For decades, the ex-gay movement has produced a striking number of former leaders who eventually repudiated some or all of what they once taught.
John Paulk did. John Smid did. McKrae Game did. Randy Thomas did. Yvette Cantu Schneider did.
Others have remained committed to essentially the same worldview despite decades of evidence contradicting older promises of sexual-orientation change. Sometimes the promise itself has changed. “Change” may now mean rejecting a gay identity, remaining celibate, marrying someone of the opposite sex, or resisting same-sex relationships rather than becoming heterosexual. Restored Hope Network, the principal organizational successor to Exodus International, currently describes several approaches ranging from a celibate gay Christian identity to renouncing gay identity and seeking deeper “transformation.”
Why can some people eventually say I was wrong, while others keep revising the explanation so that the underlying belief never has to be wrong?
There probably isn’t an “ex-gay personality type.” It would be irresponsible to diagnose public figures from their speeches or social-media behavior, and conservative religious beliefs aren’t a personality disorder.
But there are recognizable differences in how people deal with contradiction, uncertainty, belonging and threats to identity. Those differences may help explain why some ex-gay leaders reconsider almost everything while others double down.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION
What makes someone capable of admitting that the story around which a life was organized was wrong — particularly when that admission could cost a career, marriage, ministry, friendships and religious community?
When Ex-Gay Belief Becomes an Identity
Changing an ordinary belief usually doesn’t produce an existential crisis. We discover that a politician disappointed us, a treatment doesn’t work, or a theory we accepted was mistaken.
An ex-gay leader may have much more at stake. The claim that homosexuality can or should be overcome can become intertwined with work, marriage, religious faith, friendships, reputation and a personal testimony about what God has done.
The question is no longer merely Is this true? It becomes Who am I if this isn’t true?
That distinction helps explain why contrary evidence may have surprisingly little effect. A factual correction is easier to accept when it changes an opinion than when it threatens an identity.
Jonathan Haidt: Why Better Arguments May Not Be Enough
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a useful framework in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Haidt argues that moral judgments are often intuitive before they are analytical. His memorable metaphor is the elephant and the rider: the elephant represents our large, fast, intuitive processes, while the rider represents conscious reasoning. As Haidt explained in a discussion of The Righteous Mind, the rider can influence the elephant, but often serves and explains where the elephant already wants to go.
Applied to homosexuality, an activist may sincerely believe that his position follows logically from Scripture, science and experience. Yet moral intuitions about sexuality, purity, gender, family or religious authority may already point strongly in one direction. Reason then becomes very good at finding arguments that support the conclusion.
This isn’t necessarily lying. It is an ordinary feature of human reasoning.
Haidt also argues that morality can “bind and blind.” Shared values create solidarity and meaning, while making a group’s own assumptions harder to see. In an interview about the book, Haidt describes morality as binding people into groups while potentially blinding them to perspectives outside those groups.
That has obvious relevance to the ex-gay movement. An activist may be confronting more than inconvenient research. Evidence can collide with belonging, religious authority and values experienced as sacred.
And belonging is powerful.
When “Change” Can Mean Almost Anything
Motivated reasoning may also help explain the extraordinary flexibility of the word change.
If heterosexual attraction develops, change worked. If it doesn’t, chastity can be called change. If same-sex attraction persists, rejecting a gay identity can represent change. A heterosexual marriage may demonstrate transformation; if the marriage fails, unresolved wounds or insufficient healing can explain the failure.
Restored Hope Network’s current FAQ illustrates how far the vocabulary has moved from a simple claim that homosexual people become heterosexual. Its categories include “Accommodation,” involving a celibate gay Christian identity; “Mortification,” involving renunciation of gay identity and homoerotic behavior; and “Transformation,” which adds an effort to address purported wounds contributing to “sexual brokenness.”
Religious decisions about celibacy or identity do not require anyone to claim a change in sexual orientation. The problem comes when very different outcomes are gathered under the same language of change.
REALITY TEST
A meaningful claim about sexual-orientation change should allow some conceivable result to count as evidence that the claim was wrong.
Five Ex-Gay Leaders Who Eventually Reconsidered
The people who left the movement did not all follow the same psychological route. That may be more illuminating than searching for one trait they shared.
John Paulk: Experience Overruled the Testimony
John Paulk was once perhaps America’s best-known ex-gay success story. He chaired Exodus International and, with his then-wife Anne Paulk, became a highly visible symbol of heterosexual transformation.
In 2013, however, Paulk publicly repudiated reparative therapy and apologized for the harm he had caused. “I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation,” he said.
What changed was not simply his political affiliation. Paulk eventually allowed his own experience to overturn an explanation of his life that he had publicly defended for years.
