4. The Gospel According to John

00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode includes references to suicide from the start and uses historical language about it too. There's strong language and discussions of disordered eating.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: I did not realize during the years that I was in this movement I was causing harm to anyone. I literally and honestly had no idea that that was the result. By nineteen ninety eight, I'd spend a decade in the X gay movement. I was living as an ex gay man, making my living off my story, my family's story, and preaching about how conversion therapy works. And while I can say I did not realize I was harming anyone, the evidence of the devastation was right in front of me. If only I'd looked. Here is a picture of the year I came to love and action. There I am looking very cute, very George Michael.

00:01:12
Speaker 1: Right there, you're PALTI.

00:01:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, patting. And these were guys that I was in their program with. And this man next to me committed suicide because he came from a very very strict evangelical family and he felt he could never live up to their expectations of him, and he put a gun in his mouth because he couldn't change. This is atonement. The John Paulk Story. I'm John Paulk and I'm Kate Holland.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: This is episode four The Gospel according to John.

00:02:06
Speaker 2: When I took the job at Focus on the Family, Anne and I, along with baby Timmy, moved to Colorado Springs. The red carpet was rolled out for us and we were living in a community of like minded people. Our social lives revolved around my new role too, and I was working at the heart of it all in the public policy division of Focus. I didn't even know what public policy was. I was head of the Homosexuality and Gender division. I launched my conference Love One Out, I wrote books, I did interviews, all for one aim to educate a primarily conservative Christian audience about the origins of homosexuality from our perspective, where it comes from, what the Bible says, and ultimately to influence public policy. That was the crux of it. It went way beyond individuals or single families. It was about combating the so called pro game movement.

00:03:16
Speaker 1: The religious right does a lot of lobbying across the United States, much of it is in public. At one stage, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, had a radio show that was reportedly heard daily by more than two hundred and twenty million people in one hundred and sixty four countries. But other policy influencing happens behind closed doors.

00:03:42
Speaker 2: There was a private, hidden group called the DC Group, as in Washington, d C. This was a group of representatives from the major conservative ministries of the day that met once a month in Washington, D C. And the whole goal of this group was to plot and strategize how to topple homosexuality. This was mostly a public policy group dealing with political issues and legislatures, etc. Etc. And they thought they had found the solution, and that was used the story of former gay men and former gay women to illustrate the story that change was possible. So I wasn't only to speak to the media and to conference guests. Is a matter of fact. One of the first things that Anne and I did is they had us travel to the state of Hawaii. Timmy was still in a bascinet, so we would carry him around and we would walk through the halls of the Hawaii state capital and Honolulu PLoP our baby on the desk of some states telling them why homosexuals did not deserve equal protection under the law. I was upon in that chess game. My story was used to further a bigger agenda against gay rights. My whole livelihood, our reputation, our public persona, our message was solely based on the fact that Anne and I were the embodiment of change. I was John, the professional ex gay.

00:05:44
Speaker 1: The way I see this, it's you change hearts, you change minds, then you change laws.

00:05:52
Speaker 2: When it comes to the public policy side of my position, I was never ever comfortable with that role. Frankly, it held no interest to me. I did everything I could to steer myself away from that, and it was as though I had my agenda and they had their agenda for me.

00:06:21
Speaker 1: In November nineteen ninety eight, Hawaiian voters passed a constitutional amendment. It gave the state to the power to define marriage as between a man and a woman, effectively banning same sex marriage until twenty thirteen. This advocacy from pro conversion therapy groups is very powerful and they had success whilst John was a part of it. Casey Pick from the Trevor Project says these groups are continuing to influence legislation today.

00:06:51
Speaker 3: This is a practice existing on the fringes that is targeting particular communities and that does its best getting by in the shadows. But the forces behind it have been very focused for a very long time. So the legal groups, the advocacy groups that are encouraging conversion therapy, that are promoting the idea, especially today, that gender identity can be controlled and changed, they are all part of a coherent movement that is interconnected and that is very overt about its agenda. So you are seeing powerful group of funders and advocacy organizations and communications teams and lawyers that are deeply invested in the idea that sexual orientation and gender identity can be changed. If it's something that can be changed, then why protect you from discrimination at your job, why allow you to marry the person of your choice. So, in some ways, conversion therapy, while it's an issue that hasn't been at the forefront of everybody's mind, especially now when we're talking about things like participating in sports, access to bathrooms, healthcare, marriage, military service, all these big things. The idea that you can just change somebody's sexual orientation or gender identity and that this is something that should be changed underlies.

