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...
Read MoreSex, death and marriage
In case anyone is interested, this is the paper I gave at an ETS panel on theological methodology for discussing marriage; many of the arguments have or will appear in print elsewhere, but I’m not going to publish this, so it may as well be here. And I say to you, that whoever puts away his wife – except on account of porneia – and marries another woman commits adultery. [His] disciples said to him, ‘If that is the way it is for a man with his wife, it is not a good idea to get married!’ Mt. 19:9-10 (my tr.) This retort from the disciples fascinates me, as does its neglect in recent commentary and ethical reflection. Let me pose my question straightforwardly: can any of us here imagine Christian leaders in our own context responding to a description of a Christian sexual ethic by asserting it is better not to marry? If, as I presume, the answer is no, it might be worth us asking why there is this difference: what did the disciples know that the we don’t, or what do we know that they didn’t? Jesus has been challenged over the famous, if probably apocryphal controversy between R. Shammai and R. Hillel; he responds by citing Genesis, affirming marriage as a creation ordinance intended by God, and so not to be broken by human beings – ‘what God has united, let no-one untie’ (6b). They cite Moses’ stone tablets; he cites their stony hearts – a concession, but it was not so at the Beginning and now at the beginning of the End it will not be so again. Matthew’s Jesus then offers an exception – porneia[1] – and so offers a much more liberal reading than we discover in Mark or Luke; the disciples still however, recoil at the strictness of the interpretation – so hard it would be better not to marry at all. Jesus responds with the strange saying about varieties of eunuchs, and then turns to play with some children. Someone – a rich young ruler, on Luke’s telling – arrives and leaves, sorrowful, and we hear about camels and needles’ eyes, and Peter’s protest about how much he has given up already. There are some textual variants, mostly apparent assimilations to the similar text in Mt. 5:31-32; none of them change the force of the teaching, or the strength of the disciples’ rejection. So how might this be read? Badly, would seem to be the general answer amongst us moderns. Some commentators – France (TNTC) for example – assume the disciples cannot mean what they say: ‘[w]as this a serious suggestion, or were these words spoken with a wry smile which the printed word cannot convey?’ Well, Jesus took it seriously, speaking of Kingdom castration with his next breath. Morris (Pillar) is equally weak: ‘[t]he disciples envisage problems in maintaining the marriage relationship with this hanging over their heads. They probably had no intention of making use of the provision for divorce, but they found it comforting that the provision was there in case of need.’ Hagner (WBC) does a little better, at least acknowledging the plain meaning of the disciples’ objection: ‘[t]he risks … were too great in their estimate’. But the risks of what? He says ‘becoming inseparably linked with an unsatisfactory wife, in whatever way’. Is that really it? ‘Unsatisfactory’? I think we need to recall the strength of the Jewish commitment to marriage at this point, and insist that whatever worries the disciples, it is a bit stronger than this. Hays[2] offers something more plausible: for a man to renounce the right to divorce would be, he comments, ‘startling … within Matthew’s patriarchal cultural context’, but it can, he suggests, be placed alongside renunciation of anger, turning the cheek, loving the enemy, as a principled embrace of powerlessness which is a mark of the Kingdom. Older readers listened to the text more carefully. Calvin makes two fairly characteristic moves in his commentary on the harmony: he blames the devil, and he is surprisingly feminist.[3] For the latter, he criticises the disciples for not thinking about what wives have to endure – all assumed in the day that wives had no right of divorce, of course – ‘why do they not consider how hard is the bondage of wives?’ he asks. And he answers ‘devoted to themselves and their own convenience, they are driven by the feeling of the flesh to disregard others, and to think only of what is advantageous for themselves’. Warming to the theme, he asserts ‘it is a display of base ingratitude that, from the dread or dislike...
