Why ministries promising to heal “unwanted same-sex attraction” remake God in their own likeness… and end up turning on their own followers.
When watching political and religious groups tear each other apart in circular firing squads, it is tempting to write it off as simple vanity or personal selfishness.
We see this same pattern inside the modern conversion therapy subculture—especially in groups like the Restored Hope Network, the CHANGED Movement, and Brothers on a Road Less Traveled (famous for its “Journey into Manhood” weekends).
Yet, calling this behavior pure selfishness or an “ego trip” misses what is actually going on. The people running these ministries do not think they are being selfish. In their own minds, they believe they have surrendered completely to God.
The real problem is what happens when people confuse God’s will with their own survival. When you build an entire life on proving you are a living miracle, you are not acting out of casual vanity—you are running on spiritual grandiosity and survival panic masked as holiness.
Who Are the Players?
To understand how this operates, let’s look at who runs the religious side of the U.S. conversion therapy world today:
- Restored Hope Network (RHN): Formed in 2012 by hardliners after Exodus International fell apart and its president apologized for causing deep harm. Led by Anne Edward (the former Anne Paulk), RHN acts as the movement’s theological police, demanding strict obedience to the idea that anyone with enough faith can change their sexual orientation.
- The CHANGED Movement: Based out of Bethel Church in California and led by figures like Elizabeth Woning and Ken Williams, CHANGED is the slick, media-savvy face of the movement. They swap out old-school religious shame for modern self-help language, claiming that leaving homosexuality is just about personal empowerment and spiritual freedom.
- Brothers on a Road Less Traveled & Journey into Manhood: Founded by Rich Wyler, this group focuses on intensive weekend retreats where men try to fix their “broken masculinity” through role-play, intense emotional reenactments, and surrogate father-son holding.
The Trap of Spiritual Self-Grandiosity
Traditional Christian faith once taught humility: everyone makes mistakes, nobody is perfect, people are obligated to hold themselves accountable, and we all rely on grace.
The “ex-gay” movement turns that upside down. In these groups, as in the broader American evangelical movement, a leader’s status depends upon being an untouchable success story: a living trophy that proves 1) that their dogma works, and 2) that they are specially blessed by God.
Some psychologists call this spiritual grandiosity. Instead of listening for guidance that might challenge their assumptions, leaders treat God like a mirror image of themselves. Whatever they feel, whatever rule they invent, and whatever personal struggle they think they have conquered, gets stamped with divine approval.
Rather than examining whether their core premise is flawed, leaders often interpret their own experience as universal truth. A leader’s personal trajectory—no matter how rare or precarious—becomes the blueprint everyone else is expected to follow.
Because an organization’s credibility depends heavily on demonstrating tangible transformation, sustained lack of progress creates an institutional crisis. When someone commits years to the process and still experiences persistent same-sex attraction, the model itself is rarely questioned. Instead, the explanation almost always shifts back to the individual: unexplored emotional wounds, lingering relational defense mechanisms, an incomplete surrender of the heart, or external cultural threats that must be suppressed. The promise of the ministry remains intact, while the person seeking help is left carrying the full weight of the failure.
Group Supremacy and “Sanctified” Cruelty
These ministries also rely on collective grandiosity—the belief that their specific club is holier and braver than everyone else.
Look at the name Brothers on a Road Less Traveled. It is designed to make members feel like elite spiritual warriors. They are told they are doing the hard work that ordinary gay people (whom they view as morally weak) and ordinary straight people (whom they view as taking their heterosexuality for granted) cannot do.
Once we believe that we are soldiers in a cosmic war between light and absolute darkness, regular kindness and personal accountability go out the window. Cruelty gets reframed as love:
- Deflecting Outside Critique: When professional medical associations or former participants point out the emotional and psychological toll of change efforts, ministries tend to frame the criticism as ideological persecution or spiritual compromise, insulating their followers from genuine external accountability.
- Shifting Boundaries of Belonging: Internal solidarity is conditional. When an insider speaks openly about chronic exhaustion, questions the demand for heterosexual marriage, or suggests that permanent celibacy might be a healthier pastoral path, they often find themselves quietly sidelined or viewed with growing suspicion.
- Justified Exclusion: When leaders break ties with colleagues who reconsider their stance, the fallout is rarely framed as personal animosity. In their eyes, cutting off or publicly discrediting a former peer is treated as a necessary, even sorrowful act of protecting the community and defending biblical fidelity, even if the Bible actually has nothing to say about the situation.
Why the Weapon Always Turns Inward
When an organization operates with religious self-blessing and self-adulation, treating God as a mirror image of itself, genuine community cannot exist.
Real brotherhood and sisterhood require honesty, admitting weakness, and making space for human reality. But when a group’s entire existence requires maintaining an image of flawless moral victory, vulnerability looks like treason.
These groups do not turn on each other because they are bad at teamwork; they turn on each other because their worldview demands it. When you teach people that their personal survival story is the voice of God, there is no room left for grace, no room for dissent, and ultimately, no room for anyone else.
The God Mirror on the National Stage
This tendency to remake God into a mirror of oneself or one’s group is hardly unique to “unwanted SSA” pastoral support groups or retreat weekends. It is the defining rhythm of modern political religion, where divine authority is routinely borrowed to baptize raw personal ambition. Across the MAGA ecosystem, faith is less about submitting to a higher standard and more about declaring that the higher standard is so high because you own it.
We see it in political rallies where Donald Trump treats his instincts, wealth, and grievances as self-evident proof of divine favor, never seeing a reason to seek forgiveness because his gut is treated as naturally righteous. We hear it from televangelists like Paula White-Cain and Kenneth Copeland, who frame their luxury and political access not as earthly excess, but as mandatory kingdom dominion—dismissing regular critics and ordinary travelers as spiritual adversaries. Even among digital firebrands and populist commentators, the language of “spiritual warfare” is constantly recruited to settle petty factional scores and bless personal grudges.
Ultimately, whether the arena is a weekend retreat for “unwanted same-sex attraction” or a Turning Point USA political rally, the dynamic remains the same. The moment a movement trades self-examination for self-coronation, genuine community collapses. When everyone in the room believes they are uniquely anointed, dissent becomes treason, allies become expendable, and the movement inevitably spends its energy firing inward.