00:08:35
Speaker 4: All of that.

00:08:37
Speaker 1: I think This also maps onto broader goals of conservatism that affect us all. LGBTQ plus or not. These ideas impact the role of women in society. There's a fundamental underpinning to much of it that a woman's role is in the home, rearing children, and it's about money and power.

00:08:57
Speaker 3: Too, and so really there there are powerful groups that are pushing those because it's the foundation of everything else they do to silence and suppress LGBTQ people.

00:09:10
Speaker 2: When I was telling my story of how I became an ex gay, I didn't think that I was living a double life, but there was definitely a split in my emotions. Externally, I was on top of the world. I was respected a celebrity in the Christian sphere. But internally, well, that was a slightly different story. I remember Anne saying to me once, just be honest with me, Just be honest with me about your struggle or struggles. And by this point my struggles were creeping up. We'd been married for about six years. They weren't on the outside, but the way they started manifesting was in and secretive pornography use, and well, you know, I had starting watching pornography at the age of fourteen in junior high at my stepdad's sixteen millimeter videos. So it was a very difficult struggle for me to try and shake, and as a Christian and now a national Christian leader, Oh my lord, can you imagine if people found out I watched pornography from time to time. At the same time, my drinking started to increase. The sobriety I'd found in AA when I was previously out was gone. When I was representing Focus on the Family, of course, there was no alcohol use permitted, but as I began traveling more, speaking at churches hosting Love One Out, I'll never forget that day that I was told sixty minutes wanted to interview me. I'm like, good, Lord, were there, And I remember traveling to Manhattan and getting off out of the car limousine, of course, and sitting across from Leslie's stall being interviewed by sixty minutes. This had become my life. So the idea of being utterly honest and forthright was not something I felt safe doing because there was no thought to me I would ever revert back to being homosexual. That was not my desire in any way, but it increasingly became something that I was having to push down. That is the best way to describe. It's like I put my hands one on top of each other in front of my sternum and push, push, push it down into my abdomen, into my soul area. I had to push it down.

00:12:19
Speaker 1: As John's public image rose, his appearance changed too, something that didn't go unnoticed by Joseph Nicolosi from nath the psychologist and one of the leaders of the movement, whom John often shared the stage with.

00:12:34
Speaker 2: I began to gain weight, and one day doctor Nicolosi pulled me aside we were traveling. He said, I'm concerned about your weight gain, and I thought, why is this any of your concern? He said, if you gain weight and become overweight, people will think you're compensating. I knew exactly what he meant. In other words, I'm eating my feelings. I'm burying my homosexual struggle in food and eating and overeating is a very tangible signal that something's wrong. For the movement, it was about protecting the image, but I felt that there was a reason to gain weight. If I got morbidly obese, he would keep men away from me because I would no longer be attractive, and that worked. It was false. It wasn't solving anything, but it took care of the temporal issue of keeping men away from me.

00:13:46
Speaker 1: John's friend Josh struggled too, but in the opposite direction. He showed us a picture of him at a conference.

00:13:53
Speaker 5: That's me and the red I gotten skinny. I'd lost one hundred and fifty pounds. Because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was to control my weight. So I began to focus on and I called my nine hundred calorie a day diet a fast to remind myself that what I had struggled with in a way to do something about it. Looking back, my nutrition says that sounds like an eating disorder.

00:14:18
Speaker 6: And this was.

00:14:18
Speaker 5: Literally last year. She said this. I thought, oh, I think you might be right. Yeah. In those conferences, man, we were clinging to each other for hope, like we were just each other's life rafts. Man. I had a friend in every state and some in Canada even that I would network with to support. When we'd fly to each other, we'd call each other, how are you doing? It was just I needed that system to stay afloat. Living in rural Ohio. You know what I mean, there's nobody to look to for support.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just food that Josh was controlling.

