Category: Conversion Therapy

by Jayne Ozanne, Member of General Synod, Director of the Ozanne Foundation and Chair of the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition

The “debate” around the need to ban “conversion therapy” has attracted more than its fair share of fake news and scaremongering, particularly by those who want to continue to “help” LGBT+ people become something that they believe God finds more acceptable.  According to Julian Mann (Christian Today, June 21^st 2021) my work to ensure that these degrading and harmful practices are banned will mean that “Christian pastors could be banned from saying the Lord’s Prayer with same-sex attracted people”.

This type of reporting inevitably feeds the narrative that certain Christians are now facing their own special form of “persecution”, which not only bolsters their sense of identity as God’s “chosen remnant” but also helps them justify why they are so beleaguered and vilified.  This narrative attracts many Christians who are eager to find support for the contentious views they hold, but it comes at a considerable cost – as it alienates an increasing number of Christians who wish to find more common ground.

There is one significant truth, however, that those who subscribe to these views consistently side-step.  This is becoming increasingly apparent to both Christians and non-Christians alike.  Indeed, the media are now also beginning to highlight it by asking repeated questions which those who are wedded to defending their right to “pray the gay away” refuse to answer. And the question?  Why will you not acknowledge or address the mounting evidence of the deep psychological harm that you have caused and are still causing so many LGBT+ people, particularly young LGBT+ people?

Medical professionals are clear; international institutions such as the UN are clear; hundreds if not thousands of senior faith leaders are clear; and now the UK government itself is clear – “conversion therapy” is harmful and must be banned in order to protect LGBT+ people whose lives are being damaged and destroyed by it.  Just how many more lives need to be lost before people decide to take this on board?

Of course, Jesus never caused anyone harm.  Indeed, quite the opposite – he had very strong words to say to those who cause “any of these little ones to suffer” (Matt 18:6).  Indeed, his whole ministry was characterised by showing unconditional love and compassion to those who were hurting and who had been judged unacceptable by the religious leaders around them.

I have recently run a series of testimonies on my blog site, Via Media, by LGBT+ Christians documenting the years of abuse they have suffered at the hands of church leaders.  The Bishop of London has called them “texts of terror” before going on to ask church leaders to recognise the harm that they are causing.  There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of stories just like them.  LGBT+ Christians being repeatedly told that who they are is unacceptable, that they did not have enough faith to be “healed”, that more often than not their problem lay with their primary relationships – such as with their parents – and so added yet more pain and anguish to those already hurting.  All had suffered rejection, most had had to leave their churches, all spoke of the mental toll it had had on them – often with quite harrowing results.

And the response from those who were responsible for their pain?

The truth is that the overwhelming response from these church leaders has been to shout even more loudly in the media about their “right” to continue causing such trauma and harm.  No one has seen fit to apologise.  No one has stopped and reflected on the serious safeguarding issues that have been presented. They have no plausible answer to the harm that they have caused and continue to cause, save to ignore the evidence and condemn the messengers instead.

The worrying thing is that this is sadly all too familiar – indeed, the Bible is full of such stories.

Israel constantly ignored their shortcomings and dealt with the prophets who confronted them with the evidence of their wrongdoings by ignoring them, and worse.  They vilified them, they mocked them, they berated them, and they even killed them.  It is a strategy as old as the hills, but one which always has the same outcome –the people who ignore the warnings end up facing the full force of God’s judgement.

So, it is time to say “enough”!

Enough of the excuses.  Enough of the spiritual abuse.  Enough of the hardness of heart.  Real people are being hurt and it is being caused – and condoned – by those who preach a message of love, which now sounds hollow and false.  Interestingly, it seems that evangelical Christians have some form in this area.

Take the so-called “smacking ban”, where the Evangelical Alliance and the Christian Institute decided to “stand up to the government” and campaign to be allowed to discipline their children.  This was yet another example of Christians being oblivious to the damage – in this case physical harm – that they were causing.  They believed their God-given right to uphold scripture over-ruled any evidence of the pain and trauma they were causing, despite mounting evidence from professionals to the contrary.

If there is one thing Jesus was clear about, it was the need to stand up to religious leaders who defined themselves by what they were against rather than what they were for, who spent their time putting burdens on other people’s backs that they could not carry, and who prided themselves with the fact they thought they were more righteous than anyone else.

Interestingly, it was those “in the world” who formed the crowds that thronged around Jesus because of the love and compassion that he exuded, which was magnetically attractive – and in stark contrast to the hypocritical piety of the religious leaders, who seemed to think they knew the bible better than Jesus did!

So no, neither I nor anyone else are seeking to ban the Lord’s Prayer.  I am however seeking a ban on any religious practice that is focused on an individual with a predetermined outcome that tells them that they cannot be anything other than heterosexual or cis-gendered.  This includes any prayer that causes someone to suppress or hide who they intrinsically are and more often than not causes them to feel deeply ashamed about who God has made them to be. In contrast, I welcome and encourage any prayer or spiritual guidance that creates a safe space for people to explore who they are and come to a point of peace about how they have been created.  How they then chose to live out their life, in the knowledge of this truth, is quite another story – and one that Jesus promises to accompany us on so that we have fulness of life.

