Exploring the False Hope of the Ex-Gay Promise
From the blog series Redefining "Change:" Hope for Sexual Minorities
Many gay and same-sex-attracted Christians have been negatively impacted by the ex-gay movement, particularly the slogan associated with it, “Change is Possible.” This blog series will explore the power of the ex-gay promise and the false hope it offered while also exploring ways that the gospel offers true hope for a new life of holiness and freedom for sexual minorities.
“Change” happens all the time. Seasons change. Landscapes change. People can even change, although maybe not always in the ways we would like. We change our minds, our moods change, we age… change follows us everywhere we go.
Perhaps most importantly, as Christians, we believe that one way people change is through the indwelling presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Growth in holiness is a sign of day-by-day faithfulness to Jesus, which is another way of saying that following Jesus necessarily involves change. (2 Cor. 3:18; Titus 2:11–12)
Sadly, many gay and same-sex-attracted Christians have a complicated relationship with the word “change” because of the ex-gay movement. For many, many years, the phrase “change is possible” was the official mantra of the ex-gay movement. Ex-gay leaders weren’t referring to something relatively meaningless, like changing the cereal we like to eat for breakfast. They were referring to the aching hearts’ desire of many gay kids every night: to wake up the next day and be straight… be normal. The ex-gay movement was centered on the assumption that homosexual people could and must become heterosexual. Not only that, but the possibility of changing from gay to straight was held up as a normative expectation, especially for Christians. Throughout the rest of this blog series, we will refer to this expectation that orientation change was normative as the ex-gay promise.
To help us imagine the power of the ex-gay promise, let’s look at three imaginary scenarios that capture how different people would have been impacted by it during the peak of the ex-gay movement (mid-90s through 2008). After recounting these three scenarios, we’ll examine how each illustrates the failures of the ex-gay promise. Finally, to be as historically accurate as possible, I will use terminology these Christians would have used during that time frame instead of following contemporary language conventions.
Rob and Lisa, parents of a gay kid
Rob and Lisa are the parents of 13-year-old Derek, their only child, with a vibrant faith in Jesus. They recently found a stash of gay porn hidden in Derek’s closet and were both devastated and confused. Rob and Lisa are evangelical Christians who had grown up believing that Romans 1 taught that true followers of Christ could not also be homosexuals. As they sought answers, they discovered the ex-gay movement and the developmental theory of homosexuality that had become dominant within it. (This “developmental theory” is a quasi-psychological explanation of how a homosexual orientation develops in individuals that was widely referred to in ex-gay ministries. Scientific support for the theory is virtually nonexistent in secular and Christian psychological communities.)
As Rob and Lisa dove deeper and deeper into the ex-gay world, seeking developmental causes for “why” Derek was gay, Rob realized that his workaholic tendencies had resulted in chronic absences during key periods of Derek’s childhood. During these periods of time, Lisa assumed most of Derek's parental duties and roles. As Rob and Lisa realized this, they were soon led to the belief that the reason Derek had become a homosexual was because Rob had been a father who was distant and emotionally unavailable, and Lisa had been a mother whose dominating presence kept the household running. Both of these dysfunctional relational dynamics resulted in a lack of identification with his same-gender parent and an over-identification with his opposite-gender parent.
Rob and Lisa were devastated when they realized the impact that their parenting had had on their son and immediately began efforts to rectify their errors. Rob, who had always enjoyed sports, began to insist that he teach Derek how to throw a football to forge a better father-son bond. Meanwhile, Lisa began withdrawing from Derek out of the fear that she had been overprotective of her son.
They hoped that these efforts would heal the psychological wounds that they had caused Derek and that this would lead to heterosexuality slowly but eventually replacing homosexuality in Derek’s life.
Deborah, a political culture warrior
Deborah was a political volunteer from South Carolina who had a gay uncle who died from AIDS in the mid-1980s. She didn’t know how exactly people became homosexual, so she regarded all gay people with a degree of distrust, almost as though she might become homosexual herself if she got too close to one. Deborah believed that the AIDS epidemic was God’s judgment on gay people and that society would be healthier without them in it. Needless to say, Deborah knew what side she took in current debates about whether gay couples should be allowed to marry.
Deborah was intrigued when she first discovered the ex-gay movement. She soon realized that her former beliefs about the AIDS epidemic had been unkind towards gay people and that a different solution to the problem of being gay was possible. As an evangelical Christian, Deborah also began to believe that her volunteer work in politics provided her with a new opportunity to be a witness to the gospel. She now believed that God could do a healing work in the lives of homosexuals who renounced their homosexuality. Deborah began to oppose gay marriage with even more fervor, believing that homosexuals instead needed to hear the good news that they didn’t have to be gay. This newly discovered passion about being a public witness distracted her from two realities that she could barely even admit to herself. First, she still felt a visceral discomfort around gay people who weren’t trying to renounce their homosexuality. And second, she had spent her entire life refusing to acknowledge her own bisexuality out of fear and shame.