00:14:50
Speaker 5: I'd never let my family ask if I was happy. I didn't think that was a fair question as a person who struggled with same sex attraction. My mom asked me that one day, are you happy? I said, Mom, please don't ever ask me that questioned again. I'd be doing fifty six other things right now if I wanted to be happy. So I never thought that was a fair question for somebody to ask me. But outside of the church, and this is why I can hear the critics saying, now, well, he's given himself over. Of course he's happy. Of course he's feeling quote unquote free. I would say the least shame I've ever felt, and the most free I've ever felt, is being an openly gay man who's accepting his gay identity. I felt sometimes more shame, I know I did in the context of the church than I do outside of the church.

00:15:31
Speaker 2: And of course they could explain that. Of course, say you could explain that you know your feelings are never legitimate, because they'll say, well, your feelings are as fallen as the rest of you. Your feelings are sinful. Yeah, your desires are sinful, but your feelings are too. There is no legitimacy in anything we say.

00:15:50
Speaker 5: It was almost like you were being gas lit by the church. Oh you're feeling this way, you shouldn't be, or you should feel this way or think this way. There was always a response or an explanation for the way that you should go, you know, or who you should be. There was always an interruption, there was always a response. I don't know. It was just frustrating, felt circular. The arguments, Yeah.

00:16:16
Speaker 1: It's a catch twenty two. You're happy now you're out as gay. Well, that's because you've fallen too sin You were unhappy trying to be x gay. You weren't trying hard enough.

00:16:28
Speaker 2: Well, there is safety in giving pet answers, and I found in my own journey as an ex gay leader, pet answers formulaic answers were part of my repertoire. Oh you think you might be gay, Come into my office, sit down, and in an hour I can figure out if you are or if you are not, and if you are, exactly why you are.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: Josh's path to living as an openly gay ma'am was not one he thought he would ever journey down.

00:17:03
Speaker 5: I was going to be a professional Christian, you know, just progressing till the day I died. That's what was my trajectory. I really did.

00:17:10
Speaker 2: While Josh and I have talked about our shared experiences many times throughout our friendship, sitting with him in my apartment recording, this was surprising. He shared stories we'd never discussed.

00:17:22
Speaker 5: Early on in my experience with campus crusade, I remember when I first felt different as a staff member and being gay at the same time. The director at the campus at that particular chapter said, you're going to have a short leash as a person who deals with homosexuality under my leadership. You have a one strike policy and if you are to mess up, quote unquote, you're gone and you will be required to resign. And living in an unresilient, unsustainable way. Not having true alternatives to not being gay, my sexuality was looking for an escape, and I found my self compromising sexual activity by calling a phone sex line. And I remember being the transparent confessor of my sins that I was telling my roommate at the time, and my roommate reminded me aren't you supposed to tell the director that this happened? And I said, you're right, And I ended up confessing that I was required to read a statement aloud to about fifty students and other staff exactly what happened, telling them Number one, I'm gay or struggle with the same sex attraction. Number two, I decided to have phone sex. And three, I'm submitting my resignation. And I'm just a crying mess in front of this whole group of students and staff. Yeah, and that happened. That was really embarrassing, And I've never seen anyone have to do that with any other sin. And I don't know if that wasn't about face or a way for them to control their image or their risk as an organization for me to do that, but then that's what I left. I left. It was kind of a forced outing number one, and then almost like a shame shaming session or something to make an example of myself to these people. I don't know, because I had a very front facing role with this organization at the time.

00:19:18
Speaker 2: I know, and you're right, homosexual issues are dealt differently than everybody.

00:19:24
Speaker 5: I think still to this jests. Yeah, And I thought to myself. I haven't touched another man. I mean I was on the celibate road. I was, you know, six or seven years in. At that point, I was even a person that looked at pornography. I took pride in that, you know, not having looked at porn you know, I think there was an incapacity to manage someone like me. But at the same time, I'll never forget the same person because we would get in trouble for masturbating, by the way, as Christian boys or men, even to this day, and I remember this particular. I think the leader is actually a closeted gay man, to be honest. He would always hammer me about masturbation. Did you masturbate today? Did you masturbate today? It was persistent, and if you masturbated, it was you had sinned.

00:20:07
Speaker 2: And I remember, because you had fantasy that would go with it or none?

