Joshua Gonnerman is a “chaste” gay Christian whose writings I look forward to. I put “chaste” in scare quotes only because some use it as a synonym for “sexually abstinent,” whereas I think chastity, one of the virtues, is much more than mere abstinence.
False Hope and Gay Conversion Therapy is an adaptation of something Gonnerman wrote elsewhere. From everything I know or think I know, his guarded assessment of reparative therapy is more than warranted. The whole piece is worth digesting.
But buried within it, something in particular caught my attention that I hadn’t noticed about reparative therapy claims before:
Out of ninety-eight original subjects, sixty-one were able to be categorized at the end of the study. The other thirty-seven either explicitly refused or were regarded by Jones and Yarhouse as passively refusing through non-communication to continue. Of the final sixty-one, just eleven subjects (18 percent of completing subjects, 11 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Conversion,” while seventeen (28 percent of completing subjects, 17 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Chastity.” (As a chaste man who is also gay, I am inclined to dispute categorizing chastity as a success for orientation change.)
(Emphasis added)
I hesitate to call it “paraphrase,” but here’s my take on the “Success: Chastity” notion:
If you’re promoting your techniques (1) as secular and (2) as intended to produce a change of orientation, then counting the behavioral change of sexual abstinence, without a change of orientation, is cheating. Only if your techniques were acknowledged as religious (What secular interest is there in abstinence of consenting adults? Few at best, no?) and pastoral would abstinence count as any kind of success at all, and if the abstinence were only technical (e.g., only gay porn, no gay partner), it would be dubious to count even such abstinence as “success: chastity.”
I think “success” from an authentically Christian standpoint need not include change of orientation, but requires more than mere technical abstinence. The same is true for unmarried Christian heterosexuals, for whom chastity is not attained by limiting non-marital activity to “heavy petting.” It requires guarding the imagination as well. I’m an equal opportunity blue nose.
And [Begin preemptive strike] it’s certainly possible to cast out the demons of fornication and sodomy and end up possessed by seven worse, starting with pride. [End preemptive strike]
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 