unpack the harmful teachings that influenced me back then, I learned that both Joshua and Shannon were also deconstructing those ideas. Joshua has removed his books from publication and discusses his deconstruction in podcast interviews and a video series. Shannon shares her side of the story in The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife.

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The Woman They Wanted overview

Shannon’s autobiography is broken into seven parts: Beginnings, Illusions, The Good Woman, Undoings, Exodus, Missing Pieces, Braver Things. She shares the story of her childhood, growing up in a secular yet loving home, watching her parents divorce and chase their own dreams, living with her father and struggling through high school, being invited to church. She’s honest about the good and the bad and what drew her to church, where she met Joshua Harris.

With the clarity of hindsight, Shannon talks about the problems within the church, including the control exerted by the lead pastor CJ Mahaney and his wife Carolyn. Joshua was their protege and when he began dating Shannon, she was taken under their wings as well. Their entire courtship was supervised and orchestrated by CJ and Carolyn. Drawn by the opportunities at church to pursue her singing, and her honest love for Joshua, Shannon didn’t at first see the other problems–or how she was forced to shrink and become someone else.

When we don’t speak on our own behalf it is like inviting the world to relate to a false version of ourselves. If you pretend something doesn’t matter when actually it does you’re essentially lying to yourself and whomever you are relating to. Then people get used to this version of you who is lying and they come to expect this false you. Even you get used to this false you. And in this way you can get stuck in it, just like getting caught in a lie. You cannot lie to the world and expect to get truth back. But when we are true to ourselves it forces the world to reckon with the real us. People have to respond to the real us, which in turn gives us a better chance of seeing the real them.

After her marriage, Shannon throws herself into the life of a wife and mom. She homeschools their three children while also learning how to be a good cook and take care of their home. Shannon is mentored by Carolyn, but she’s aware of  how CJ and Carolyn “maintained a few degrees of separation between themselves and the common folk” of the church. They also “encouraged us to separate ourselves from the rest of the church in the same ways they did.”

Shannon was told to keep leadership issues private, not to share information with others, to be cautious in her friendships. Carolyn held everyone around her at arm’s length and expected Shannon to do the same, but Shannon “wanted deep, genuine friendships, and I pursued them and found them. And yet, because of Carolyn’s advice, I also unnecessarily isolated myself and my children in certain ways too.”

Just as Joshua and Shannon’s courtship was to be a model for the young adults of their church because of Joshua’s books, their marriage was also expected to be a model for other couples in their community. And yet the church leaders had very specific ideas about what marriage looked like:

The church asked the pastors’ wives to model the kind of marriages where the woman quietly recedes into the background while creating a little home haven that revolves around her husband. That first year of marriage I was like a ball of cookie dough placed in the center of a mold and baked in the oven. When the heat hit me, I just slowly melted down into the desired shape. When I hit the walls, I accepted I could go no further. I pressed down my dreams, wants, and needs in big and small ways. I put myself under my husband–I deferred to him. Instead of wanting things, I was content. Instead of doing things I wanted to do, I died to self. Instead of standing up for my preferences, I just tried not to have them.

Joshua and Shannon finally go looking outside the church for help, first for their ministry and then for their marriage. Shannon suffers from massive depression as she works to recover who she is and confronts what she has become under the control of the church. They move from the eastern US to Vancouver, Canada, for Joshua to go to school. While there, Shannon also pursues growth, education and singing again. Realizing they never really had that much in common, they go their separate ways.

My thoughts on The Woman They Wanted

Shannon’s book is deeply honest, a reflection of who she was, why she made the choices she did, what influenced those choices, and what she’s learned. While she calls out CJ and Carolyn for the harm they did, she does so in a factual way, without being vengeful and angry. She is gentle towards Joshua, focusing on her own growth and healing process without saying much about him. While her book is mostly chronological, at times it wanders, fluctuating like memories do and flitting from one thought to another.

The Woman They Wanted is a deep, heart-wrenching look at the way the Christian church has treated women. While we could point fingers at Shannon’s particular church, the teachings promoted there are unfortunately not isolated. These teachings exist wherever the Bible is taught, as the patriarchal values of past cultures have been passed on to every generation and reinforced in our modern society. Shannon’s book examines how these teachings may sound okay from the pulpit but are actually deeply harmful when applied to everyday life:

The language used to soften the sound of submission to a woman’s ears is clever. We were told women were equal to men in worth–only the roles were different. We were told women were honored and respected. Leaders were not to be leader lords but servant leaders. Husbands were taught they should “love their wives as their own bodies,” nourishing and cherishing them as they would for themselves. In a well-crafted sermon, this can almost sound fine.