00:20:11
Speaker 5: What if I was just biologically it needed a release if you will, you know. And I remember one day he's married with kids, and I remember one day going, when's the last time you masturbated? I decided to ask back, and yeah, he puts his head down. He goes last night in the shower while my wife was in the bedroom and I thought, you've been I let him hammer me with that shit for years.

00:20:43
Speaker 6: I think very few people have understood just how much toxic religious teaching embeds itself in people's minds and experiences. It manifests it in myself.

00:20:54
Speaker 1: This is Reverend Brandon Robertson. He's a progressive Christian and the pastor of Sunnyside Reformed Church in New York City. He also happens to be gay.

00:21:05
Speaker 6: Five years ago, I would have said I didn't really have religious trauma. But as I started working in therapy and kind of looking at the subconscious voices in my own head that make me feel guilty if I engage in a gay sexual relationship, or if I'm teaching theology or ethics that are contrary to what I learned in my conservative church. It's so easy for those subconscious voices to bubble up, and so I've done a lot of work to really identify what those are in my own life and reframe and see both my theology and my ethics and the way I live in the world in a different light. But then I also, as a pastor, have had the honor but also horrifying experience of sitting with people who are sixty years old who have just come out of the closet in the past couple of years and come to me and say, I still fear hell every single day of my life.

00:21:59
Speaker 1: Brandon's candidate It's a New Testament at Drew University. An author, he's also known as the TikTok pastor, creating videos about theology and progressive Christianity.

00:22:12
Speaker 6: I think the way that I explain religious trauma and fear to non religious people is to think about the idea of being told from childhood that your salvation is contingent upon believing the right things and living the right way. It's ingrained in people throughout their whole lives. It's not just that you'll be rejected from a church. But the conservative Christian movement uses Versus Revelation Chapter twenty one, which is the final book of the Bible in the New Testament, which talks about a lake of fire that burns with fire and brimstone for all eternity. And it's got this horrifying line in it that says the smoke of their torment rises to the throne of the Lamb day and night for all eternity. It's this idea that if you're not with us and walking in our path, that for all eternity, you're going to be tortured, suffering, and separated from God and from everyone you know and love. That sounds crazy, I know, to people who are not raised within it. But if that is the worldview that you walk through the world with for even five years, but most people for thirty forty years, then of course that fear is going to have an outsized influence in the way that you interact with the world. And I even think in the United States context, the modern Christian nationalist movement is born out of people who earnestly are afraid.

00:23:36
Speaker 1: Brandon didn't grow up in a religious family, but age twelve he started to attend a fundamentalist Baptist charge in Baltimore.

00:23:44
Speaker 6: And it was during that time that I was just starting to hit puberty and start thinking about sexuality and attractions. But I also immediately was drawn to this idea that there was a God who created me and had a plan for my life. And so I dove headfirst into Christianity, and within a year or so, I was hearing sermons from the pulpit about the sin of homosexuality and the danger of the gay agenda. And so it became very clear early on in my puberty journey that even though I experienced same sex attractions, so to speak, that this was not acceptable in my tradition or in my church. And I ended up going off to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for college, which is an evangelical school that trains pastors. Moody is traditionally evangelical, very fear based theology, but it's in the heart of downtown Chicago, and so as soon as we would walk off campus, the theology we were learning would contradict the reality we saw on this beautiful, diverse city. And that happened many times.

00:24:46
Speaker 3: For me.

00:24:46
Speaker 6: It was when I hung out with Muslims and recognized that these were not evil, demonic people who worshiped a false God, but had the same values that I had. Or when we went down to Boystown, the gay neighborhood in Chicago at the time, and saw queer people who were not just all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but we're living full lives that looked a lot like our lives as evangelicals. And so my theology really started to shift in that period, and I was studying the Bible in an academic setting, which started to help me ask some questions about what the Bible actually taught. And when I started asking those questions, one of my moody professors called me into her office and basically said, we think that you are going down a dangerous path, and if you would like to graduate, we want you to do a year of conversion therapy in order to prove that you are aligned with us on sexual ethics. And the dean of students literally said that our only hope is that you don't graduate and start waving rainbow flags.

00:25:48
Speaker 1: For the entirety of his final year, Brandon started meeting with a professor for a mode of conversion therapy called healing prayer.

