An LGBT Perspective: Losing One's Faith Trying to "Pray Away the Gay"

Tomorrow is Easter and I will not be going to church - not because churches are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic but because I largely lost my Catholic faith as I struggled to "pray away the gay," something I began to do around age twelve and continued for decades without success.  As a child, I loved Easter, especially at my grand parents' beautiful church pictured at left. That was, of course, before I realized god had made me gay.  Early posts on this blog look at my faith struggle and I talk about it from time to time, usually when I see religion being used to deliberately harm LGBT people.  A piece in an Irish LGBT publication struck a chord with me because the author's experience so closely parallels my own.  

Like me, the author left Catholicism and largely walked away from organized Christianity (I remain technically a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - they liberal Lutheran denomination).  Many in the LGBT community have had a similar experience once they shake off the self-hatred their religious upbringing had instilled in them as they come to comprehend the cruel lie that god supposedly loves you and made you in his image yet made you intrinsically disordered per Church dogma. I continue to worry about LGBT youth currently engaged in the fruitless struggle to pray away the gay, likely suffering from self-hate as a consequence.  Here are highlights of the piece which may help straight friends who remain churchgoers to understand why I find religion to be a harmful force for so many:  

I had a number of theories about my sexuality in my early years. At one point, I believed that God had made me gay as a challenge to see if I could overcome my same-sex desire. Later, about a year and a half into my efforts to pray myself straight, I thought that he might have just made some horrendous mistake. But even believing that was difficult, because I knew that God didn’t make mistakes. So, the theory I ultimately settled on was that my attraction to other boys was actually just a phase – it would pass in time and then, finally, I would be just like everybody else. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. 

Today, I am 26 years-old and I am openly and confidently gay. But I still look back on that teenager who so desperately wanted to change who he was and wonder: how did it get to that point? There were many reasons, of course; homophobic bullying, a hostile society – but my intense Catholic faith also played a big part in making me hate myself. My parents, while not exactly devout Catholics themselves, brought us to mass most weekends. We were cultural Catholics, but religion was also a big part of our lives. It was how we came together and it allowed us to connect to something bigger than ourselves. At 11 years-old, when most boys my age started having crushes on girls, I started having crushes on boys. By the time I was 12, my sexuality was in full swing – and I despised myself for it. I ventured onto Google and quickly established that being gay was not only socially unacceptable, but my church – the religion I cared so passionately about – strictly forbade it. I became increasingly aware of just how hated gay people were within Catholicism. It was an incredibly isolating and alienating feeling, to feel rejected from a place in which I had always felt so at home. I was too young to see the Catholic church’s anti-LGBT+ views for what they are: bigoted, normative, hateful. Instead, I told myself that I was the problem – that I needed to be fixed.

It was in that context that I started asking God to help me, to try to pray myself straight. My efforts were not without their complications; by that point, my faith was starting to crumble around me. I had backed myself into a theological corner, and it was patently clear that there was no easy way out of it. If God never makes mistakes, and makes us in his image, how could he have gone so far wrong with me? Why would he voluntarily create somebody who was intrinsically disordered when he makes everybody in his image? And if he truly loved me, as I had always been told he did, then why would he put me through this unbearable suffering? These questions did not have easy answers, and even while I continued to pray myself straight, they pushed me gently towards the exit door of atheism. 

When I was 13, I finally came up with a plan of action – I decided I would ask God to take this burden from me. To my dismay, my efforts to pray myself straight only made me more miserable. I felt utterly hopeless, and started to wonder if I would be better off dead. I contemplated suicide on numerous occasions as a teenager; whether to die or stay alive became a constant grappling point. I often wondered which would hurt my parents more: me dying or me coming out as gay.

Just before my 15th birthday, as I yet again tried to pray myself straight, I told God it would be the last time I would ask him to fix me. I told him I had had enough – I had tried hard enough to rid myself of these feelings. I asked him to rescue me – and he didn’t. That finally put an end to my belief in a higher power.

It is an intensely alienating feeling, standing in a beautiful Catholic church, remembering all the times I tried to pray myself straight, all the times I asked God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary to rescue me.

