Dodging Conversion

Turning from sin and toward Jesus always involves becoming a better gift for the other sex. Voila, the Imago Dei! God sets every Christian on the path to creative self-giving.   

We err by splitting holiness from sexual wholeness. Real Christian conversion means growth in who man will be for woman and who woman will be for man.

Yet no air-gun fires more frequently at our work of Living Waters than the charge of ‘conversion therapy.’ Beware! Danger Zone! Leaders throughout the body of Christ, including prominent ‘Side B’-ers like David Bennett, Greg Johnson and Eve Tushnet, still swing that dull sickle.

Is this not a defense against the nature of real conversion itself? Are these artful dodgers protesting too much against Christians who seek to leave behind homosexuality and move onto more fruitful ground?

Bring on the straw man of ‘conversion therapy.’ Take aim and fire on Christian helpers who challenge ‘gay’ as identity and birthright.  Demonize them. Make them agents of psychological torture—coercive and abusive—for inviting ‘victims’ to consider the evidence of their bodily humanity, the gift (s)he could be for the other.

My grief in relation to a ‘gay’-identified friend is his abdication of fatherhood. As he shares his solo adventures (despite a partner who is now just a detached roommate), I mourn his loneliness. And his selfishness. I remind him of his dormant fatherhood. Somehow, our friendship deepens.

A truthful guide understands the complexity of sexual identity and desire and helps seekers mine their meaning. There’s more to explore. The stakes are high: Will I find the keys that unlock my truest self? Will I find the courage to grow beyond sexualizing mere friends and to face and forsake my latent contempt for the other?

Marco and I recently did a podcast with Thomas Mirus, author of the excellent ‘Your Sexual Pathology Doesn’t Make You Special.’ He said: ‘Conversion is conversion. That involves not only controlling one’s external acts but actually looking at one’s sinful or disordered dispositions…how are you going to even find out and get to that higher level of conversion if you’ve stopped it at managing external acts and not even thinking about those deeper issues of how I relate to the other?’

We discussed how same-sex temptations do not invalidate our repentance. Truth-seeking Christians are contenders and thinkers. We employ reason and insight to read the resistance we may still feel in our fallen selves. We overcome through objective, steady conviction. ‘No matter what temptations assail us, ’ writes Mirus, ‘it is part of our Christian vocation to face up to the truth about ourselves, and then seek conversion and healing.’

‘Conversion therapy’ is a strawman, a defense against reality. Real conversion is the goal for all Jesus-seekers, including those tempted to resolve their conflicts by assuming LGBTQ+ status. Jesus entrusts repentance to us. We can lay down rainbow identification. And we can stop making irrational claims that a body of therapists lie in wait to snatch us and make us ‘straight.’

The good news about Jesus: He is both the agent and the orientation of our conversion. He draws us out of darkness and into an eternal bond of love. His first words to us in Scripture? ‘Repent and believe in the Gospel!’ (Mk 1:15). ‘It is by faith in the Gospel and by Baptism that one renounces evil and gains salvation, that is, the forgiveness of sins and the gift of new life’ (CCC# 1427). That gift involves laying aside childish things and becoming a responsible man or woman for others.  

Commitment to Jesus and the Church includes becoming ‘mature expressions of the gift’ (St. John Paul II). We cannot do that with blinders on. Heart open and broken by sorrow over sin, we can hear and act.