00:25:57
Speaker 6: The version of healing prayer I went through was based on a modality by a woman named Leanne Payne, who has written a number of books on healing homosexuality. And it's at once deeply mystical and spiritual, and so it's very enticing to a lot of people, but it's rooted in the same pseudo psychology that clinical conversion therapy is rooted in, which is again that trauma in your past, distant father and over attached mother equals a gay child, and that if you just heal that trauma, you can heal your sexuality. So a healing prayer session for me in college would look like walking into this professor's office. It was quite strange because we're Evangelical Christians, so we don't use things like holy water or crucifixes, but in healing prayer we did. And so there would be a vial of holy water sitting on her desk, a crucifix, and essentially we'd start praying and we would ask God to bring up a traumatic memory for my past. And I'll give an example of one that stood out for me. My mom had long told me a story of being an infant. My dad was an alcoholic, and one day my dad passed out drunk while I was left in a crib crying apparently for a number of hours, and my mom came home to find me with swollen eyes and a hoarse voice, and it was just this traumatic moment for her. And that memory emerged for me in one of these prayer sessions, and so we would then invite Jesus to step into that memory. What would it look like if Jesus had come into the crib and picked you up and soothed you, instead of you laying there feeling abandoned without your dad. And once that new memory had time to process and you felt the comfort of being comforted by Jesus in your crib, she would then take out the bottle of holy water and typically anoint my chest, my head and ask God to cut off any of the bindings that had on me and had put into my soul. And I would do that once a week my conversion therapy. When it really hit a breaking point was when the end of that year, my professor realized that I wasn't being healed very much, and so she sent me to a church in Wheaton, Illinois called the Church of the Resurrection, and that particular session of healing prayer this kind of intense one. I was brought into a room with one of my Bible college friends who I had kissed. He was a boy, and we had this kind of sexual sin moment, and so they sent us off here. We had to confess our lusts for one another in detail in front of this group of people, and then they separated us into rooms, and that day I was taken into a room with two pastors, and they used holy water to anoint my head, my chest, and they even dripped it over my nether regions, we'll say, and started speaking in tongues over me and really trying to pray out whatever this deep seated sins. And it was in that moment after I walked out of that healing prayer session that I remember looking at my friend who was there with me, and literally saying, this is bullshit, Like this is insane, This has nothing to do with the Bible. This is not our faith, and it's not working.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: There's something quite as you say the crucifix and the Hodie water, it sounds like an sort of almost exorcism type imagery.

00:29:31
Speaker 6: No, totally. And again what's so strange is that Protestants don't generally use these things. We don't believe in those things, at least not to the same degree that like a Roman Catholic might. And yet when it comes to the issue of LGBT people, there is this willingness to go to extremes. There is a willingness to see things as demonic rather than even just a sin struggle or something like they might address any other type of sin, and for the record, I obviously I don't believe being gazes in, but there's this heightened awareness that if you don't deal with this, it's a danger to your soul but also to the community around you. And that's what results, I think, in this really intense intervention in people's sexual orientation and gender identity. At the end of that year of healing prayer, I knew two things. One that I had not been healed of my sexuality, and that too, the religion I was a part of did not look like the religion I saw in the mouth of Jesus in the Gospels, who didn't say much about sexual ethics and who taught a lot more about love than fear. And so that brought me to a place where I began really exploring what my identity as a gay Christian future pastor might look like.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: When I was first in the X gay movement, it was John Smid who guided me through it, and his arguments for conversion therapy were based on the interpretation of a few selective verses.

00:31:05
Speaker 4: The only thing we had to go by were six or seven Bible passages that appeared in our interpretations appeared to say that being in a same sex sexual relationship was sinful. I took it at face value. I never really studied it myself because other people had studied it, and I just took what they had to say, which I admit was was my own fault for not looking into it more closely. But the only thing I would have looked at was something that was already stating those as facts. I would not have allowed myself to look at any progae theology or progae reading or materials, because we always taught that that was wrong, that you shouldn't do that, that that was tempting, or that was something you shouldn't look into. I mean, like, for example, the passage about sodom goemor that was the one that stood out to me the most, because culture has labeled male gay behavior as sodomy based on a scripture that does not in any way teach that they were dealing with homosexuality. It wasn't even there, That's not what they were doing with at all, and the culture has used that word to label male sexuality with men as sodomy.