John Smid: An Opponent Became a Person
Former Love in Action director John Smid followed a slower path. After leaving the ministry in 2008, he continued reconsidering what he had taught.
An important influence was gay filmmaker and activist Morgan Jon Fox, whom Smid had first encountered during protests of Love in Action’s controversial program for gay teenagers. Smid later said his relationship with Fox helped “break down my walls” because Fox was the first openly gay person who would meet and talk with him simply as a person.
The relationship didn’t settle a scientific question. It made an ideological caricature harder to sustain.
McKrae Game: Allowing the Explanation to Fail
McKrae Game spent roughly two decades leading Hope for Wholeness before coming out as gay and repudiating conversion therapy.
In 2019, Game described conversion therapy as harmful, a “lie” and “false advertising”.
Game’s reversal points toward something less dramatic but psychologically important: the ability to remain with an unanswered question. Closed ideological systems rarely run out of explanations for failure. Reconsideration becomes possible when a person can stop reaching immediately for the next one.
Randy Thomas: Seeing the Group From Outside
Randy Thomas, a longtime Exodus International staff member and executive vice president, later apologized for participating in what he called an “echo chamber of condemnation.”
More revealingly, Thomas apologized for “idealizing and reinforcing the institutional groupthink of Exodus”.
Thomas didn’t have to decide that every religious experience from those years was fraudulent. He could preserve parts of his Christian history while rejecting conclusions and behavior he now regarded as harmful.
That ability to separate some of this mattered to me from some of this was wrong may itself make reconsideration easier.
Yvette Cantu Schneider: The Person We Might Have Predicted Wrong
Yvette Cantu Schneider provides perhaps the strongest warning against assuming that public certainty reveals private certainty.
Schneider worked for the Family Research Council, served on the Exodus board and participated extensively in Religious Right politics. Yet doubts were developing while she was still inside that world.
In 2014, Schneider said she had never trusted claims that “ex-gay” men had actually ceased being attracted to men. She even recalled refusing an attempt to match her romantically with an ex-gay man because she didn’t believe such men were really ex-gay.
She also began asking a more fundamental question. Schneider recalled noticing that people could undergo years of therapy without actually saying they had become straight: “You can go through years of therapy and what are you left with — shame?”
From the outside, Schneider might once have looked among the least likely people to reconsider.
That prediction would have been wrong.
Can We Predict Who Will Reconsider?
Probably not with much confidence. We may, however, be able to identify conditions that make reconsideration easier.
Tolerance for uncertainty matters because it leaves somewhere to go when an explanation fails. Relationships beyond an ideological community make opponents more difficult to reduce to stereotypes. Intellectual humility allows error without turning error into personal annihilation. And curiosity about anomalies matters: when experience contradicts doctrine, does the contradiction provoke investigation or an immediate rescue of the doctrine?
It probably also helps to have a self that can survive the loss of the cause. Someone whose friends, work, marriage, status and relationship with God all depend upon the same testimony has far more to lose.
These aren’t predictive personality markers. We seldom know how much doubt someone harbors privately, and personality is only part of the story.
There is also exit cost.
A private church member might face several painful conversations. A national activist may risk income, marriage, friendships, audience, church and the meaning assigned to decades of adult life.
A Simple Framework: Rigidity and Identity Dependence
Two dimensions may therefore be more useful than an “ex-gay personality type.”
Rigidity is how difficult it is for contrary experience to alter a worldview.
Identity dependence is how much of the self depends upon that worldview remaining intact.
Someone high in both has strong reasons to reinterpret inconvenient evidence. Someone lower in either dimension has more room to reconsider. Exit costs can raise the barrier anywhere in the framework.
Psychological Permeability: Letting Reality Answer Back
Haidt’s model helps explain why moral convictions can become so resistant to argument. It leaves the question of how they ever change.
One useful phrase is psychological permeability. It isn’t a diagnosis or formal psychological category. Here it simply means the capacity to let accumulated experience alter a moral and intellectual framework instead of continually reinterpreting experience to protect it.
An ex-gay leader hears variations of the same account for years: I prayed. I followed the rules. I went through counseling. I’m still gay.
There are always explanations available.
The important moment comes when another possibility is allowed to remain open:
What if this keeps happening because our premise is wrong?
Paulk, Smid, Game, Thomas and Schneider reached that question by different routes.
Their stories should make us reluctant to declare that someone else never will. They also show why adopting a new label, theology or political identity isn’t necessarily the same thing as deeper reconsideration.
The more consequential change occurs when a person becomes willing to let reality — including other people’s reality — answer back.
Next: Part 2: If someone keeps doubling down, what can friends, critics and churches do that might actually leave room for reconsideration?