A conservative case against ‘conversion therapy’

I was on holiday when the Church of England General Synod met, and so I followed events with even less interest than I, as a Scottish Baptist, usually do. On my occasional scans of my social media feeds, however, I saw a certain amount of interest in a motion proposing that the Synod condemn ‘conversion therapy’, the practice of seeking to change the orientation of lesbian or gay people to make them straight. I was far enough away to have nothing interesting to say about the motion or the debate, but noticing it made me think once again what a deeply strange practice ‘conversion therapy’ in fact is. For the sake of the following argument, let us agree—briefly—to assume the best possible conditions: that there is no doubt that a traditional Christian account of sexual ethics is right, and that there are modes of intervention that are effective in changing a person’s sexual orientation (in reality I believe about 0.75 of these two things to be true). Even given these ideal conditions, the practice of conversion therapy would be a very odd one to engage in. The argument is very simple: to be gay/lesbian is to experience erotic desire for various people of one sex only: one’s own sex. To be straight is to experience erotic desire for various people of one sex only: not one’s own sex. Mt. 5:28 suggests strongly that such an experience of being straight is just sinful. It happens that there is no parallel condemnation in the NT of gay or lesbian desire, but I suppose most serious ethicists would construct one. Fairly simply, in Christian sexual ethics, to lust after someone to whom you are not married is sinful, and that judgement either does not depend on the sex of the object of your lust—or, just possibly, is intensified if your lust is heterosexual. So, to engage in ‘conversion therapy’ is to seek to supplant one set of sinful sexual desires—for people of the same sex—with another set of sinful sexual desires—for people of the opposite sex. Why would anyone want to work to exchange one set of sinful lusts for another, possibly worse, set of sinful lusts? And why would any responsible Christian ministry propose or promote such work? As far as I can see, this is the only interesting question concerning ‘conversion therapy’—not, ‘does it work?’ (who cares?); not ‘is it a good idea?’ (from any meaningfully Christian perspective, obviously, no), but why did anyone ever dream it up?—and why did others in the church not merely laugh it off? I can see only one plausible answer, though I would be very open to hearing others. I have argued in a few pieces before now that a peculiar pathology of contemporary Western society is an assumption that sexual activity is necessary to attain adequate humanity—a ‘healthy’, ‘adult’ existence is not possible for the virgin. (The source of this assumption is worthy of exploration—Freud must be the deep origin, but more has to be said.) I have also argued before now that this pathological—idolatrous—assumption is deeply embedded within our churches, perhaps especially within the more conservative Evangelical traditions. Offered a single senior pastor, congregations demur, fearing that s/he is not adequately adult; faced with an adult celibate, we strain a young adults group to make space for them, and then give up, implying by our programme construction that there should be no celibate adults beyond the age of 30. (Forget Jesus. Forget Paul. Forget the gospel.) Surrendering completely to this contemporary idolatry, that proper adult humans must be sexually active, we discover lesbian and gay people, who are sexually attracted only to people of the same sex. We might attempt to deny the existence of such people, but reality intrudes, and, if we are convinced that marriage can only be between man and woman, we therefore propose that it must be possible to change sexual orientation, and so we invent conversion therapy, and invest deeply in its plausibility. On this telling, the practice of conversion therapy is a surrender to idolatry: to the idea that healthy and adult humanity demands sexual activity. In the face of this idolatry Christian ethics can say one word only, the first word of all real Christian ethics: ‘Jesus’. The moment we say ‘Jesus’ we admit that true, fulfilled, adult, humanity is possible without sexual activity, and so the moment we say ‘Jesus’ we deny the need for conversion therapy. More, the moment we say ‘Jesus’ we acknowledge that, in the Kingdom, celibacy is the normal and natural way of being human; the ethical question is whether sexual activity, marriage, is ever...