00:32:28
Speaker 6: The Bible is used to defend conversion therapy pretty much based on the six so called clobber passages that seemingly condemn homosexuality or same sexual relationships, and also conversion therapy people and X gay people would appeal to stories of miraculous conversions and healings in scripture. But what I've discovered in my ten years now as a biblical scholar is that most conservative Christians are actually biblically illiterate. And I don't mean that in an offensive way. I mean the These are the people that claim to build their lives on the Bible. But if you do a modicum of biblical scholarly research, you will find that there's not a verse from Genesis to Revelation that condemns anything like loving consensual same sex relationships. Unfortunately, the people in the X gay movement in particular are the ones that are hyper fixating on identities and making it what makes or breaks someone's true faith. You can't be gay and Christian. You can't be trends and Christian, and that goes against the entire grain of the entire New Testament. And so when you bring those two things together, you really don't have a biblical leg to stand upon. But most Christians are not willing to do even a little bit of research into the culture context language of the Scripture to understand how the ancient world saw sexuality and gender and how different that is from the world that we live in today.

00:33:56
Speaker 2: That John it was based on one one verse in the Bible, just one. It's in firse Corinthians six, passage nine through eleven. Or do you not know the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Neither fornicators, idolators, gossips, et cetera, nor homosexual offenders will inherit the Kingdom of God. That's part one of the verse. The second part is, but such were some of you? You were washed, you were justified, you were sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the spirit of our God. I remember it as it were yesterday. And that passage was the hope when it said and such were some of you? In other words, you could change first.

00:34:58
Speaker 6: Corinthian six' nine is one of the other very common verses from The New, testament and depending on what translation you're reading in Your English, bible it seems really. Clear in Many english translations it says no homosexual offender will enter The kingdom Of god something along those. Lines but as a great deal of research recently has revealed the word homosexual did not appear in The English bible until nineteen forty, six when the translators of The Revised Standard version of The bible were wrestling with this Mysterious greek word. Arsenoquoitai the word arsenoquoitai did not exist in The greek language until it appears In First corinthians by the Apostle, paul Meaning paul invents this. Word the reason we know this word does not mean homosexuality or homosexual offenders is because there are at least thirteen other words In Quoina greek from the first century that refer to various same sex, acts same sex, attraction same sexual. Relationships paul would have used one of the words that the common person would have understood if he was trying to condemn same sex, sex same sex. Relationships, instead he invents the.

00:36:10
Speaker 1: Word so What brandon's saying is that there were words that meant gay that were in common use When paul was, writing words that would have been understood by the. Reader so he must have meant something, else because otherwise he would have just used one of the ones to mean gay already out. There that new word ars na koitai is the one that was later translated in the twentieth century to mean, homosexual And brandon, says the Word paul invented was based on a phrase used earlier in The, bible in The Old, testament and what that word meant there is What paul was actually.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: Condemning all of this is.

00:36:49
Speaker 6: To, say What paul did was look out at his world In corinth and realized that there was a practice going on that he did not have a word to, describe but he thought it was the same thing that was happening in the book Of. Leviticus what was happening In, Leviticus, Well Leviticus chapter eighteen is an entire, chapter devote it to condemning the practices of the pagan nations Of egypt And. Canaan there was no widespread homosexuality or gay, marriage but what was common was men of higher social statuses, abusing raping people of lower social, statuses slaves or people of different. Cultures and we have ample evidence in first Century roman law that if you were A roman citizen and a, man you were permitted legally to have sex with anybody of a lower social status than. You and there was no legal recourse for. Them they were not treated as the same level as humans.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: As you, were according to this, reading because there was no word to condemn the rape of lower class, People paul invented a new.

00:37:52
Speaker 6: One and the last reason we know that that's probably What paul was talking about is that in One corinthian sixt' nine and the other Places paul uses. Arsenocoitsie in The New, testament it's always in a list called a vice, list and it's always tied to economic, exploitation, idolatry and. Abuse so some of the other sins listed in that same list that Arsenocoits i appears in is, prostitution is idol. Worship slavery is sometimes in the, list so that contextualizes whatever Behavior paul is referring, to which again is nothing like loving consensual same sex.

