Sexual orientation change efforts within religious contexts: A personal account of the battle to heal homosexuals (original) (raw)
Related papers
CONVERSION THERAPY IN AUSTRALIA - the state of the nation
2018
‘Gay conversion therapy’ and ‘conversion therapy’ are relatively recent terms. They are a double-edged sword. Their popularity demonstrates that the LGBTI community is now in control of the conversation. However, the terms are often misused as they become broader in definition which also plays into the hands of orientation change advocates. The need to separate the different methodological attempts to change peoples’ orientation is important as the most prevalent is in religious contexts and not considered ‘therapy’ at all. This report is the first in-depth of the Australian scene and goes behind the scenes of previous ‘ex-gay’ organisations and documenting previously unpublished materials. The harmful outcomes of sexual orientation change attempts are clearly shown along with the challenges faced to ban the practice within religious communities. Religious leaders and churches that persist in believing homosexuality is a sin, an illness and not an orientation.
Improving Spiritual Health Care for LGBTQ+ Australians: Beyond Conversion Practices
2024
This is the is the final community report from a series of studies into lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and asexual (LGBTQA+) conversion practices in Australia. The report provides a brief overview of findings from a major national survey of LGBTQA+ Australians’ religious experiences, including experiences of LGBTQA+ conversion practices. Conversion practices are efforts that aim to change or suppress the sexuality or gender identity of LGBTQA+ people. These practices may be formal, involving interventions such as counselling, organised groups or targeted pastoral care, or they may be informal, including self-directed, unpaid, and/or ad hoc efforts to change or suppress sexual desire or gender identity. The survey was conducted in 2022-2023, and complete by 1,311 LGBTQA+ people living in Australia. The survey was advertised as being a survey on “LGBTQA+ Australians’ experiences with religion and faith” and as such the sample and the findings are not representative of the broader LGBTQA+ communities (and should not be interpreted as such). Nonetheless, the survey findings provide valuable insights into the anatomy of conversion practices and associated messaging in Australia.
The Medical Journal of Australia , 2022
Recent research has shown that conversion practices are poorly understood in Australia and that health workers would benefit from training to improve their care of survivors. As part of a comprehensive civil response, training for medical and mental health practitioners will be important given that increased public attention on these issues will likely lead more survivors to seek support. It is significant that the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Psychological Society and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists have issued statements against conversion practices. These could be further supported by provision of more information for members about the scope and nature of conversion practices and ideology, details of appropriate referral pathways, and support for training
Confess the Gay Away? Media, Religion, and the Political Economy of Ex-Gay Therapy
2015
The “ex-gay” movement does not encourage people to pray the gay away but confess the gay away. As a loose organization of mostly Christian ministries and psychotherapy practices that offers “freedom from homosexuality,” the movement offers religious and psychological confessions of sin and disease and testimonies of truth and belief as technologies of both selfsacrifice and identity formation. The aim is to control unwanted same-sex desire through lifelong labour and struggle so as to sacrifice one’s gay or lesbian identity for an ex-gay identity. However, in the debate surrounding the movement, those opposed use confessions of trauma and harm, and testimonies of their own truth and belief, to try and sacrifice the movement in favour of gay and lesbian identities. Confession and testimony, then, which are two sides of the same coin, underlie the discourses and practices of all involved in ex-gay truth games. In the 1970s and 80s the ex-gay movement operated in the shadows of Christi...
Negotiating a Reiigious identity: Tiie Case of the Gay Evangeiical
1991
This article examines the process by which persons reconstruct their Evangelical religious identity to include the formerly incongruent homosexual identity. Members of one conservative gay Christian organization, called Good Nevus, are profiled in the way they come to desire, construct, and solidify a gay Evangelical identity. Through a process of socialization , they renegotiate the boundaries and definitions of their religious identity to include a positive valuation of homosexuality. This accommodated, but still distinctively Evangelical, identity enables persons to resolve the dissoruince between their Christian beliefs and their homosexual feelings. The case study explores how a religious identity is accommodated to incorporate incompatible aspects of the self. It provides an interesting glimpse at religious socialization outside of radical conversion. This somewhat unique example offers a look at how individuals and groups are involved in negotiating religious identities in a ...
PASTORAL CARE FOR LGBT ATTRACTION
NWU, 2020
This one issue, “Same-sex union and the church”, has been the forefront debate of the church and society at large. The dissertation illustrates a report by the Oasis Foundation on exclusion and indicates that LGB individuals are up to 12 times more likely to experience mental health difficulties. The research done in preparation for this study illustrates a report by the Oasis Foundation on exclusion and LGB individuals are up to 12 times more likely to experience mental health difficulties. The study demonstrates ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that it is church goers and Christian leaders, accompanied by the media and political debate that are fuelling negative messages about same-sex relationships in society. While previous studies have shown the damage done to LGB individuals within Christian denominations, this is the first study that seems to justify the long-held assumption that church practices and teachings are seriously damaging the mental health of LGB individuals outside the Church; often with life-threatening consequences
Negotiating a Religious Identity: The Case of the Gay Evangelical
Sociological Analysis, 1991
This article examines the process by which persons reconstruct their Evangelical religious identity to include the formerly incongruent homosexual identity. Members of one conservative gay Christian organization, called Good News, are profiled in the way they come to desire, construct, and solidify a gay Evangelical identity. Through a process of socialization, they renegotiate the boundaries and definitions of their religious identity to include a positive valuation of homosexuality. This accommodated, but still distinctively Evangelical, identity enables persons to resolve the dissonance between their Christian beliefs and their homosexual feelings. The case study explores how a religious identity is accommodated to incorporate incompatible aspects of the self. It provides an interesting glimpse at religious socialization outside of radical conversion. This somewhat unique example offers a look at how individuals and groups are involved in negotiating religious identities in a modern world.
