To the editor,

As someone who just finished a book defending Evangelicalism’s view of the arts and as a believing Christian, I am appalled at InterVarsity’s invitation of ex-gay speakers to campus. Ex-gay “therapy,” whether in its psychoanalytic or purely faith-based form, has a proven track record of ineffectiveness. Even many evangelical psychologists — for instance, Warren Throckmorton — have begun to question its effectiveness. Honest evangelical leaders as far back as the great theologian Francis Schaeffer have admitted that this therapeutic methodology does not work. The best and most neutral studies on the ex-gay movement (for instance, Tanya Erzen’s “Straight to Jesus”) also concur in this assessment. It is one thing to market celibacy to the gay community, it is another thing entirely to tell LGBT people they can actually change their sexual orientation. Such a claim is scientifically implausible and ethically unjustifiable.

I wish to add one other point, which is that the LGBT community is not the only community today harmed by abusive evangelical therapeutic methodologies. In Australia and the U.S., for instance, Mercy Ministries exorcised scores of girls of their “demons of anorexia.” More locally, many Northeastern Presbyterians believe in a counseling methodology known as nouthetics (or biblical counseling), which holds that mental illnesses do not exist, and that the behaviors associated with them are the result of sin. In both biblical counseling and ex-gay therapy, the justification for healing the “diseased” person is the same: Biblical counselors, like ex-gay therapists, claim that a biological condition is changeable through simple faith healing; Biblical counselors, like ex-gay groups, claim that “change is possible”; biblical counselors, like ex-gay groups, claim that one’s biological makeup can cause the mentally ill, like gays, to be inherently sinful; and in both cases, the success rate of the therapy is extremely low, approaching nil.

I, as a straight male, have undergone biblical counseling. I therefore have a limited, but real understanding of what LGBT people have to go through in these therapeutic systems. No rational person who has seen a biblical counselor or an ex-gay therapist at work — and I have witnessed both — would want these people treating anyone. Yet their treatment methods remain constitutionally protected. That does not mean, however, that we have to countenance their existence by promoting easily falsifiable therapeutic systems. As a gay-affirming person, I feel that’s unethical. And as a Christian, I feel supporting such a system violates the Lord’s command that “the truth shall set you free.”

Sincerely,

John Weaver
Adjunct Professor, English Department