Professor Wesley Hill
Australia’s ex-gay movement is almost dead, but out of the ashes have risen those who believe they can live a celibate life, free of all that gay sex, for Jesus.
For decades, Christian groups ran so-called “ex-gay” or “gay conversion” organisations aimed at turning people straight through therapy that at best involved praying very hard and at the very worst involved self-harm or exorcism on the (often unwilling) participants in an effort to get them to stop being gay. In the face of public opposition to gay conversion therapy due to the mental health problems and suicide risk associated with it (when it doesn’t “work”), many of the groups have now shut down or shifted focus.
The largest ex-gay organisation, Exodus International, collapsed in 2013 when leader Alan Chambers issued a strong apology to the gay community for the “pain and hurt” experienced by gay people who couldn’t change their sexuality. An Australian version of Exodus International, Living Water, shut down in 2014, meaning that there are very few organisations left in Australia now openly seeking to turn gay people straight.
Out of the demise of this movement, however, has come a new approach: gay Christian celibacy, where the church accepts people are same-sex attracted, but only if they don’t act on it and live a single life without sex.
Last week Ridley Theological College and St Hilary’s Church flew Professor Wesley Hill — an evangelical academic from the Trinity School for Ministry in Pennsylvania in the US — to Australia for a set of three talks. The free talks in suburban Melbourne were booked out and focused on Hill’s beliefs about living his life as a celibate gay man, in accordance with his reading of the Bible.
It’s the second time Hill has visited Australia, after Liberty Christian Ministries flew him out for a conference in 2015. Recordings of at least two of the talks are available online and reveal a softer approach to the topic that has haunted some Christian evangelicals, as society has moved towards a growing acceptance of LGBTI people.
[Why can’t sexually active gay men donate blood?]
Hill talks of not slandering same-sex relationships or giving into homophobia but instead preaches living a “washed” life where gay people can admit that they are gay but just don’t act on it, in the hope that whatever comes after will somehow make up for what they’ve missed out on in this life.
“Same-sex partnerships may be filled with all sorts of virtues. They may be filled with what we Christians say is common grace … but they’re still, at their very best, still contrary to nature. In that they miss that unity and difference that God creates male and female to be,” Hill said.
Sexual purity is key, he said:
“Gay people misinterpret and distort our true selves. If we look inside our attractions and interpret those attractions as same-sex genital expression … We are not wrong to want to love others of the same sex, but we need to love them in a way that is holy.”
Not everyone who attended the lectures seemed to buy Hill’s arguments, however. At one of the lectures this week, Hill was challenged on how much pressure gay Christians face from some in their church to abide by their interpretation of the Bible, while overlooking other aspects, like the length of women’s hair, adultery, or other so-called sins.
To those in the religion who have come to a more progressive view on homosexuality, Hill said that while it might be motivated by compassion, churches “should not be redefining our sexual ethics” and instead be shifting people’s perspectives so that gay people who live celibate lives don’t feel lonely or pressure to be married.
Former Christian preacher Anthony Venn-Brown, who spent 22 years attempting to convert to heterosexuality, now monitors the ex-gay movement and works with victims of ex-gay programs. He set up the Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International in 2013 to train church leaders about LGBTI issues. He told Crikey that this iteration of the ex-gay movement largely preached the same views about homosexuality as its predecessor, but without the part that claimed people can be delivered to heterosexuality.
[To err is human … and Devine]
“Celibacy is the new ex-gay. All those organisations that used to preach that change is possible had to face the reality that it is not, and so they’ve had to change their message, and it’s now ‘I am gay, but I will never act on it’, but the fundamental things about this not being natural, and not part of God’s order remain,” he said. “The thing that really concerns me is what does this message give to young gay and lesbian people in congregations? Or to their parents or their friends? There’s still shame around it in the church.”
Venn-Brown said celibacy was asking a gay Christian to shut down a very fundamental part of human nature, and he believed in many cases, as with conversion therapy, it would not be sustainable.
