I\u2019ve heard this claim a few times\u2013don\u2019t feel like rounding up links, hope you will trust me!\u2013and it\u2019s an understandable concern. \u201cEx-gay\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cout of the closets and into the pews<\/a>\u201c\u2013a movement which was simply unimaginable when I became Christian about 15 years ago. Are we just the new \u201cmagic bullet,\u201d the new solution to (what many churches perceive as) the problem of gay people?<\/p>\n Here are some reasons to think that\u2019s not an accurate assessment. I do think celibate lgbt Christians and those who support us will make a lot of our own mistakes\u2013that\u2019s the nature of social and religious movements\u2013but I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll simply recapitulate past errors and harms with new slogans.<\/p>\n 1. Many of us tried, and rejected, ex-gay ministries and reparative therapy.<\/strong> Lindsey and Sarah at A Queer Calling wrote about their experiences with ex-gay approaches here<\/a> (with further comment here<\/a>), and many celibate lgbt Christians have had similar experiences<\/a>. Not everyone\u2019s experiences with ex-gay ministry were harmful\u2013I 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<\/a> and here<\/a>\u2013but 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<\/a>\u2013not sure why the first paragraph is missing, but you should be able to follow it.<\/p>\n As an aside, I get that people bring the ways of thinking and acting that they learned in old communities to new ones. It\u2019s 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 \u201cthe new ex-gay\u201d without some fairly careful qualifications seems tacky\u2013a form of blaming the victim.<\/p>\n 2. The ex-gay movement sought to fit gay people into a preexisting church culture centered around marriage as the universal vocation for everyone<\/strong>. By \u201chealing\u201d homosexuality the movement sought to saw off the square pegs\u2019 edges so we could fit in the round holes provided.<\/p>\n By contrast, most celibate lgbt Christians\u2019 writings emphasize the diversity of vocations and the need for church culture to change. My \u201cComing Out Christian<\/a>\u201d article talks about some of the ways openly gay, celibate Christians challenge straight<\/em> people to change. Matt Jones wrote a great, impassioned post<\/a> about this very thing, basically saying, \u201cIf we take the possibility of celibacy as an excuse for churches to stay the same, then we are<\/em> \u2018the new ex-gay.'\u201d I\u2019ve written about how celibacy isn\u2019t the point<\/a>\u2013it\u2019s not the \u201canswer,\u201d the \u201cwhy don\u2019t you just.\u201d Vocation\u2013finding ways to love, which does not require any change in your orientation at all\u2013is the point. And I\u2019ve said many times that both church culture and the broader culture need to change<\/a> to support and honor vocations outside of marriage.<\/p>\n The pressure on everybody to get married was part of what made ex-gay ministries so often toxic, centered on \u201cfixing\u201d 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 \u201csucceed\u201d 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\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cMixed-orientation marriage<\/a>\u201d becomes (I hope) so much easier to enter into honestly and sustain humbly when it is only one option among many\u2013not the best for everyone, not the default.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t have a good umbrella term for our community. I keep saying \u201ccelibate\u201d but of course that doesn\u2019t cover everyone either.) My impression is that the ex-gay movement focused its spirituality far too much on healing\u2013which is not the only thing God does with our wounds<\/a>. I\u2019m super skeptical of the \u201chomosexuality as wound\u201d metaphor anyway<\/a>, but some people do find it fruitful, and people like Melinda Selmys<\/a> and Chris Damian<\/a> have done a lot of good work drawing out the \u201cdisability as gift\u201d spirituality which is just as much a part of Christianity as healing. Once you accept multiple vocations, it\u2019s 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<\/a>, but that\u2019s sort of the point, my personal spirituality doesn\u2019t have to be everyone\u2019s.)<\/p>\n 3. On a related note, maybe part of the reason there\u2019s no catchy name for \u201cmy comrades\u201d is that names imply narratives. We are all striving to conform our lives to the \u201cmaster narrative\u201d of the Gospel, if you like, but that still leaves room for enormous individual variation. The saints are weird!<\/a> The saints are startlingly different from one another. So we\u2019re trying to make room for many vocations, many ways of identifying and understanding one\u2019s sexuality, many metaphors<\/a>, many narratives.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the fascinating aspects of Melinda Selmys\u2019s Sexual Authenticity: Further Reflections<\/em><\/a> is the way she describes the pressure she felt to conform her story to a standardized \u201cex-gay\u201d narrative. Wesley Hill also alludes to pressure to subscribe to a simplistic ex-gay narrative here<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of our lives will be cruciform (I suspect<\/em> 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\u2019m doing and the ex-gay movement, but to be honest I don\u2019t have enough understanding of ex-gay approaches to make that claim) but crucifixes<\/a> vary<\/a> wildly<\/a> in their depiction of Christ\u2019s victorious suffering.<\/p>\n I hope that\u2019s a useful start. As always, I welcome your comments!<\/p>\n ALSO\u2013I think you may be able to buy my book as an e-book today! If you\u2019re able to get a copy into your hot little digital paws, please let me know.
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