So please join me in praying that God will open the eyes of all those who have been the cause of so much trauma and pain to so many LGBT+ people over the years – that they will be humble enough to recognise the harm that they have done and courageous enough to admit it and apologise for it.

This article was originally written as a Right of Reply to an article about Jayne by Julian Mann for  Christian Today

by the Very Revd Nicholas Henshall, Dean of Chelmsford

It is a privilege to respond to the Via Media series of moving and challenging reflections on LGBT+ Christians experience of the Church and the wider implications of that experience for the LGBT+ community, and for the identity of the Church as a genuinely inclusive culture. As a straight white male, I feel inadequate to the task. These are (in Thomas Merton’s phrase) conjectures of a guilty bystander, offered in the hope that together we can navigate the map of the new country faithfully, inclusively, and assured that Jesus takes us as we are because we can come no other way.

In 1968 Pope Paul VI announced the infamous Catholic ban on artificial contraception. That came as a surprise. The aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council was going into reverse. A young Catholic woman wrote later: “that was the day I took control of my own morality”.

Over recent decades the drip feed of fearful intolerance about human sexuality has had an equally toxic effect. LGBT+ Christians have long since taken control of their own morality. Like the popular response to the Vatican ban, this is corrosive for all of us and gradually erodes the ability of the Church to be heard seriously on a wide range of ethical dilemmas. Why should anyone listen to the churches on major biblical issues such as the evil caused by borrowing and lending money at interest (about which the Bible says so much) when it seems incapable of addressing issues of human sexuality (on which the Bible as a whole says almost nothing, and on which Jesus is completely silent)?

More disturbing still is that the landscape and rhetoric have become increasingly contested. A decade ago, when I was an acting Archdeacon, my evangelical colleague asked me to put together some resources that we could make available to clergy for the blessing of same sex partnerships. We – and our Bishop – saw this as completely uncontroversial. That today we are formally not permitted to bless same sex couples seems astounding. The recent outspoken decision of a hundred Roman Catholic priests in Germany to defy the latest Vatican ban on blessing same sex couples is a standing rebuke to our own lack of courage here.

In his 2006 collection, The Other, the Polish Nobel Prize winning journalist and commentator Ryszard Kapuscinski critiques the Western response to the non-European and says something absolutely crucial about what happens when we “other” people who are different. At best it harms both the other and the other-er. At worst it leads to genocide. Othering may have been theologically validated by parts of the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa, but excluding people on the grounds of taste and culture dressed up as principle is both common and deeply corrosive both for living faith and for wider community cohesion. So-called “conversion therapy” is an extreme form of othering, and responding with compassion is necessary but not sufficient, certainly for churches with a very uneven track record in their response to diversity.

Once again, Jesus in the Gospels gives us startling counter examples. Jesus loves and welcomes the “other” (and those othered by Jesus’ own community): a Jewish tax collector; a pagan centurion and his boy; a Canaanite woman; and so on. Instead of judging them, he holds them up to others as examples for us to imitate. The exception here of course is when it comes to the religious elite. Most extraordinarily, Jesus others himself in extreme ways in order to stand with the other.

Multiple pathologies hover around human sexuality among many Christians. These are inexplicable by reference to Bible, tradition or reason. Sexuality stirs up a much more visceral reaction. Some years ago a senior church leader said that he felt physically sick when people talked about homosexuality. That is not good theology!

Why is sex the stumbling block? At what point did sexual identity and orientation become the touchstone of an entirely novel understanding of biblical orthodoxy?

For western Christians, the double whammy of Original Sin (a doctrine unknown to patristic and orthodox theology, and – I would suggest – unknown to the Bible) plus the linking of that doctrine to genital activity have left a toxic legacy which constantly threatens our ability to have sane and faithful conversations about human sexuality. There is a related and consequent inability to recognise the damage we inflect on others. We still have a significant way to go to climb our way out of an Augustinian pessimism about sex, and indeed about human flourishing more generally.

Pope Francis’ made a splendidly inclusive statement in the context of Black Lives Matter: “We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of human life.” Fantastic logic, but – as a comedian quipped recently on the radio – banning the blessing of same sex couples was not the obvious way to follow that up. And as a young woman involved annually in Pride, my youngest daughter has developed a wonderful sense of irony as year by year she faces fellow Christians (of rather different convictions) yelling at her that she’s on the road to hell. Really?

It would be helpful if we were a bit more honest – that for most of us there is very little theology in our response to most issues in human sexuality, but rather a visceral response. At least the medieval church – hardly sympathetic to LGBT+ rights – recognised that there was very little in Scripture to support their position and largely resorted to arguments from natural law.

In a beautiful comment recently on the BBC World Service a devout Moslem lesbian described the resolution of her own struggle with her sexuality. She came to the conclusion that because Allah did not make mistakes, Allah could not have made a mistake in making her. Those are words of deep reassurance that the Christian churches need to say unequivocally to all of those it has “othered” – not simply expressing a vague liberal tolerance of difference but insisting that all of us are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139) and intended by God. Our failure to see that is part of our own alienation.