The problem is that people live in the real world, where things are definitely not fine and the conservative evangelical answer to this problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Which begs the question: what happens when things are not fine? What happens when a woman traders her autonomy, her body, her intuition, her career, her dreams, her choices and preferences in return for protection, honoring and cherishing, but then on the other side of her marriage vows she isn’t actually protected, honored, or cherished? What does she do then?

Shannon experienced the harm of patriarchy and hierarchy in the church. Although she was a pastor’s wife, she was treated as less than the male pastors, who had all the authority in the church. On one occasion, a group of women were told they shouldn’t even study the Bible on their own. CJ Mahaney was like a king, above all others in the church, and refusing to accept the correction and advice he handed out to others. And while hierarchy in the church has its own problems, Shannon saw even more clearly how problematic that hierarchy was when applied to marriages.

Hierarchy creates order, and I get that this can be comforting and even helpful in certain situations like hospitals and the military. There is a time and place for leaders and followers. But not inside a person’s most intimate relationship, on which the bulk of a person’s happiness, mental health, and well-being rests. Not unless there’s a way out of worse. Because let’s think about worse for a second.

When I got married, I vowed to love for better or for worse, and my only thought of worse was cancer. Of course, I would stick it out for that worse. But what if worse is a husband who enjoys forcing his wife to do sex acts she doesn’t want to do? What if worse is the husband loses his job and decides it’s easier to become a drug addict than to reinvent himself? What if worse is beatings? Controlling food? Sexual assault? Abusive words? Emotional manipulation? Abandonment? Neglect? Abusing the kids? What if worse is constant criticism? Years of disinterest? This is the man who promised to protect and cherish? To love and honor and treat his wife’s body as his own?

These are hard questions, which too many churches of every denomination are ignoring or sweeping under the rug.

What Can We Learn from Shannon’s Story?

It’s not easy to confront deeply entrenched ideas, to realize that your life is built on harmful advice. Shannon is honest about how messy and difficult it was to deconstruct, to rethink, to confront her past choices. She shares how she begins moving towards the things that bring her joy and peace, returning to her singing and reaching out to friends who see her for who she is and support her growth. Finding her creative spark again was integral to her healing, which reminded me of Jennifer Fulwiler’s “blue flame.”

It is not surprising that a woman would go looking for herself in a place she naturally feels most connected to herself. A woman’s creativity is intimately connected to her vitality and flourishing. Creating something from our own hearts and hands is important to our sense of self-worth. It gives us opportunities to learn. It allows us to see ourselves in new ways and be seen and recognized by others. Every person needs that.

Leaving the church and her marriage allowed Shannon to more clearly see how she had been forced to stop being herself and simply play a role. She had tried for years to be the good Christian wife, the woman they wanted, and it nearly destroyed her. She asks, “What was the point of being alive if not to find things that spark our souls into aliveness? Wasn’t that why we were all here? Why had the church worked so hard to limit the interests and passions of women?”

We think of abuse as violence, as punching or yelling or physical force. The abuse Shannon endured from the church was not like that, and yet it was still harmful. Any person or organization who tries to control another, who sees a person only for the ways they are useful for the roles they play, is abusive. I don’t believe Joshua himself was abusive, but he was both a victim of the system and complicit in the abuse. Shannon doesn’t use the word abuse, but she does recognize how unhealthy this control on her life (and Joshua’s) was:

Once I was outside my relationship, it was much easier to see why it had been unhealthy for me. It’s hard to see relationships, families, churches clearly when you are in the middle of them. Any system that enables men to hold authority over women, and husbands over wives, is unreasonable and outdated. This practice robs a woman of her full personhood. Her right to self-ownership and self-government are at best undermined. The fullness of her identity is denied. And the potential for her further suffering is compounded by a culture that glorifies suffering.  What makes this view especially misleading in some churches is that any potential for harm is hidden. And before any talk of breaking free from this system cane take place, a woman has to see it as harmful in the first place.

Like The Well-Trained Wife and All the Scary Little Gods, The Woman They Wanted is a wake-up call for every Christian, every church, every denomination and parish and diocese. Shannon’s story should cause us to look carefully at what we have believed about woman’s roles, at how we treat women in every area of society, and at what we can do to change this dynamic and respect women as true equals.

Shannon says, “This experience has opened my eyes to the oppression that others have faced. It has given me compassion I didn’t have before. It has helped me see the connections between power, politics, and religion.” May her story open the eyes of many others to see the oppression around them and to stop it.

Where to Find Shannon Now

The Woman They Wanted is available on Amazon or at your local bookstore or library. She is now pursuing a career in performing arts and has released her first album under the name Shannon Bonne. Visit her website or check out her music on YouTube or your favourite music streaming service.