00:38:28
Speaker 1: Relationships For, brandon his biblical understanding and his entire faith comes from The First book Of. John in The New, testament it Says.

00:38:39
Speaker 6: God is, love and Perfect love casts out all fear because fear has to do with. Punishment that verse teaches me that anytime someone is speaking on behalf Of god and stoking, fear especially fear of. Punishment we can be certain that they are not speaking For, god Because god's love expels, sphere especially fear of.

00:39:01
Speaker 1: Punishment, yet when fueled by, fear the consequences of conversion therapy can be devastating and have real world. Impact many people have told their accounts of conversion therapy and its link with suicide and suicidal.

00:39:17
Speaker 4: Ideation during the TIME i was, there there was one suicide attempt by someone and it was really really it was really devastating because a person went missing and we couldn't find.

00:39:31
Speaker 1: Him former house leader and director Of love And Action John smid again.

00:39:37
Speaker 4: And eventually a person drove down the road that he worked with and recognized him walking out of a. Field it just. Happened this person that knew him happened to drive down the road and, say, hey that's so and, so and they called the authorities and they came and found, him and he had suicidal ideation societally. Attempted very devastating for the people for, him he did not. Complete, thankfully he's moved on and over his life he's reconciled his sexuality and thankfully he's still. Here we did not have a lot of that during the YEARS i was, there but, honestly since two thousand and, eight there have been several people who have suicided that went through our program years after the, Program and ALL i can say to that, is you, know suicide is a very very complex, thing and it is a combination of, emotional, spiritual, physical chemical. Realities and in all, honesty WHAT i can say is that the premise that being gay is sinful and wrong and it breaks a relationship With god and it's a shameful thing to experience absolutely plays into people who are suicidally. Attempted in all, HONESTY i can't say that we caused people to commit, suicide BUT i can say that we were absolutely a part of that scenario for many people's, lives and for that we are.

00:41:15
Speaker 1: Accountable one former participant Of love And action told the media that In october two thousand and, four during a one on one, Session John smid said to, him, quote it would be better if you were to commit suicide then go back into the world and become a homosexual. Again the man explained that quite a physical death with my soul, intact was much preferable to a spiritual. DEATH i put this To John, Smid.

00:41:45
Speaker 4: NO i didn't say. That i'll tell you WHAT i. Said this was a guy that was a young man that was in our program In, california and he had been going against the program secretly to attend pro gay meetings with a pro gay organization that was In Marin county at the. Time when we found out that he'd been doing, THAT i sat down with them and met with, them and my words were Which i'm accountable for these. Words, However i'm not accountable for the words That i've been quoted as. Saying there is some difference IS i said it would almost be better if you were dead then to go back and be involved in. Homosexuality and SO i did not say commit suicide at. All but in my conviction at the, time and in our culture and an evangelical world that we were, in especially the little tiny cultist church we were a part, of we believed that being gay was one of the most serious sinful issues anybody could have in their, life and that it would seriously damage their relationship With god and seriously affect any future that they might have socially or. Relationally some theological perspectives within Evangelical christianity and Non Evangelical christianity is that being gay could cost you. Eternity there are some that believe that if you're actively gay and you die, unrepentant you will absolutely go to the fire burning. Hill SO i took that so seriously in that conversation THAT i really wanted him to take it seriously as, Well and that ended up becoming a part of an interview in a local newspaper in Northern, california which then went, viral and that is one of the most quoted things THAT i supposedly have. Said i'm super thankful that he AND i have spoken and have gone back through that conversation and have cleared the air and reconciled both of. Us i've listened to, him and he listened to, me and so on a personal, LEVEL i haven't spoken with him in quite a number of years, now BUT i believe that he's reconciled in being gay and as a, person and that things are well for. Him BUT i, MEAN i take that very seriously THAT i was so strongly convicted AND i conveyed that to him in such a way that absolutely can be conveyed in a majorly wrong and shameful.

00:44:26
Speaker 1: Way i'm not sure that there's really much of a difference between saying you'd be better off dead and you should take your own. Life BUT i find that level of conviction and fear well terrifying in. Itself and did you believe that for yourself then it was better To?