Soon, Deborah's political activism drew the attention of national lobbyists who saw an opportunity. Unlike Deborah, these lobbyists did know that evangelical Christians often harbored vague disdain towards the LGBTQ+ community. They knew this, and they saw an opportunity. Before she knew it, Deborah was mobilizing entire communities nationwide to vote for state marriage amendments. Evangelicals spent millions fighting gay people in courtrooms and on the ballot, seemingly unaware that gay people also have basic dignities and needs that Jesus wants his Church to meet. Meanwhile, Deborah was actively working against any possibility of achieving greater self-integration in her own life.
Brian, a closeted gay Christian
Brian was 11 years old when he first admitted to himself that he was a homosexual. He had always felt vaguely different from other boys his age while also enduring seemingly endless taunts from classmates calling him a faggot. His grandfather died when Brian was in sixth grade, and halfway through the funeral, he realized that he had been staring at the jawline of one of his older male cousins he hadn't seen in five years. At that moment, he realized that his classmates had all been right. He was a homosexual.
This new awareness crushed Brian. Thankfully, no 11-year-old is capable of understanding the full impact of the reality that Brian had just accepted. But what started as a paralyzing fear of the unknown eventually developed into a visceral disgust, loathing towards himself, and a burning desire to do whatever he could to avoid being discovered. Brian had attended church with his family his entire life; he knew that the Christians there only viewed homosexuals as depraved perverts whose mere existence was a sign of God's wrath towards rebellious sinners.
As Brian entered his teenage years, his family began attending a different church with a larger youth group. When Brian overheard one of the youth workers talking about a gay family member, something about the youth worker's tone stood out to him. Instead of being laced with the usual disgust and contempt he had come to expect from Christians, Brian could sense that the youth worker genuinely loved his family member. Eventually, Brian mustered up the courage to confide in the youth worker, and a new friendship began. Soon after this, Brian learned about the ex-gay movement and began to live out his faith in a new way. Instead of resigning himself to the fact that he would always have to live with the shame and self-loathing of being a homosexual, he would instead trust that God would remake him into the heterosexual that he had already been created to be.
Stepping Back: A Personal Testimony
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I can relate to many of these stories. The shame of feeling different from other boys in my life. The fear of what people would think if they somehow found out. The ache that I felt when prayers to wake up "normal" went unanswered. Each of these was a daily experience for me as a teenager, so you can imagine the relief I felt when it seemed there was an explanation for why my sexuality wasn't like everyone else's.
Around this time, however, my faith began to deepen in ways that it hadn't before. I started to confide in others about my orientation. My prayer life developed to the point where I was praying about other things besides my sexuality. I experienced a sense of meaning and purpose in exercising leadership in various ministry contexts. I even began dating a good friend, who eventually became my wife.
As I look back over the past 20 years, it's become more apparent to me how sexuality can ebb and flow for a variety of reasons, and the various ways that I made sense of my orientation in these different seasons reflect this ebb and flow. In the early years of marriage, for example, the fact that I was gay played a relatively small role in my daily life. I had come out to my spouse while we were dating, but once we were married, I just didn't think about it very often. In subsequent seasons, however, I had to walk through a fresh awareness of shame after realizing that I was still gay. I hadn't consciously believed the ex-gay promise, but I had nonetheless been lured by the false hope that it had offered.
In similar ways, the ex-gay promise was alluring to each of the individuals in these scenarios, but for different reasons. For Rob and Lisa, the ex-gay promise came with an explanation for how their son Derek had become gay and provided them with an action plan they could follow so their son would no longer be gay. For Deborah, the ex-gay promise ultimately provided one more reason why her opposition to gay marriage was warranted. And for Brian, the ex-gay promise was a means to alleviate the shame he felt for being gay in the first place.
But each of these reasons is a product of unhelpful assumptions about what it means to have a homosexual orientation and also to follow Jesus. Rob and Lisa could not envision having a gay son who could also be a thriving Christian. Deborah embraced the ex-gay promise because it allowed her to continue her subconscious disdain for gay people. And Brian believed that God's love for him was contingent upon his embrace of the ex-gay promise.
The problem is that the ex-gay promise doesn't deliver. No matter what parents did to correct whatever perceived errors they saw in their parenting, their children's sexual orientation did not change from gay to straight. When followers of Jesus doubled down in the culture wars, gay people came to believe that Christians didn't want them to have the dignity and honor that they deserved. And no matter how hard they tried, the vast majority of gay men and women who had deep-seated patterns of attraction to members of their own sex and who pursued orientation change never saw those patterns reversed.
Instead of delivering answers, the ex-gay promise delivered more shame, increased stigmatization of gay and same-sex-attracted people, and mounted roadblocks to flourishing for sexual minorities. The ex-gay promise told parents that they were the cause of their kids' sexuality. Instead of empowering them to love their kids unconditionally, it set parents up to view their children as projects needing fixing. The ex-gay promise told gay people that they could only have dignity and honor if they somehow achieved orientation change. And when orientation change didn't happen, the ex-gay promise shamed gay people into silence and denial.
The ex-gay movement has since collapsed with the closing of its flagship institution, Exodus International, in 2013. But its lingering influence remains in the form of new expressions of the ex-gay promise. The legacy of the ex-gay promise and its slogan, "Change is Possible," has indeed been devastating. Thankfully, it is not the end of the story. We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to achieve supernatural transformation in the lives of all who submit their lives to the Lordship of Christ. In future blog posts, we will explore these vital and practical examples of gospel change.
