Part 2: Can You Help Someone Leave an Ex-Gay Ideology?

Why do people sometimes become more entrenched when confronted with better evidence?

And if direct argument doesn’t work, is there anything friends, family members, critics or churches can do?

There is no technique for making another person self-reflective. Some people will not reconsider, and efforts to force a breakthrough can strengthen the defenses we hope to weaken.

But the histories of former ex-gay leaders, together with some lessons from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, suggest ways to make reconsideration more possible — and ways we may inadvertently make it harder.

Don’t Argue Only With the Rider

Haidt’s elephant-and-rider metaphor has an important practical implication.

If moral intuition gets a head start over conscious reasoning, defeating someone’s argument may not reach the real source of the belief. As Haidt explains his model, the conscious “rider” is not simply the master of the intuitive “elephant.” Much of our reasoning serves intuitions that are already pointing us somewhere.

Suppose a Christian activist experiences affirmation of gay relationships not merely as a proposition about sexuality but as a threat to biblical authority, holiness, family or obedience to God. Another scientific study may be entirely accurate while leaving that underlying moral problem untouched.

Facts still matter. Public misinformation about conversion therapy should be corrected.

But correcting the public record and persuading the person making the claim are different jobs.

Ask Questions That Can Outlast the Argument

Arguments easily become contests. Once winning becomes the immediate objective, concession feels dangerous.

Questions can sometimes work differently.

What would count as evidence that sexual orientation did not change? How should we distinguish changes in behavior or identity from changes in attraction? If someone remains attracted to the same sex for decades, what precisely has changed? Is there any possible outcome that would cause the theory itself to be reconsidered?

The purpose isn’t to trap someone. A clever gotcha creates another contest.

The useful question is the one that remains bothersome after the conversation is over.

Speak to More Than One Moral Concern

Haidt’s work also suggests that people may be talking past one another because they aren’t necessarily emphasizing the same moral concerns.

A critic of conversion therapy may naturally begin with harm: Does this practice increase shame, distress or family rejection?

A conservative Christian may also be thinking about authority and sanctity: What does Scripture require? What constitutes sexual holiness? Would abandoning the traditional position mean surrendering religious authority to cultural pressure?

If the goal is persuasion rather than simply stating opposition, it can help to address moral concerns the other person recognizes.

For example: What obligation do Christian ministry leaders have to describe their outcomes truthfully? What does bearing false witness mean when dramatic testimonies are generalized beyond what the evidence supports? What does pastoral responsibility require when people repeatedly blame themselves for a promised transformation that never occurs?

That doesn’t concede the theology. It puts the problem into a moral vocabulary that is harder to dismiss as coming entirely from a hostile tribe.

Make Room for “I Don’t Know”

Ideological movements tend to reward certainty, especially from leaders. Admitting uncertainty can look like weakness, loss of faith or loss of authority.

That makes I don’t know more important than it sounds.

Someone doesn’t have to jump directly from conversion therapy works to everything I believed was false. An intermediate position is possible:

I don’t understand why this isn’t working.

If uncertainty is immediately met with triumph — See, we were right all along — the old defenses have good reason to return.

Sometimes doubt needs room to exist before it can develop into reconsideration.

Relationships Can Challenge the Moral Story

John Smid’s relationship with Morgan Jon Fox illustrates the point particularly well.

Fox had protested Love in Action and strongly opposed what Smid represented. Yet Smid later credited their relationship with helping break down his defenses.

An ideological category gradually became a person he knew.

Nobody owes friendship to someone who has mistreated them, and people harmed by conversion therapy have no obligation to rehabilitate its advocates. But where genuine relationships already exist, keeping another person human while disagreeing with him can sometimes accomplish something that another debate cannot.

Haidt’s observation that morality can bind and blind works in both directions: a moral community binds its members together, while relationships outside it can make the boundary between “us” and “them” less absolute.

Give People Somewhere to Go

Belonging also helps explain why persuasion can’t be separated from exit costs.

Imagine acknowledging after 20 years that the testimony supporting your ministry was wrong. What happens to your job, marriage, church and closest friendships? What do you say to donors, audiences and people who reorganized their own lives because they believed you?

Under those circumstances, reconsideration isn’t merely intellectual.

Communities that hope people will leave harmful movements should therefore ask whether they have left them anywhere to land.

That doesn’t mean erasing responsibility. Nothing you did matters is not a reasonable response to harm.

But there is a great difference between that and saying: What you did matters, and you remain responsible for repairing what you can. But admitting it doesn’t mean there can be no life afterward.

Recognizing a genuine concession without pretending it is sufficient works the same way. “We exaggerated the evidence for orientation change” isn’t a repudiation of conversion therapy, but it is better than insisting nothing was exaggerated.

Don’t Feed the Provocation Machine

Some activists present a different problem because conflict itself supplies status, attention and purpose.

An outrageous statement produces angry posts, denunciations, interviews and another chance to portray oneself as a dangerous truth-teller whom enemies desperately want silenced.

Milo Yiannopoulos provides an unusually clear example because provocation was central to his public persona long before his announcement that he was “ex-gay.” A shift in religious or sexual narrative need not alter the deeper pattern if the public role remains built around conflict.

Correct consequential misinformation. Keep an accurate record. Support people being harmed. But not every provocation requires a response.

Samuel Perez: Why We Should Be Careful With Our Categories

Samuel Abraham Perez is a useful counterexample to treating every contemporary ex-gay activist as the same kind of provocateur.

Perez remains committed to a conservative Christian understanding of same-sex attraction. Yet his own Christian in Progress podcast contains more self-questioning than an “ex-gay” label alone might suggest.