Today, I am firmly an atheist and the only masses I attend are the odd Catholic wedding. I’m not necessarily happy I’m an atheist, but I am happy that I’m no longer part of an organisation that is not just intolerant, but is actively hostile to LGBT+ people. I now understand that I, like all queer people, deserve so much better than what the Catholic church is prepared to offer us. I still hold out hope that one day, the church will change its teachings on LGBT+ issues, but that hope dims by the day. Every time it looks like Pope Francis is starting to move towards greater acceptance, he imminently throws more discrimination our way.

I no longer care what the Catholic church thinks of me. I keep my hope alive for all the other children growing up in that institution. It breaks my heart that they have to learn that they are not loved unconditionally like their straight and cisgender peers. I hope that one day, young queer people will no longer contemplate suicide because the church that was supposed to love them rejected them. I hope that they will be able to go to mass and won’t feel alienated in the way so many queer people do.

But right now, change looks a long way off. The Catholic church of today is an intensely backwards organisation that endeavours to keep people inside tiny boxes. But queer people cannot – and will not – thrive inside boxes.

 Unlike the author, I do not see myself as an atheist.  Rather, I am perhaps a deist like Jefferson and some of the other founding fathers.  There is a higher power - just not the god of the bible or the Roman Catholic Church.

How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America

The Christian Century has a review of a book written by William Lobdell, a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, the full title of which is "Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace." I suspect that Lobdell's spiritual journey to unbelief resonates with many, particularly with the LGBT community which has been the target of some many lies and so much viciousness from allegedly "godly Christians." I also suspect that many in the younger generations who view Christianity negatively may identify as well. It seems that the behavior of Christians - and in Lobdell's case the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal - is one of the strongest arguments against Christianity. Indeed, it is proof, at least in the opinion of some, that institutional Christianity is an utter sham, peopled with hopelessly unloving practitioners such as the leaders of "professional Christian" organizations like The Family Foundation here in Virginia. Here are some review highlights:

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Former religion reporter William Lobdell's deconversion narrative, Losing My Religion, refrains from both bombast and suggestions of dopiness. By his very choice of genre—memoir rather than apologia—Lobdell enters a different territory of the new atheism, one already inhabited by several other counter conversion narrators, including John Loftus, who wrote Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (Prometheus, 2008), and Dan Barker, author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists (Ulysses, 2008).

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He calls himself a "reluctant atheist" and a "skeptical deist." "With all that has happened to me," Lobdell says, "I don't feel qualified to judge anyone else.""All that has happened" includes, most notably, Lobdell's eight-year tenure on the religion beat of the Los Angeles Times during the breaking of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.

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Then a colleague of Lobdell's passed him some documents about a priest named Michael Harris who was named in a clergy sex abuse lawsuit. . . . It was the first of more than $1 billion worth of settlements with victims of clergy sex abuse across the nation. Lobdell became convinced that as chilling as the pedophile priests' actions were, the real story lay in the bishops' cover-ups of the felonies, their quiet transfers of accused clergy to new and unsuspecting parishes, and the Catholic Church's revictimization of the victims.

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The Harris case dealt Lobdell's personal faith what he calls a "spiritual body blow." . . . But the deeper he got into the story, the more difficult it became to square the sins of the church with his image of a loving and powerful God. "I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies—many of them written on their own stationery, undeniable and permanent—out of my head," he writes. "Like a homicide detective, I had seen too much."

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Lobdell depicts the ebbing of his faith as inevitable, something that he could not control or choose to fight. Many people assume that Christians-turned-agnostics make a conscious decision to leave the faith, but he insists that in his case that's simply not true. "As deeply as I missed my faith, as hard as I tried to keep it, my head could not command my gut.

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While the review goes on to critique Lobdell for not retaining his faith, personally, I he is very much on point. As a former Catholic I find it difficult to even walk into a Catholic Church given the hypocrisy and evilness of the Church hierarchy. While I still consider myself Christian, it is in spite of not because institutional Christianity.