Is Celibacy Just “The New Ex-Gay”? A “Gay and Catholic” Book Extra

I’ve heard this claim a few times–don’t feel like rounding up links, hope you will trust me!–and it’s an understandable concern. “Ex-gay” groups have lost a lot of credibility lately; the largest ex-gay ministry, Exodus International, shut its doors last year and its president issued an apology for the harm it had caused. So it’s natural to wonder whether the many problems of the ex-gay movement would go undercover, and reemerge in some new disguise. Meanwhile celibate lgbt Christians are coming “out of the closets and into the pews“–a movement which was simply unimaginable when I became Christian about 15 years ago. Are we just the new “magic bullet,” the new solution to (what many churches perceive as) the problem of gay people?

Here are some reasons to think that’s not an accurate assessment. I do think celibate lgbt Christians and those who support us will make a lot of our own mistakes–that’s the nature of social and religious movements–but I don’t think we’ll simply recapitulate past errors and harms with new slogans.

1. Many of us tried, and rejected, ex-gay ministries and reparative therapy. Lindsey and Sarah at A Queer Calling wrote about their experiences with ex-gay approaches here (with further comment here), and many celibate lgbt Christians have had similar experiences. Not everyone’s experiences with ex-gay ministry were harmful–I talked to one guy who gained a lot from his time with Exodus, and Jeremy Erickson writes about what he learned from his experiences with ex-gay ministry and why he ultimately rejected that model here and here–but in my experience even the celibate lgbt Christians who did gain from their time in ex-gay ministry are pretty candid about the harms others experienced. I never had any personal involvement with the ex-gay world (which is why I may not be the best person to write this post, but bear with me) but I did give my basic take on it many years ago here–not sure why the first paragraph is missing, but you should be able to follow it.

As an aside, I get that people bring the ways of thinking and acting that they learned in old communities to new ones. It’s always fun to point out that the neocons were still Marxists in their social-science hearts. But many celibate lgbt Christians were hurt pretty badly by their experiences with ex-gay ministry, and are trying hard to help others avoid what they suffered. So calling them “the new ex-gay” without some fairly careful qualifications seems tacky–a form of blaming the victim.

2. The ex-gay movement sought to fit gay people into a preexisting church culture centered around marriage as the universal vocation for everyone. By “healing” homosexuality the movement sought to saw off the square pegs’ edges so we could fit in the round holes provided.

By contrast, most celibate lgbt Christians’ writings emphasize the diversity of vocations and the need for church culture to change. My “Coming Out Christian” article talks about some of the ways openly gay, celibate Christians challenge straight people to change. Matt Jones wrote a great, impassioned post about this very thing, basically saying, “If we take the possibility of celibacy as an excuse for churches to stay the same, then we are ‘the new ex-gay.'” I’ve written about how celibacy isn’t the point–it’s not the “answer,” the “why don’t you just.” Vocation–finding ways to love, which does not require any change in your orientation at all–is the point. And I’ve said many times that both church culture and the broader culture need to change to support and honor vocations outside of marriage.

The pressure on everybody to get married was part of what made ex-gay ministries so often toxic, centered on “fixing” people so they could conform to the world around them. This is not the Gospel. It led people to deceive themselves and others about the true nature of their feelings; it created huge pressure to “succeed” at orientation change, and avoid the failure which continued same-sex attraction seemed to represent; it pushed people away from their own actual vocations and into somebody else’s, into a fantasy vocation for a person who never existed. In this respect the ex-gay movement was the product of its times: Devoted nonmarital love between adults has often been normal and publicly recognized, but today the only bonds between adults we can expect others to honor are marital bonds.

When marriage is understood as one vocation among others, not a pass-fail test of your spiritual maturity or psychological well-being, even gay/queer/same-sex attracted people entering heterosexual marriages will view their marriages differently. “Mixed-orientation marriage” becomes (I hope) so much easier to enter into honestly and sustain humbly when it is only one option among many–not the best for everyone, not the default.

There are other implications of this fundamental difference between the ex-gay movement and most of the work being done by celibate lgbt Christians. (And fellow travelers in mixed-orientation marriages! We still don’t have a good umbrella term for our community. I keep saying “celibate” but of course that doesn’t cover everyone either.) My impression is that the ex-gay movement focused its spirituality far too much on healing–which is not the only thing God does with our wounds. I’m super skeptical of the “homosexuality as wound” metaphor anyway, but some people do find it fruitful, and people like Melinda Selmys and Chris Damian have done a lot of good work drawing out the “disability as gift” spirituality which is just as much a part of Christianity as healing. Once you accept multiple vocations, it’s easier to explore multiple spiritualities, including spiritualities in which homosexuality or same-sex attraction can be understood as a gift. (Again, not a metaphor I really grok, but that’s sort of the point, my personal spirituality doesn’t have to be everyone’s.)

3. On a related note, maybe part of the reason there’s no catchy name for “my comrades” is that names imply narratives. We are all striving to conform our lives to the “master narrative” of the Gospel, if you like, but that still leaves room for enormous individual variation. The saints are weird! The saints are startlingly different from one another. So we’re trying to make room for many vocations, many ways of identifying and understanding one’s sexuality, many metaphors, many narratives.

One of the fascinating aspects of Melinda Selmys’s Sexual Authenticity: Further Reflections is the way she describes the pressure she felt to conform her story to a standardized “ex-gay” narrative. Wesley Hill also alludes to pressure to subscribe to a simplistic ex-gay narrative here.

All of our lives will be cruciform (I suspect a greater emphasis on suffering as imitation of Christ, which all Christians are called to regardless of our vocation, may be one additional difference between the thing I’m doing and the ex-gay movement, but to be honest I don’t have enough understanding of ex-gay approaches to make that claim) but crucifixes vary wildly in their depiction of Christ’s victorious suffering.

I hope that’s a useful start. As always, I welcome your comments!

ALSO–I think you may be able to buy my book as an e-book today! If you’re able to get a copy into your hot little digital paws, please let me know.
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