Training the Porous Body: Evangelicals and the Ex-Gay Movement
American Anthropologist, 2018
In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique understanding of sexuality and the person. As my respondents explained to me in over sixteen months of field research, evangelical rejection of LGBT individuals and practices is rooted not simply in prejudice but also in a culturally specific notion of personhood that requires Christian bodies to orient themselves to the divine. In evangelical Christianity, the body, along with its capacity to feel and communicate, is understood as a porous vessel receptive to communication with God. In contrast to a dominant idea that sexual orientations shape individual identities, sexuality within this religious world instead facilitates the movement of moral forces across individual bodies and geographic scales. Sexual desires and sexual acts are broadly understood in evangelical cosmology as communicative mediums for supernatural forces. This understanding of sexuality as a central component of moral agency shapes widespread practices of ostracism of people who identify as LGBT within evangelicalism and often leads to anti-LGBT political positions. Claiming an LGBT identity is seen as making one a distinct kind of person incommensurate with evangelical porosity. [evangelical, sexuality, embodiment, United States] RESUMEN En este artículo, examino cómo la oposición evangélica en Estados Unidos a los derechos de la comunidad LGBT proviene de un entendimientoúnico de la sexualidad y la persona. Como mis respondedores me explicaron en más de dieciséis meses de investigación de campo, el rechazo evangélico a individuos y prácticas LGTB está enraizado no simplemente en prejuicios sino también en una noción culturalmente específica de la condición de persona que requiere que los cuerpos cristianos se orienten en sí mismos hacia lo divino. En la cristiandad evangélica, el cuerpo, junto con su capacidad de sentir y comunicarse, se entiende como un recipiente poroso receptivo de comunicación con Dios. En contraste a una idea dominante que las orientaciones sexuales dan forma a las identidades individuales, la sexualidad dentro del mundo religioso, en cambio facilita el movimiento de fuerzas morales a través de cuerpos individuales y escalas geográficas. Los deseos sexuales y los actos sexuales son ampliamente entendidos en la cosmología evangélica como medios comunicativos para las fuerzas sobrenaturales. Este entendimiento de la sexualidad como un componente central de la agencia moral le da forma a las prácticas extendidas de ostracismo de las personas quienes se identifican como LGBT dentro del evangelicalismo y a menudo lleva a posiciones políticas anti-LGBT. Reivindicar una identidad LGBT se ve como el hacer un tipo distinto de persona inconmensurable con la porosidad evangélica. [evangélica, sexualidad, corporeización, Estados Unidos] I met Virginia Simmonds in the lobby of the evangelical North End Church one Sunday morning in 2010 in
Religious trauma and moral injury from LGBTQA+ conversion practices
Social Science & Medicine, 2022
Highlights •Research shows a globally common range of religion-based LGBTQA + conversion practices. •Spiritual harms associated with conversion practices have not yet been investigated. •Coercion in conversion practices was linked to stronger religious trauma responses. •Complicity in experiences of conversion practices was closely linked to moral injury. •Attending to spiritual and cultural factors will aid in survivors' recovery. Abstract Religion-based LGBTQA + conversion practices frame all people as potential heterosexuals whose gender aligns with their birth sex (in a cisgender binary model of male and female sexes). Deviation from this heterosexual cisgender social identity model is cast as curable ‘sexual brokenness’. However, research shows conversion practices are harmful, and particularly associated with increased experiences of abuse, mental health diagnoses, and suicidality. This paper explores their contribution to the particular harms of moral injury and religious trauma, drawing firstly on the foundational moral injury literature to offer a unique conceptual framework of spiritual harm and moral injury, and secondly on a rare qualitative 2016–2021 study of the spiritual harms reported in semi-structured interviews of 42 survivors of LGBTQA + change and suppression practices in Australia. The paper examines the survivors' support needs around the nature and extent of religious trauma and moral injury, to inform services working towards supporting their recovery from such experiences and their resolution of conflicts deeply bound in their sense of self and belonging. It argues that impairment of conversion survivors' relationships with religious communities, and religious self-concepts, point to the need for additional improvements in pastoral practice. Keywords Sexuality; Gender identity; Religion; Conversion therapy; Moral injury; Spiritual health
Mechanisms of religious trauma amongst queer people in Australia’s evangelical churches
Clinical Social Work Journal
Christian communities teaching traditional theology and ethics, which treat diverse sexualities and gender expansive identities as sinful, can be places where faithful LGBTQIA + people are subject to spiritual abuse. This paper explores the complex dynamics and multilayered mechanisms of this abuse in Australian Evangelical Christianity. It is based on a qualitative research project using 24 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQIA + people who have spent two or more years in Evangelical church settings. The project found that participants were subject to mischaracterization and viewed as a moral threat, and consequently experienced erasure, social distancing, and suffered psychological trauma. The paper uses minority stress and micro-aggression theory to conceptualize these experiences and inform social work practice. It also shows the rich resilience and spiritual growth of participants who navigated trauma and sometimes emerged with a more nuanced and deeper faith. These findings ...