Recently I’ve called and emailed Alan Chambers several times asking him to elaborate on his claims exgays now number is the “hundreds of thousands” but the only reply he’s given was a very polite email stating he’s been too busy to talk. However Chambers had time to appear on FamilyLife Today with Dennis Rainey back on January 1, 2006 and provided some insight into Exodus’ rather queer statistical gathering techniques.
Chambers: It became sexualized at puberty for me. However, a couple of years prior to puberty, I was molested by an older teenage boy who I looked up to, who was athletic, who was smart, who was good-looking, and that guy that I had looked up to and idolized paid attention to me in a way that I was not meant to be paid attention to, and that kind of started me thinking along the lines of maybe this is how I find male relationship.
Dennis: [co-host] Mm-hm. I want to ask you a question about that. It seems to be a theme within the homosexual community, especially around boys; that they have had some kind of an experience, many times, around being molested. Do you have any statistics or hard data around that?
Chambers: We find at Exodus, those who contact our ministry for help, and there are about 400,000 of those each year – of those people, about 85 percent of the men and women have been sexually molested prior to age 13, and that’s a very high statistic. On the national average, I believe, it is somewhat lower, but it’s in the 70-percent range for women and in the high 60s for men on a national average.
Bob: [co-host] For those who are practicing homosexuality.
Chambers: Right.
Oh yes, expect an infographic on this later in the week.
Yeah, doesn’t sound like good scientific method to me. But it’s reminiscent of Stephen Bennett’s claim that 75% of gay men were molested as children or youth, based on phone calls to their office.
400,000 calls per year… Does Chambers claim they are all from LGBT persons seeking change? Or does that not include all the anxious parents and friends and clergy and others who call seeking help? If so, how would those calls support Chambers’ ‘85%’ statistic? Also, does the Exodus staff really ask every LGBT caller whether or not he or she was molested? That sounds really wierd. When I called Exodus for help years ago, they mostly just asked where I lived and provided a referral to a local affiliate.
This is rather like an executive at Tiffany or Neiman Marcus deducing that most women have access to six-figure incomes, based on the women who patronize their businesses.
I also have a hard time believing that all those calls are from LGBT people. I’m certain a good percentage comes from parents, pastors, etc.
But I’m kind of not in the mood to read this nonsense anyway–a parent of one of my wife’s middle-school gymnastics students wants to withdraw her daughter from her class because the girl developed a crush on her. I bet Alan would think she was right to do so.
If Exodus was really getting 400,000 inquiries per year from gay (excuse me, same-sex-attracted) individuals, you’d expect its 120-odd affiliates to be bursting at the seams with thousands of people attending their meetings.
In the real world, how many Exodus affiliates have even 50 active participants at any given time? I’d be very interested to see some hard numbers…
On pp. 44-47 of our recently released report on ex-gay programs, we analysze the “research” often cited by Nicolosi and Chambers as evidence of extremely high rates of childhood sexual abuse among gay men and lesbians. You can download the report here: https://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/crosshairs.pdf
Is quoting statistics without citing a source and then refusing to give a source to substantiate claims lying?
They must have some infrastructure.
Let’s assume only half of the contacts are phone calls, the other half are mail responses.
Since there are around 255 business days a year, that works out to 784 letters and 784 phone
calls a day. If the phone calls average 5 minutes each, that’s 65 hours of off-hook time a day for their phones, and 3,920 pieces of outbound mail a week. If they operate their phones 8 hours, a day, they have 8.1 lines off hook at any given moment just to handle the “help” calls.
Pretty big operation for that little building.
Let’s play Fun With Numbers:
1. Let’s assume that all 400,000 calls per year are from same-sex attracted people who are contacting Exodus for help. Exodus claims “over 120 local ministries in the USA and Canada”.
Let’s be real generous and assume that these local ministries each get 100 new participants per year. This would total about 12,000 participating ex-gays per year (although Exodus annual conferences generally draw less than 1,000 of which most are pastors, family, and other non-ex-gays).
This suggests that 97% of the gay people who call Exodus for help never join.
2. Or, alternately, suppose that Chambers means that the people calling aren’t gay themselves but are calling to get help for a friend.
Then, using our inflated figure of 12,000 only one in 33 talk their loved ones into going to an Exodus program.
Interestingly, if Chambers does mean that these callers are friends, pastors, and family, what he said was “of those people, about 85 percent of the men and women have been sexually molested prior to age 13”. Maybe he really doesn’t mean that 85% of the pastors were molested before 13, surely not.
3. Currently there are about 298 million people in the US. Using CDC rates of gay and bisexual men and women, there are about 5.3 million gays and lesbians and about 6.9 million bisexuals.
With 85% having been molested, that would have 4.5 million gay people who were molested and if you include bisexuals you’re up to 10.4 million.
According to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services, roughly 85,000 children were reported as sexually molested in 2004 (9.7% of 873,000). This number counts multiple incidents separately so that if one child had 10 incidents, he would count as 10 children. However, we also know that many incidents go unreported. For the sake of our calculation we’ll use 85,000.
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm04/chapterthree.htm#age
Assuming that ALL of the kids who are molested become gay (a laughable assumption) it would still require 53 steady years of molestation for 85% of gay people to be molested. If you count bisexuals, it would be 122 years.
Sorry, Alan, your numbers just don’t add up. Did you have your fingers crossed behind your back when you made those claims?
Daniel, I can’t wait to see your graphic.
Yeah, fun with numbers. If only the national lottery was soooo easy.(Preparing a page on subject, so don’t ask for links etc at this point. This is purely for info.)My own best guesstimate is that each Exodus affliate has, overall, 10-15 active members. Some are much inflated by including parents at weekly “weeping sessions” etc, or on-line “courses” (which we’ve taken too). The average life cycle is about 6 months, few go beyond a year.If you included all the contacts to Focus — who flog material on behalf of Exodus — and all the affliates you may be able to get to 400,000 contacts per year.But clearly that pissant little office doesn’t handle that volume. It couldn’t. (We used similar benchmarking to PCLiberal to guage Chambers may be crediting contacts to Exodus, all affiliates, and Focus — generously, but also therefore one more Chambers attempt at fakery.).The “85%” figure, as best we can trace, has no connection to any info gathered by Chambers. He is making up the number.Paulk made the same claim in 1997, as example, and also provided no details. (Interestingly: the “18,000” quote by Falzarano, ignoring the BS 100% success claim, lines up with 10-15 active members and a 6-12 month turnover.)
Per Rena Lindevaldsen, senior litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel (on April 24th, 2006), again the claim has been repeated that hundreds of thousands of people have successfully left homosexuality.The number just keeps fluxuating from thousands to hundreds of thousands, but whatever the version of the number of ex-gay’s, no one challenges the factual basis for the statistic in the press, but it still getting recycled. Geez, reporting must be getting to be an easy profession — apparently, reporters no longer need to fact check statistics. Just say, “He said this…” or “She said this…” and leave it at that.