“When I was attending the final Exodus Conference in the US I developed a friendship with the vice president, Randy Thomas. He was at the same place Wesley Hill is preaching about. In fact, Randy talked with me about celibacy. And preached about it as his own personal choice. Randy was in his early 40s. I can respect people making adult choices. It’s their life, not mine. I can’t accept this being preached to all and sundry. Since that time Randy has moved away from the celibacy teaching. Maybe Wesley will too. For many of us this is a long journey. It took me 22 years to finally accept that I was gay.”
The full ex-gay movement does continue. Groups such as Liberty Christian Ministries and Triumphant Ministries Toowoomba both claim to offer support for leaving the LGBTI life, but they go to pains to say they’re not a gay cure service.
Beyond Egypt is reported to still offer conversion therapy, but it keeps its internet presence minimal and has a rigorous vetting process in place to ensure its methods remain secretive from the public. Many of these groups are now also setting up practices in the Asia-Pacific region where homosexuality is far less accepted.
In January, the Victorian government announced plans to crack down on ex-gay therapists, with those found to be offering ex-gay therapy facing up to two years in jail.
“When I was attending the final Exodus Conference in the US I developed a friendship with the vice president, Randy Thomas.”
I really shouldn’t find this so amusing but ……………..Randy Thomas hahahahahahaha
In no way to be confused with his cousin Doubting Thomas.
Having been raised Anglican I have some understanding of churchy matters.
But if God created everything surely he/she/it also created homosexuals, so what’s the fuss about? All God’s creatures, isn’t that the dictum…..
I can’t understand why the worship Jesus crowd are so anti gay. Think about it; Jesus hung around with 12 male deciples for nearly all his life. Makes you wonder if Jesus wasn’t just a little bit gay? Just saying.
Josh, you’re writing some good stuff. Well done.
I find intriguing the suggestion that God made human beings, with all of their complex combination of likes, dislikes, desires and impulses and called them good and then said: “Nah! No way! You are not allowed to use that. Yes, you’re gonna ache, right down to the tips of your toes; so go and lift some cars!”
Putting the male G-Spot in a place that requires alternative access and then suggesting “Computer say’s NO!” to having that itch scratched is a bit twisted, IMHO.
The repression and oppression of homosexuality has it’s basis in the mis-use and manipulation of reliable texts taken way out of context, which served a particular purpose, for a specific time and place; such as the Leviticus reference. Suffice to say that the dishing out of guilt and condemnation has its origins in politics; church politics being the most dastardly of all forms. For this Rome has a lot to answer.
Homosexuality, like any other sexuality, in this modern age, is not considered by the bible; it couldn’t be. Homosexuality, while falling on an overall continuum of human expression, has, tangentially a spectrum, a continuum of its own. It is the reductionism of those opposed who do not see that spectrum, but use a single sweeping motion to encapsulate it into a single representation of genital expression. The mere fact that they spend so much time concentrating their efforts fighting that expression says more about them than it does about those living in wholesome, stable, loving, same sex relationships; that put many heterosexual couples to shame; for both longevity and faithfulness.
Those that use the analogy about gay sex being about playing in a waste disposal unit remind me of an episode of Qi where Stephen Fry talks about the prissy nature of some people talking about body parts. Those who refer to a woman as having a rear bottom and a “Front bottom”.
The sexual reductionists like to suggest that Gay men are only interested in “playing in waste” while conveniently forgetting that the human body uses two parts of the anatomy to dispose of waste and that in the case of women the other form of waste comes from what Fry has conveniently referred to as the “Front Bottom”. If we ran that past a few of them we might see a few brain farts and conniptions.
The whole infatuation that the church has about regulating the sex lives of human beings beggars belief. This young professor’s ‘opinion’ regarding the option of celibacy, has been dragged over the coals, more recently, as a sad, but demonstrably sick joke, through the evidence, now apparently worldwide, of just how damaging the repression of human sexual expression can be; as demonstrated, in Australia, through the evidence brought before the ongoing Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to child Sexual Abuse.
Shame and Guilt are poisons to the human psyche and are the preferred tools of trade of institutional hypocrisy, not the least of which is perpetrated by institutionalised and fundamentalist religion, of all shades.