In February 2025, Perez devoted an episode to asking why so many ex-gay Christians eventually return to gay life. His explanation remains firmly within a non-affirming Christian framework, but he discusses factors including guilt, shame, inadequate church support and what he regards as bad theology.

A month earlier, he had devoted another episode to examining mistakes he said had nearly broken him during the previous year.

None of that means Perez is gradually moving toward an affirming position. We have no basis for predicting that.

It means the categories in Part 1 should remain descriptions of processes rather than labels permanently attached to people. Someone can retain beliefs we strongly dispute while showing a capacity for introspection.

Yvette Cantu Schneider is reason enough to be cautious about declaring anyone unreachable.

When Ostracism Confirms the Story

Boundaries are sometimes necessary. Churches may need to remove someone from leadership. Organizations may need to sever relationships. Individuals have every right to stop interacting with someone who treats them badly.

But punishment can have unintended effects when a person already understands himself as a persecuted truth-teller.

Rejection then becomes supporting evidence: gay people reject me because they hate truth; my church rejected me because Christianity has become weak; conservatives rejected me because they compromised.

The conduct produces rejection, and rejection confirms theSam worldview that helped produce the conduct.

Where possible, accountability can therefore contain two messages at once:

This behavior is unacceptable. Different behavior is still possible.

That isn’t appeasement. It is a refusal to make permanent exile part of the ideological incentive structure.

The Catholic Pivot: Reconsideration or a More Sustainable Theology?

There is another response to the failure of older ex-gay promises: change the theological framework without necessarily abandoning the moral conclusion.

Andrew Comiskey, founder of Desert Stream Ministries, was confirmed as a Roman Catholic at Easter 2011 while maintaining his sexual-healing ministry. He stressed that the conversion was personal and that Desert Stream itself remained ecumenical.

In the same account, Comiskey described what attracted him to Catholicism: Christ Crucified, the Eucharist, a less personality-driven church life, historic moral teaching and confession.

Traditional Catholicism can address a problem created by older evangelical promises of sexual transformation because heterosexual attraction isn’t required as proof of faithfulness. Persistent same-sex attraction can instead become the setting for lifelong chastity and self-denial.

If the original expectation is God will make me heterosexual, decades of continuing homosexual attraction pose an obvious problem.

If it becomes God calls me to chastity despite continuing homosexual attraction, the attraction itself no longer disproves the religious story.

That can represent greater honesty about experience. It can also make the underlying moral claim harder to falsify.

The conversion itself tells us little about the person’s psychological development. Religious discipline can foster humility and self-examination, while religious authority can also become another defense against uncertainty.

The more useful question remains: Has the person become more capable of acknowledging reality that doesn’t fit the preferred story?

Anthony Falzarano: Independent Thinking Has Limits

The late Anthony Falzarano complicates the picture in another way.

Falzarano was a prominent ex-gay activist and founder of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX). In a 1998 PBS profile of the ex-gay movement, he promoted developmental theories involving early sexualization and emotionally absent fathers and claimed that Christian therapy, prayer and surrender to Jesus had changed him.

Yet Falzarano was hardly an obedient functionary of the Religious Right.

After conservative political organizations embraced ex-gay testimonies in their campaigns, Falzarano publicly complained that ex-gay activists were being used. “Many of us in the ex-gay movement feel we are being used,” he said during the dispute.

That independence deserves recognition. It also shows that resistance to groupthink in one area doesn’t guarantee openness in another.

A person can challenge allies, institutions and political tactics while continuing to protect the belief most central to his identity.

We don’t need to speculate about Falzarano’s private psychology to see the lesson.

Independence and permeability are not the same thing.

Sometimes the Goal Should Be Harm Reduction

There is an uncomfortable limit to every persuasion strategy discussed here.

Some people will not reconsider. At least not now.

Questions can be interpreted as attacks. Relationships can be used manipulatively. Evidence can disappear into increasingly elaborate explanations. Patience can simply prolong someone else’s exposure to harmful conduct.

At that point, the goal should change from transformation to harm reduction.

Correct important misinformation, establish boundaries, protect vulnerable people, document public claims accurately and avoid supplying unnecessary attention to provocations.

Most importantly, don’t organize everyone else’s life around the hope that a resistant activist will eventually have a breakthrough.

We can leave open the possibility of change without pretending that we can produce it.

Leave the Door Open, but Don’t Stand in It Forever

Haidt’s work helps explain why the perfect argument is rarely enough. Moral beliefs are entangled with intuition, belonging and values people experience as sacred. That’s true of ex-gay activists, their opponents and the rest of us.

The practical lessons are consequently modest.

Correct falsehoods without assuming humiliation will persuade. Ask questions capable of surviving the argument. Speak to moral concerns the other person actually recognizes. Make uncertainty tolerable. Preserve human relationships where doing so is healthy. Allow accountability to coexist with a route out.

None of those approaches guarantees reconsideration.

Schneider reminds us that people may be questioning privately when they look thoroughly entrenched. Falzarano shows that an independent person can still protect a central premise. Perez demonstrates why a present belief shouldn’t automatically become a permanent psychological label. Yiannopoulos illustrates how a dramatic change of narrative can leave familiar patterns of conflict intact.

The goal, then, isn’t to discover the combination of arguments that forces someone to adopt our worldview.

It is to avoid unnecessarily strengthening the defenses that prevent someone from examining his own.

Whether he eventually does so remains his decision.

Read Part 1: Why Some Ex-Gay Leaders Change Their Minds — and Others Double Down