Does the Church Kill ‘Gay’ People?
Author: Andrew Comiskey
September 18, 2023
Part 2: The MacGuffin of
Conversion Therapy
This is the second blog of
our three-part series. If you haven’t already, please read part 1.
‘Conversion therapists’
permeate
Dear Alana like mold, wounders who pose as healers and hasten the
disintegration of otherwise whole ‘gay’ lives, first Alana’s, then Fung’s, who
comes to his senses and embraces his ‘gay’ self.
It’s a now familiar MacGuffin,
meaning a plot device that shows up recurringly and connects the dots. It lends
continuity and motion to the plot (
Dear Alana’s 8-segments) but lacks significance
to the outcome of the story. Why is conversion therapy a MacGuffin?
Because Fung’s nemesis isn’t
a type of therapy. It’s the Church and Her call for all to live chaste lives.
Chastity is the virtue most
associated with sexual wholeness in the Catholic world. It means integration:
reconciling one’s ache for God with his or her ache for others as to realize
God’s design for our bodies. That means cultivating a Spirit-filled commitment
to loving people well, with full-bodied ‘gift-giving’ reserved for creating and
welcoming children (opposite-sex marriage). This means the Church celebrates
all people but cannot and will never bless any sexual union other than a
marital one.
Whew. Hard sell. Chastity is
an equal opportunity offender, glorious to some, a stench to others. For Fung, chastity
(and the Church) is a stench because it frames ‘gay’ desires as disintegrated,
their expression in sexual acts as wrong.
What then do people with
‘gay’ desires do? Fung cites ‘conversion therapists’ as hurtful ‘fixers’ who
held out cures for himself and Alana to take away these distressing feelings and
failed miserably. I was included on this list of culprits (though I never met
Alana or Fung) as well as three deceased colleagues: Elizabeth Moberly, Joseph
Nicolosi, and Father John Harvey.
Fung errs in several ways
here. First, ‘conversion therapy’ doesn’t exist. That is the name activists ascribe
to any effort people make to diminish or change homosexual feelings. In my 43
years of ministry in this area, I have never heard anyone use that term. An
accurate term is a ‘reparative’ understanding of same-sex attraction. This is
based on the perspective that same-sex desires reveal unmet or distorted
emotional needs more than an adult sexual destiny.
Second, no wise helper who
explores this ‘reparative’ approach with a struggler promises a ‘cure.’ Simon
uses ‘fix it’ language throughout his story and is always disappointed (from ‘when
will my healing come?’ to awaiting in vain ‘the silver bullet’). A reparative
understanding simply opens a door for strugglers to look at other ways of interpreting
homosexuality by raising the question, ‘What do my passions mean?’
Third, this view helps, not
hinders people seeking to resolve same-sex feelings. For Christians committed
to becoming chaste (the process of living within God’s design and boundaries
for sexual relating), reparative perspectives offer wisdom, compassion, and space
for healing distortions in one’s sexuality.
That helps people pursue
chastity. Fung has a rather good experience of exploring this ‘repair’: he describes
opening to his humble father (who admits to gaps in their relationship and
makes amends) and securing good non-sexual guy friends. He is less clear on
Alana’s experience of counseling and support groups. What we do know is that
Alana’s perfectionism escalated, and she couldn’t manage the tensions between
her spirituality and sexuality.
‘Conversion therapy’ is a MacGuffin.
It’s a broad, obvious culprit which doesn’t even exist in those terms. Reparative
stuff probably helped Alana and Fung. What hurt them was a disintegrated
approach to chastity. We’ll look next week at how we can best integrate our disintegrated
parts, and how the Church helps us to do so.
Join Andrew Comiskey, Marco Casanova and Katie Comiskey as they discuss this topic further. Listen now on
Spotify,
Apple Podcasts or
YouTube.
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