Abstract
This chapter explores the phenomenon of Christian courtship; its history, discourse, and key players; and its relationship to homeschooling, Christian Reconstructionism, and to what has become known as purity culture. Courtship’s emphasis on parental authority makes it distinct from purity culture, which has been waning since the early 2000s. Courtship media play a critical role in the process, and while the first people to write about its principles were homeschool fathers and pastors, the most successful authors have been younger believers who wrote about their own courtship stories.
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Notes
- 1.
Portions of this introduction originally appeared in a Religious Dispatches article (Shively 2019).
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Shively, E.L. (2020). Kissing Dating Goodbye. In: Patriarchal Lineages in 21st-Century Christian Courtship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49622-7_2
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