00:44:47
Speaker 4: Oh, yes, ABSOLUTELY i absolutely believe that for. MYSELF i believe that IF i were to in any way compromise my, sexuality it would be the worst possible THING i could ever, do which was the fuel and EVERYTHING i did for thirty.

00:45:01
Speaker 1: Years but there's more to it than. Scripture Here's Pastor brandon.

00:45:06
Speaker 6: AGAIN i think people look to conversion therapy for, themselves usually because they're terrified of losing. BELONGING i think the fear of hell and all of that is part of. It but actually what is more destructive and dangerous for people is the fact that if a Queer christian comes out as, queer they lose their church, community which to an outsider might not sound like, much but for those who live in evangelical, communities that is your entire friend, group that is your entire social. Life these are the people that are with you in the hospital and that show up at your birthday and so there's a real social pressure to conform and do everything you can to make sure you continue to belong in that. Group and the number one THING i hear from not just queer people who have left, evangelicalism but all people who leave evangelicalism for any kind of reason is that they're. Lonely is that they don't know how to, socialize is that they don't even know how to make it in the world because everything's been packaged for them in the church throughout their entire, journey and isolation is one of the most dangerous things, psychologically and so no wonder people repress their sexuality or gender identity and seek everything they can do to stay a part of their.

00:46:21
Speaker 1: Community there's also an idea that people have spoken about that attending allows them to spend time with other queer people in a way that is psychologically acceptable to, them and of course not everyone goes as their own.

00:46:35
Speaker 6: VOLITION i think most parents who force their kids into conversion therapy are not innately bad. People they're really, afraid so in one strange warped, sense you can see deep love. THERE i don't think that gets anybody off the, hook AND i don't think it justifies, it BUT i do understand and can empathize with somebody who's scared to their core that eternal hell as waiting for their child and trying to do everything they can to stop that from.

00:47:05
Speaker 1: Happening the nineties was a tense time FOR lgbtq plus rights in THE usa and for those fighting against. Them, Politically President clinton brought In Don't, Ask Don't tell in ninety. Six two years, later he signed into law The defense Of Marriage, act OR doma as is, known banning the federal government from recognizing same sex. Unions at the same, Time Tammy baldwin became the first openly gay person to be elected to The house Of representatives and the first out lesbian In. Congress, culturally more and more people were speaking out and coming out influential figures of the time Like ellen De. Generes films Like philadelphia And Boys Don't cry were winning at The. Oscars yet brutal murders of lgbt, people like that Of Matthew shepherd were making national headlines and fueling calls for queer people to be included and protected by hate crime. Laws the voices on both sides were turned up to eleven And John polk saw it first.

00:48:17
Speaker 2: Hand WHEREVER i, went there were angry, protesters understandably with my. Struggles AS i put, IT i was pulled to both. SIDES i THINK i was In New orleans and there was a conference AND i was speaking keynote, speaker AND i actually wanted to be with those. Protesters AND i think that shows the conflict THAT i often carried inside of, me especially WHEN i was confronted by gay. People BUT i didn't. GO i was on my side of the fence and it seemed impossible to cross over to. Theirs and in nineteen ninety, NINE i was shaken to my. CORE i got called in by security one day and they had told me a letter had been received in the mail making death threats to my, Son, timmy who was at that, POINT i believe, Three and what the letter said was that we know where you, park and we've seen your family coming and going inside the. Building if we see your three year old, son we will take a baseball back to his.

00:49:41
Speaker 3: Head that's on, imagine.

00:49:52
Speaker 2: Just because someone is gay and is an activist does not mean they're an angel sent From. God they're people and they're, angry and they's. Crazy whether you're gay or, straight you're still a. Person you still can be, ugly you still can be. Evil but to threaten a, child it always felt like that's where the threat, was outside of the organization and out there in the real. World BUT i was about to discover that the conflict within me was the biggest threat to my life AS i knew.

00:50:31
Speaker 1: It that's in the next episode Of, atonement The John Polk. Story atonement is a production Of iHeart podcasts and Gold Hawk productions in association With Marx Media. Co for more podcasts From iHeart, podcasts visit The iHeart radio, App Apple, podcasts or wherever you get your. Podcasts