A gay man from Sydney, Australia, says six months of Christian programs to heal his homosexuality only confirmed his sexuality rather than curing it.
According to an article in Sunday’s Sydney Morning Herald, “Shaun,” now 35, attended two three-month programs with Liberty Christian Ministries, in the Sydney suburb of East Balmain. He said he tried the ex-gay ministry because he wanted to live up to the expectations of his family, friends and church. He was 21 at the time and had been referred to the group by a minister.
Every week for three months, he met about 40 homosexual men and women at inner-Sydney churches. They sat on pews, sang worship songs and watched videos that explained the ”causes” of their homosexuality, which were usually linked to abuse or rejection in their childhoods. The group’s leader, Christopher Keane, told of his personal journey from ”active homosexual” to married heterosexual. To close each session they confessed their weekly sins. Admissions of gay thoughts, gay pornography and gay sex were followed by prayer.
Keane presented himself as a former homosexual, Shaun says, but “admitted to the group that he still had sexual thoughts about men.” Keane is now retired from Liberty, and the ministry is angry that the Herald tried persistently to contact him in relation to the story.
In its official response to the article, Liberty Christian Ministries also objects to the suggestion that it promises “‘cures’ and easy solutions to homosexuality”:
We believe in overcoming, cleansing, and healing, not ‘cures’ or ‘fixes’. Change is often long-term and hard effort and more of a marathon than a sprint, as I acknowledged in my response to Swan. Yet for Paul Martin in the article, this is just a ‘semantic’ word game. However, it makes an enormous amount of difference when it comes to having healthy or unhealthy expectations of change and how likely a person is to last the distance. Since Martin and Venn-Brown didn’t last the distance in overcoming their same-sex attractions it’s little wonder that they think the difference between ‘healing’ and ‘cure’ are just semantic. But neither do they have the final word on it.
Yet “semantic word game” is exactly right. What is the goal of this lengthy struggle if not, essentially, a cure? It’s a cure that takes time and effort, according to its proponents, but still, essentially, a cure. Not a quick fix, but a fix nevertheless. Your homosexuality is a problem, a disorder, but last the course and you’ll be free of it. Why pretend it’s anything other than a promise of a cure?
As the basis for its message of healing for same-sex attraction, Liberty relies on a biblical passage long used by Exodus International to prop up its teaching that “change is possible.” “Same-sex healing does occur in this day,” the group says, citing 1 Corinthians 6:9-12 (with emphasis in original):
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (ESV)
Liberty Christian Ministries, Inc, is part of Exodus Asia Pacific and one of eight Exodus ministries in Australia.
thanks for the post David
Hi Anthony!
How are you, brother?
I think it’s so sad (and wasteful) that a young person would spend so much of the best years of their lives, hating their gay identity and are required to spend their socializing and their only support comes from people who refuse to learn anything about it, or work towards an effective alliance against much more important social ills.
I’m frustrated because I can think of some incredibly harmful and destructive things that affect EVERYONE that the anti gay conveniently ignore.
As well as the spectacular things gay/het alliances can accomplish.
Indeed, thanks for the post, David. Gets me fired up!
The fact that anyone can type those words and not see the inherent contradiction within them is mind-boggling. For a person to claim that others are consistently misunderstanding him when, in fact, he is a terrible communicator is the ultimate form of self-absorption and entitlement, in my view. Much like Exodus here in the United States, Liberty seems to be creating new definitions of easily-understood words, and then bristling when others do not know their secret little code. It’s deplorable.
The Liberty focus on lifelong hard work and seeing exgay stuff through is just another trope for coding the pat folk criticism: You did not work hard enough to change yourself; or perhaps, You were not serious enough to stay the course of transforming Christian discipleship.
This is easily said. In fact, it seems that religious leaders and the religious-in crowd in Jesus’ day, also said, believed, and lived out similar complaints against any number of defiled unrighteous outsiders. Noting that Jesus’ disciples ate with unwashed hands, they tried to locate the disciples as defiled unrighteous outsiders, too. Jesus’ reply may be telling: It is not what fluids and functions are innate to the body that defiles, but the dark and twisted motives of our human hearts so far from God.
We could also recall Jesus’ saying: The Sabbath is made for humanity, not humanity made to conform to the Sabbath no matter what.
Only a mind closed and a heart far from neighbor and far from God in some ways, could so completely mistake LGB tenderness, care, bonding, and the embodied seeds of basic human covenant relationships … which can grow and deepen to mirror God via faithfulness, forgiveness, self-giving care, and many other fruits of spirit and Holy Spirit, …. for a priori settled, categorical immorality.
Technically, to be a picky scholar type, the ESV is still mistranslating the original word/phrases as “… men who practice homosexuality.” The original is most likely koitae and/or arsenkoitae which appear nowhere else in contemporary literature of the era, and which the Pauline author seems to have either coined or repeated as a timely mention readers would understand but which has been completely lost to us today. (Forgive the poor transliterations BTW).
More egregious? … is the strong likelihood that when we use these dodgy translations, we quickly import a modern idea of sexual orientation variance, back into an ancient near eastern original text which cannot be demonstrated in any fashion to have actually expressed or captured such a uniquely modern innovation in its message. No culture had a documentable notion of sexual orientation variance in the modern human nature sense, and in the west the notion begins to emerge only in the late 1800s. Furthermore, it is worse to import and imply the modern idea of sexual orientation variance, dislocated from its empirical and intellectual or cultural contexts involving human development and human relationship.
Bad form, indeed.
Religious people regarding themselves as righteous exemplars are warned not to resist entering the kingdom while also keeping others from access to the gospel and the kingdom. I submit that is exactly what these careless and ideological verbal games to the detriment and neglect of loving, committed, companionship, covenant relationships are doing … and by all lights, seem intended to do in the first place.
Really, really, really, … bad …. form. Alas. Lord have mercy. drdanfee
@drdanfee: thank you. I was feeling as if running in a loop. I’m no religious scholar. I come from a far more simple Native American idea of connection to a higher power. I find the double talk of the ex gay ministries so frustrating and ridiculous. I’m with College Jay on this regarding the contradictions that load up their statements.
In fact, anything to do with gay people, whether it’s these ex gay ministries, or anti gay socio political action is inevitably and constantly in contradiction or hypocritical. ESPECIALLY of what are to also be the simplest and most ethical of religious motivations.
What frustrates me most of all, is that we ALL live in the 21st century. With all it’s attendant benefits of human interaction and progress, and it’s like the anti gay want gay people to live as in another era. As if the civil rights laws and human progress that advanced them, aren’t the intention for gay people to benefit from or live with as well. As if gay people cannot COEXIST with anyone’s religious doctrine.
Even though all manner of religious doctrine is ignored in favor of contemporary comfort and convenience.
That is to say, all kinds of coexistence is going on for the same reason.
I mean, a LOT of us HAVE noticed. Why do so many anti gay Christians wish we hadn’t?
Biblical times were NOT good times for all kinds of people.
And we know all too well who has the luxury of thinking they were, don’t we?