Read More‘Sodomy’, celebrating the Eucharist, and other disgusting acts
One evening few weeks ago I tried out the perspective I have been developing over the past couple of years on a Christian ethics of sexuality on a lay audience for the first time (previously, I’ve aired it before academics and/or ministers); the general response was pleasingly positive, but, inevitably, there were folk who were not prepared to travel with me. One stood up to ask a question. ‘Dr Holmes [always a bad sign], what we are talking about here is sodomy. Do you not find sodomy disgusting when you think, when you really think, about what people are doing?’ Now, it was news to me that we were talking about sodomy: I’d talked a lot about marriage, a bit about fallenness, quite a bit about love, and a lot about asceticism, nothing that I could recall about anal intercourse; nonetheless I tried to respond. I commented that, if surveys are to be believed, many gay couples (and, surely, virtually all lesbian couples) never engage in anal intercourse, whilst a fair number of straight couples do. I further offered the comment that I don’t actually spend a lot of time ‘thinking, really thinking’ about what other people do in (or indeed out of) bed; I didn’t quite say that if the questioner did, then he might need some psychological help, but the implication was there (which I regret). I was taken aback by the question (and indeed the language) and didn’t handle it well. As a result it has stayed with me; what would a good answer have looked like? I now think that this question, whilst extreme and offensively-phrased, is indicative of a very common pattern in Christian debates about sexuality, and so worth reflecting on seriously in public. The basic falsehood at the heart of it, formalised, is something like this: Gay/lesbian couples are/do X Straight couples are not/don’t do X X is disgusting/abnormal/against Scripture/… therefore gay/lesbian couples are morally beneath straight couples. Anal intercourse isn’t it, but let us assume that there is in fact at least one X for which 1. and 2. are true; what of the rest of the argument? In the conversation I have related, I offered the standard ‘liberal/affirming’ way of refuting it, which is to refuse 3: there is nothing disgusting/immoral about anal intercourse, or X, whatever X may be. Now, in this, I over-reached myself: I do not have any views on the morality of anal intercourse as an act. I have never considered the question at all; it is far from obvious to me that it is self-evidently disgusting or immoral; but I could easily be wrong about this. (Obviously the issue is different from a Catholic perspective, where every particular sexual act should be open to the possibility of procreation; the Protestant position, to which I hold, is merely that every particular sexual relationship should be open to the possibility of procreation, so individual sexual acts need not be.) Somewhere near the heart of the arguments that I am trying to construct about sexuality, however, is a belief that this is the wrong response; to say that a particular act of anal intercourse, or any other particular act, is immoral is not wrong; what is wrong is the smuggled premise in my argument above: 3′. Y, which straight couples are/do instead of X is not disgusting/abnormal/against Scripture/… That is, my questioner’s argument depended not just on a claim that anal intercourse is self-evidently disgusting, but on a claim that vaginal intercourse is self-evidently not disgusting. Moving from the cultural category of disgust to the ethical category of immorality, the claim is something like: ‘acts of anal intercourse are immoral; acts of vaginal intercourse are moral’. Thus stated the claim is clearly false: there are many acts of vaginal intercourse that are profoundly immoral (rape; adultery; …). So we need to refine the claim to something like ‘at least some acts of vaginal intercourse are moral’. This, however, is also clearly false. East of Eden, every human desire is distorted, and so every human act is immoral – this is Augustine, straightforwardly. And this is not true just of sexual acts, but of all acts. When I celebrate the Eucharist, or preach evangelistically, my motives are mixed and warped, and so my actions are less than perfect, and so immoral – disgusting in the sight of God. As a recent Pope (if memory serves) had it, ‘not only my worst sins, but my most fervent prayers, stand in need of Christ’s forgiveness’. Everything we do is morally compromised; we cannot single out anal intercourse – or anything else – as being peculiarly morally compromised. Now, there is one further...