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Religious liberty and the European Union

In a Facebook conversation a few weeks back Eddie Arthur asked me if I could see any religious liberty angle on the EU debate. At the time I said no, since religious liberty seemed fairly firmly enshrined both sides of the English Channel  and I didn’t see that changing however we voted. That claim stands, of course, but there is another religious liberty angle that I have only this week thought of, and it is (for me) a very strong argument to be pro-EU. Let me tell you about three friends, all missionaries. Call them Anna, Bridget, and Claire, because in one case I cannot put her real name on the web. Twenty five years ago, Anna was working across Eastern Europe, including Albania and ‘Another Eastern European Country’. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a rise of ugly nationalisms in many states, which often had a religious dimension, so Anna’s work was illegal most of the places she worked. She worked quietly, hid, sometimes had to leave places quickly. Once (that she told me about) she was assaulted by a mob when she didn’t leave somewhere quickly enough. Bridget works in ‘Another Easter European Country’ now, for an illegal organisation, quietly convening evangelistic meetings for students. I don’t know her as well as I knew Anna, and can’t tell you the extent to which life has become difficult for her over the years; I have no doubt that it has, though. Claire works in Albania now for an international mission agency that is legal and tolerated. The work she does is open and permitted. She can worship in a local church which meets publicly and does not fear the police or the mob. Albania is not a member of the EU, but it is an official candidate for accession. The candidacy process involves the country being assessed on 35 criteria, which include fundamental rights and freedoms. An initial assessment highlights what needs to change, and then the EU works with the country to implement the changes. Albania is still some way off meeting EU standards on freedoms and rights, but it has got somewhere on religious liberty at least. Of course, there are many differences between the stories of that other eastern European country and Albania since the fall of the Berlin Wall; maybe without any interest in the EU Albania would still have moved towards democracy and religious liberty; who knows? But right now, it is committed to high standards in those areas because it wants to be part of the EU. Let’s pretend some of the Leave lies about the EU are true. It really does cost us £350m per week, or a little under £6 per week each; there are no cultural, economic, or political benefits from membership; it is entirely about petty regulations concerning bananas—but let’s also accept the single fact that it does this stuff promoting religious liberty on its southern and eastern borders. All I can say is, the morning I heard Anna had been beaten up, if you’d offered me religious liberty across Eastern Europe for the price of six quid a week and some rules about fruit, I would have bitten your hand off, and most of your arm with it. And that, very simply, is my pro-EU religious liberty argument.   [16/6/16 Edit: a missionary friend contacted me and asked that I remove any identification for the ‘other Eastern European country’ concerned in this story, for fear of persecution for those working there, so I have done...

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Our story begins in exile: ‘Baptist social theology’ and the EU referendum

One of the books I have recently been reading with interest and profit is Anglican Social Theology (ed. Malcolm Brown) (London: Church House Publishing, 2014). Apart from the intrinsic interest in tracing significant contributions to political theology that happened to come from within the Church of England, I was struck by the contributors’ awareness that the project, or projects, they were tracing were distinctively ‘Anglican’. As Brown puts it in an early prospectus: We have chosen to speak of an Anglican social theology with a deliberate intention of echoing the concept of Catholic social teaching because we recognise that the latter is much better known as a theological school or tradition that informs practice. Our contention … is that a distinctively Anglican tradition of social engagement can be discerned through most of the twentieth century… (p. 2) I find this interesting because I have long had a minor interest in the extent to which different Christian traditions in fact propose different practices in various areas—and of course a sustained interest in the distinctively Baptist contributions that may be available. What, I have begun to wonder, would a ‘Baptist social theology’ look like? We are, after all, the largest protestant tradition in the world, and have had our fair share of social reformers whose programmes were in some way shaped by their faith—a list headed, but far from exhausted, by Martin Luther King. At the same time I have been following what Christian contributions to the debate over the EU referendum I have been able to find. Most are Anglican, whether for Remain (Michael Sadgrove, ex Dean of Durham, founded Christians for Europe), Brexit (Christians for Britain is run by Giles Fraser and Adrian Hilton), or thoughtfully neutral (Andrew Goddard‘s personal contribution, or the excellent and thoughtful Reimagining Europe blog, which is billed as a joint project between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, but a glance down the contributors list suggests the balance is heavily tilted south of the border). Is there, I have wondered, a specifically Baptist approach to the EU referendum, and to the wider questions it crystallises? Political matters are generally questions of practical wisdom, and so do not admit of definitive theological answers. We might argue theologically that the most vulnerable in our society must be protected, but theology cannot then guide us to the best way to offer such protection. A robust doctrine of original sin will warn us that greed and fraud will be endemic under any tax regime, but it will not then help us to construct a regime that protects effectively and efficiently against these problems. I am not, then, looking for an argument that will insist that all Baptists should vote one way; there are issues where this might be the case (a narrow proposal to limit religious liberty, for example), but it seems clear enough that the EU will not be one of them. Rather, I want to suggest that Baptists, if they are faithfully Baptist, will argue and evaluate differently. Things will matter to us that others will be careless of; things that are decisive for others will be unimportant to us. Although not decisive, such considerations might well make us more likely to lean one way, so that Baptists might split 70-30 when society is 50-50. In other cases we will split the same as others, but for very different reasons. An obvious example of this is the sermon many of us preach in the run up to each general election. The messaging from every party is often enough ‘you will be richer if you vote for us’; we preach that Christians should not vote selfishly, to enrich themselves, but for other reasons (which vary: for some it will be, pick the pro-life candidate, regardless of party; for others issues of justice and ‘good news to the poor’ will loom largest; for others again it might simply be the personal morality or faith of a candidate). I want to suggest that one of the main themes of the EU referendum is a matter Baptists should have a distinctive view on. The matter is national sovereignty; and at the heart of our Baptist distinctiveness is, I suggest, the historical fact encapsulated in my title: ‘our story begins in exile’. The British Baptist movement began in 1609 when, as John Robinson reports, ‘Mr Smith [sic] baptized first himself and next Mr Helwys and so the rest.’ Smyth and Helwys were the officers of an illegal separatist congregation that had been meeting in Gainsborough, north of Lincoln, but like many others they fled Anglican persecution and by 1609 were resident, with much...