Traditional Christian moral teaching takes seriously both the sensus fidelium (i.e. what most Christians are thinking) and personal conscience. These have not been so obvious in contemporary Anglican discourse. The challenge of the experience of so many of those whom we have “othered” – so powerfully expressed in the Via Media testimonies about conversion therapy – suggests strongly that churches need to go rather further than therapeutic listening and have the boldness to embrace the “other” as the lost part of ourselves.

by the Right Reverend Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

The General Synod debate on Conversion Therapy was easily one of the hardest it fell to me to chair. We were allowed something like 75 minutes in which to deal with the substantive motion, several amendments and even one amendment to an amendment. So many members wanted to speak that it was vital not to lose sight of the thrust of the motion amid the practical issues of moving of amendments, motions for closure, and voting. When I came to leave the chamber, I could hardly move for members wanting to thank me for having managed the debate with pace, clarity and good humour. Not everyone was happy; there are always some who think a balanced debate is one where half of the speakers are advocating their particular view, and the other half cover all remaining possible views. But, outshadowing the process, was the outcome. Synod called for a ban on Conversion Therapy by massive majorities in all three Houses.

It has taken a while for the proposal to go further, but in the recent Queen’s Speech, opening the new session of Parliament, the UK government has given a clear commitment to progressing matters. When the debate on the Speech took place in the House of Lords, I took the opportunity to remind Parliament of the Synod vote and was delighted when the government minister responding to the debate, Baroness Susan Williams, endorsed my comments.

Progress, but not as yet victory. The government have continued to send out mixed messages, saying there will need to be consultation before legislative proposals are formed. Consultation, of course, but that has all too often been a phrase used to excuse foot-dragging. We are never going to achieve legislation that everyone agrees is perfect, especially when balancing potentially conflicting human rights. Sometimes we need to just get on with things, and make any necessary changes later, in the light of experience.

So, if there’s going to be consultation, let’s make it as short and snappy as we can. In which spirit, let me offer a couple of starter points, to see if we can get the conversation going. I’ve shown my theological working, but you do not need to agree with all my beliefs in order to engage with the rest of the argument.

First, let’s focus on the victim not the perpetrator.

As Mary’s wonderful song, the Magnificat, illustrates, our God does not side with the powerful but with the weak and outcast. He is the God who seeks remedy for the oppressed not protection for the strong.

In the nineteenth century, when Parliament raised the Age of Consent to 16, it did so in the teeth of considerable opposition from members who were worried that their attraction to young girls would land them in trouble, for failing to distinguish a 14 year old from a child of 16. If the children featured in their conversation at all, it was as temptresses, looking to lure unwary older men into criminality. It never occurred to them that the onus to ensure their proposed partner was of age fell on them, and if in doubt, to refrain.

If the consultation on Conversion Therapies (and I confess I’d rather call it Conversion Abuse, rather than dignify it with medical terminology) spends too much time and effort on trying to define exactly how far a perpetrator can go, or what procedures they can use, before breaking the law, then we will have lost that vital victim centrality. We need to focus on the wounding not the weapon. What matters in a victim centred approach to law is the severity and durability of the harm done, not whether that damage was done by prayer, hypnosis or psychological techniques.

There is now a massive pile of evidence to support how damaging these abuses are in general. When it comes to the particularities of an individual trial and conviction, the discretion of judges to sentence at an appropriate level provides ample scope to distinguish between levels of severity of abuse. Let it remain the responsibility of those who wish to carry out “therapies” to ensure their actions will never cause harm.

Secondly, consent is only consent if informed and freely given.

At the heart of the Gospel lies the love of God, shown fully in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This love, freely given, invites every person to respond equally freely. Love forced or coerced is not love at all.

The harrowing stories of those damaged by attempts to change their sexuality usually begin in the victims’ early or mid teens. Pressure from parents, or from church leaders, has all too often played a major part in them feeling they have to change. The procedures to which they are exposed are then often led by those same individuals who have applied the pressure. There is a deep irony in the fact that the voices who argue most stridently that a teenager cannot give consent to life changing gender therapies, in the highly controlled and monitored environment of the NHS, are often the very voices who believe that same teenager can give free and informed consent to Conversion Therapy, in the far less transparent and accountable environment of a prayer meeting or attempted exorcism.

Putting it bluntly, I struggle to see how any child judged not old enough to make an informed and free enough judgment to place a cross on a ballot paper can be considered capable of giving informed consent to attempts to change their sexual feelings, outside of a setting at least as managed and monitored as that provided by public health services.

Finally, we don’t have to get everything right in a piece of legislation prior to publishing a Bill. Parliamentary process allows many opportunities to reflect and consider, and for those interested to lobby for amendment to this or that clause. Even when a Bill becomes an Act, it doesn’t have to be the last ever word on a subject. If a law is not working well enough, it can readily be amended or repealed. Meanwhile, whilst we fail to press on with draft legislation, young people are continuing to suffer abuse disguised as therapy. Their harm is real and immediate. For their sakes we need to make this consultation both short and to the point.