Read MoreTwo new books on sexuality
I try to keep up with books addressing human sexuality from a theological/Christian perspective. The general flow of publications reminds me of an exchange from an old BBC Radio 4 drama: ‘He made pork pies the way Wagner wrote semiquavers.’ ‘You mean they were good?’ ‘Not often. But there were an awful lot of them…’ A minority of the books published simply repeat already well-rehearsed arguments and so contribute nothing to the debate; most of the rest could not be described anything like so positively. This is true on every side of the debate: much heat, little light, and less understanding tend to characterise contributions, which are nonetheless routinely praised to the skies around social media by the partisans of whichever position they champion, before they, thankfully, disappear almost without trace remaining. That the past couple of months have brought the publication of not one but two books in the area that are really very good, then, had me watching the end of the road for four blokes on odd coloured horses. The world does not seem about to end, but the fact remains. Robert Song and Eve Tushnet have not just added to my (short) list of books worth reading in this area, they have moved towards the top of it. The books are very different: Song is academic, Protestant, and revisionist; Tushnet popular, Catholic, and traditional. Regardless, both make a genuine contribution, and both need to be read. Robert Song’s Covenant and Calling: Towards a Theology of Same-Sex Relationships (SCM, 2014) offers an argument that is richly theological and serious. He locates marriage as a creational good that, however, has been transformed by the coming of Christ and the inauguration of the eschaton. Marriage will end in the coming Kingdom, because death will end: there will be no need for the begetting of further children. The church lives both in the expectation of the Kingdom and as its first fruits: in Christ, we know that death has ended, and so can embrace celibacy, a way of life not ordered to the begetting of children. This embracing of celibacy, Song thinks, re-orders marriage within the church: a people who no longer fear death no longer need to procreate, and so it is striking that, whilst emphasising the representational aspects of marital love (‘but I am talking about Christ and the Church…’) and the mutuality of self-giving, the various New Testament teaching on marriage never specifically names procreation as its purpose. Song does not write out children from the good of marriage; he recognises that the creational norm requires that procreation be intrinsic to the definition of the calling. He notes, however, that since the 1930 Lambeth Conference, Anglican theological ethics, in contrast to Roman Catholic moral theology, has consistently entertained the idea of deliberately childless marriage, chosen for weighty ethical reasons (the context here was the Anglican acceptance of the use of contraception). This does not change the definition of marriage, but opens up the possibility of imagining an eschatological space, a third calling (Song will call it ‘covenant partnership’) that can sit alongside marriage and celibacy as a way of being authentically Christian; such covenant partnerships will be marked by faithfulness, permanence, and a commitment to non-procreative fruitfulness. Can such covenant partnerships be sexual in nature? Song argues that they can, because in Scripture sex can be about faithfulness and permanence without mention of children – 1 Cor. 7 is perhaps the crucial text here. Behind this reading is Song’s account of the transformation of marriage, and so sex, in the life of the church; procreation is de-emphasised. Again, the Anglican acceptance of deliberately childless marriage, creates the same space: sex in such a union is intentionally non-procreative, but licit. Song addresses the standard texts against same-sex sexual activity from within this framework; he accepts that ‘whatever it was the biblical writers were referring to in relation to same-sex sexuality, they took themselves to be opposed to it’ (62); he suggests, however, that a careful reading of the texts, which he offers, paints a somewhat narrower intended condemnation than is usually offered. What of arguments that marriage somehow depends on the complementarity of male and female? Song does not, of course, need to dispute this point, only that sex somehow depends on that complementarity; he follows Chris Rogers’s account of the theological history of sexual differentiation (Creation and Covenant, Continuum, 1997; another must-read book in this area), and proposes that there is no convincing theological reason (other than bare divine fiat, which he concedes in passing to Barth on p. 47) why sex must be restricted to opposite-sex couples. He ends with some, admittedly tentative, proposals for working out the...
Read MoreTheology, ethics, and church growth: or, how to prove anything with statistics
It is an important part of the role of the academic, particularly the academic who chooses to comment in non-specialist arenas, to be very clear about precisely what is, and what is not, shown by a given piece of evidence. I picked up on a minor Twitter storm yesterday concerning claims and counter-claims about the linkage of church decline with a progressive/accepting stance on issues of sexuality.
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