No need for conversion therapy

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” is a harmful setback for LGBTQ+ Americans. In the 8-1 ruling, the court has failed to recognize the well-documented harm conversion therapy inflicts, especially on vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth. According to the Trevor Project, LGBTQ+ youth who are subjected to conversion therapy are “more than twice as likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers.”

The plaintiff is Kaley Chiles, a Colorado-based Christian counselor who was represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a firm designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Chiles describes her counseling as “an outpouring of her faith.” On her counseling center’s resource page, authors such as Paul David Tripp and Tim Keller, favorites of the evangelical biblical counseling movement, are listed as guiding voices for clients.

But conversion therapy is neither “faith-based” nor a model for counseling. Conversion therapy is practiced as a means of control, a formulaic pseudoscience where clients are promised relief if they deny who they are or who they love.

Conversion therapy suppresses the voice of clients, particularly adolescents in their formative years. Conversion therapy ignores the complexities and depth of the human experience and is unable to attend to needs through therapeutic, empathetic and compassionate means.

Conversion therapy pressures clients to conform to a narrow theological framework of the love of God. God’s love is many things; narrow is not one of them.

Either the court does not fully grasp the harm of conversion therapy, or it has chosen not to care. Nevertheless, this decision will have a domino effect on states beyond Colorado, with the Human Rights Campaign warning that the ruling could undermine protections in 23 states and Washington, D.C.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in her dissent, “the court could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers.”

The worldview behind conversion therapy
What the court fails to grasp is that this decision, delivered on Trans Day of Visibility, empowers a broader evangelical worldview that is committed to erasing and dehumanizing LGBTQ+ people. I know this worldview because I was trained in it.

As a biblical counseling student at Boyce College, I was taught a framework for “redeeming a thought,” based on an interpretation of Romans 12:2. This counseling method followed a rigid formula borrowed from John MacArthur’s Master’s Seminary biblical counseling program.

The framework for people to “change biblically,” we were taught, followed a formulaic “sanctification process” of guilt, repentance, forgiveness and, the chief goal, replacement.

This “biblical” counseling method left no room for human experience, no room for scientific research and, most importantly, no room for questioning the counselor’s application of scripture.

Clients were told that to raise such questions would be unfaithful.

Imagine what pain this toxic cycle inflicts upon clients. Conversion therapy’s death-dealing theology is rooted in a web of shame, and the spiritual shame of the evangelical church fosters an environment of suffocating fear.

The love of God
A worldview that counsels people to change who they are or who they love to be loved by God is a worldview that has not yet been overcome by God’s love.

As St. Catherine of Siena writes, “A healthy eye looks at the sun and sees light. But a sick eye sees nothing but darkness when it looks into such lightsomeness, and it is no fault of the light that it seems so different to the two; the fault is in the sick eye” (Dialogue, chap. 39).

The problem is not a reluctance on God’s part to extend love; the problem is how conversion therapy practitioners have been taught to see God’s love.

To be loved by God is not a state we can work ourselves into by being guilted into becoming someone we aren’t. Our very existence as complicated, beautiful human beings is the result of God’s love. As Augustine once wrote, if the entire Bible were only the words “God is love,” we should ask for nothing more.

Pastors, counselors and spiritual leaders are called to invite people in our care to embrace the freedom of God’s love, and, in that embrace, we are freed from the fear that God might not love us.

As Catherine writes in one of her prayers, “You, eternal God, saw me and knew me in yourself. And because you saw me in your light, you fell in love with your creature and drew her out of yourself and created her in your image and likeness.”

There is no need for conversion therapy, for we have been created by a God who knows us the best and who loves us the most.

The Rev. Jordan Conley is senior pastor of Celebration Community Church in Fort Worth. He is a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ken.

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy likely violates the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and sent the case back to the lower courts for further review under strict scrutiny.