In The Woman They Wanted, Shannon Harris (publishing under her married name, by which she is best known, despite her divorce), singer/songwriter and ex-wife of I Kissed Dating Goodbye author Joshua Harris, details her heartbreaking experience as a woman and wife of a church leader in a deeply patriarchal and highly controlling church. She painstakingly chronicles the spiritual abuse she underwent in the decades in which she was involved with the church, eventually leading to her complete alienation from Christianity and the mutual decision to part ways with her husband.
Harris’s memoir demonstrates, in a very concrete and visceral way, the destructive consequences of patriarchy in the church and how the elevation of one gender over the other is often bound up with the abuse of power. Throughout her Christian life, Harris was discipled to follow a deity who demanded her complete abdication of personhood—not even in service to God, but in service to her husband, or rather to her husband’s spiritual leaders. She was manipulated to cut off all relationships outside the church, give up her dreams, ignore her giftings and interests, and become little more than a shell of her former self. God’s desires were portrayed as the desires of her spiritual leadership, and far from being encouraged to develop a personal relationship with God, she and the other women in the church were actively discouraged from doing so. (In one particularly telling incident, several of the church’s women formed a book club to study systematic theology. The study group was quickly shut down by the male church leadership.)
Because Harris was never introduced to a freeing and life-giving God, it should come as no surprise that she eventually walks away from Christianity altogether, and readers hoping for a vindication of egalitarian theology will be disappointed on that front. Indeed, Harris seems relatively unaware that egalitarian interpretations of Scripture exist and shows little interest in exploring the Bible through that lens—undoubtedly because of the emotional baggage her experiences have left her to sift through. Even at the end of the book, the implication is that Harris is only beginning her healing process.
Because of this, The Woman They Wanted is not a book I would recommend to readers searching  for answers about their identity in Christ, for healing from patriarchal or cult-like theology, or for a healthier view of the church. However, this book serves as a warning and a challenge to Christian leaders who wish to avoid fostering abusive dynamics in their congregations. I would also recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the personal experiences of those—particularly women—who have undergone spiritual abuse or have chosen to walk away from the church. Finally, the book may serve as a solid conversation-starter for those wishing to examine the consequences of patriarchal theology when taken to its logical conclusions.
Related Resources
Book Review: All My Knotted-Up Life
Book Review: On Purpose: Understanding God’s Freedom for Women Through Scripture
Book Review: Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire
Book Review: Gender Roles and the People of God
The Consequences of Soft Complementarianism