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On Nationalisms, Christian, Scottish, and British

Can ‘nationalism’ ever be Christian? Brian Stanley has recently answered that question negatively in a blog for the Edinburgh Centre for World Christianity. He defines nationalism as ‘the elevation of one’s own nation over all others’, which I suspect many who call themselves nationalists would not recognise as an account of their position. He rightly highlights, however, that the two presently-plausible outcomes of the present Westminster election both involve a nationalist party holding some measure of the balance of power: If the polls are even close to correct, and if they do not shift significantly in the next thirteen days, then it seems that a Labour minority government, relying on the support of a large SNP block, and perhaps also the Liberal Democrats, is the most likely outcome. There is essentially no chance of a Conservative majority, or even of the current coalition having enough seats to govern, so a right-of-centre alliance is very likely to be dependent on support from UKIP. Further, today’s ‘English manifesto’ went some considerable way to defining the Conservatives as an English nationalist party that has essentially given up on Scotland and Wales, particularly in its repudiation of the Smith Commission. Is there more, theologically, to be said for nationalisms? I think so; the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics in Cambridge do excellent work, and their resource material in the run-up to the election has been a wonderful example of intellectually-serious non-partisan Christian engagement. The most recent (as I type) example caught my eye: Adrian Hilton’s offer of ‘a plausible ethical perspective’ on a Christian preference for UKIP. Hilton’s language is more colourful than I find comfortable (‘Ukip becomes an army of protestants, defending British national culture and traditions from the latest threat to emerge from Rome’; umm, no…), but his basic argument is worth reflection: he highlights a real problem with a democratic deficit in EU decision making (a problem that, as I see it, is nationalistic in origin: the member states will not surrender power, and so important decisions are made by the council of ministers, not in the parliament); and suggests, essentially, that a revival of traditional English anti-Catholicism will be the solution. If there is to be a Protestant defence of UKIP’s English nationalism, I accept that this is the best line available. That said, my basic response is this: I find it unconvincing, for exactly the same reasons that I found Doug Gay’s arguments in defence of Scottish nationalism in his (excellent) book Honey from the Lion eventually unconvincing. Now, I know enough of Gay’s politics, and can guess enough of Hilton’s, to appreciate that neither will be at all grateful for the comparison. Further, there is an unpleasant and unworthy Unionist line in Scottish politics at the moment trying to link the SNP to UKIP, which I have no desire to give any support to. UKIP stand well to the right of the mainstream of British politics, and propose positions that to my mind are reprehensible; if I find the SNP’s current self-presentation as the standard-bearers of progressive politics somewhat unconvincing, particularly given their record in office in Holyrood, I nonetheless of course accept that they are essentially a party of the centre-left; I would rather they were rather more to the left, but that is finally a difference of emphasis not of direction. That said, and this is my point, both pieces of writing assume that the a Christian defence of their position requires a defence of the ethical possibility of nationalism; that nationalism is properly applied to Scotland on the one hand or the UK on the other is almost taken as a given. (This is somewhat unfair to Gay’s book-length treatment, but the weight is certainly in this direction; he perhaps relies on others’ constructions of ‘Scottishness’ – I have on my shelf Storrar, who is important to Gay, judging by the references, and Smith.) I have commented before in public that I have essentially no instinctive sense of national identity; I do not say this either as a boast, or as a confession; it is just who I am – a fairly peripatetic childhood (all, however, within England) might be the reason. I found the referendum campaign odd, in that I had neither the instinctive sense of ‘Scotland’ that fired the core nationalist vote nor the instinctive sense of ‘Britain’ that drove the core unionist vote. (And I think the ‘Yes’ campaign was much better run precisely because it understood that some of us who had a vote were in this position, and so it offered appeals beyond gut-level nationalism, something only Gordon Brown, late in the day, really managed on the ‘No’...

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Faith in faith and valuing values? Reflecting on David Cameron’s Easter message

The Prime Minister has issued an ‘Easter message’, which makes for interesting reading. It has rather less (that is, no) reference to cross, resurrection, or indeed the name of Jesus than I suppose is normal in Easter messages; The claim that ‘Easter is all about remembering the importance of change, responsibility, and doing the right thing for the good of our children’ might raise more than a few eyebrows; Easter always used to be all about ‘the death of death in the death of Christ’ (to borrow what is possibly John Owen’s only truly memorable line). My friend Danny Webster has blogged on this, and I pretty much agree with everything he says. I cannot imagine any positive reception for this piece; Mr Cameron has (once again) proved himself simply tone-deaf to the concerns of the Christian community (I am told he is similarly blind to the concerns of the Muslim community). I say that not as a complaint – I do not have any right to demand a Prime Minister who is interested in my faith commitment – but as a matter of surprise; if I were running for office in a democracy, and there was a group of organisations that claimed the serious allegiance of about 7-8% of the voters, I would either make sure I understood how to speak to them, or at least had people around me to check my words and give me advice. He draws attention to the enshrining in law of the 0.7% of GDP overseas aid budget and to the modern slavery bill, two good things for which his administration does deserve credit; I suspect churches that are involved in foodbanks and debt counselling services (which most of us are, one way or another) might struggle more with the claim ‘I am proud that despite the pressure on public spending, we made clear choices to help the … most vulnerable in society’. That said, I find the piece interesting and worthy of comment because it displays a particular type of common contemporary liberal piety, which is not only wrong but positively dangerous. He starts with a recognition that is valuable, and deserves to be remembered more often: ‘As Prime Minister, I’m in no doubt about the matter: the values of the Christian faith are the values on which our nation was built.’ Yes; absolutely. He then moves on to defend the importance of faith in British society: ‘I’m an unapologetic supporter of the role of faith in this country … I’m a big believer in the power of faith to forge a better society.’ He then makes a point which I agree with entirely, but which I interpret rather differently: strong faith makes people act. Mr Cameron says ‘…faith is a massive inspiration for millions of people to go out and make a positive difference.’ OK, but I want to think about the word ‘positive’, or at least to suggest that ‘faith’ is also an inspiration for other people – fewer, I hope – to go out and make a very negative difference. Then we turn to that wonderful contemporary idea, ‘values’: ‘in the end we are all guided by the lights of our own reason … this government has consistently taken decisions which are based on fundamental principles and beliefs.’ Well, yes; as Danny said, ‘everything we do is based on some sort of fundamental principle and belief’. And that includes the bad things as well as the good things. I think that celebrating ‘faith’ and valuing ‘values’ is dangerous. Strong faith makes people act, and if their faith is deformed, so will their action be. The Anglicans who condemned Elizabeth Gaunt to be burnt alive for being a Baptist were people of faith, acting according to their values; the German Christians who supported the rise of Hitler were people of faith, acting according to their values; the members of Westborough Baptist Church who picket funerals with their homophobic ‘God hates fags’ posters are people of faith, acting according to their values. (I criticise my own tradition; other faith traditions are, obviously, not immune.) ‘Values’ are not necessarily good; some are, but some are not. Faith is a powerful motivator to action, but that makes it particularly dangerous if it is misplaced. Faith well-placed will inspire heroic and sacrificial action. When Mr Cameron says ‘[a]cross the country, we have tens of thousands of fantastic faith-based charities. Every day they’re performing minor miracles in local communities.’ I know that he is right; I know many people who work for these charities, and some of the visionaries who have started them; I know in some cases just how much they risked to follow the calling of God...

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