CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/15/2025

Conversion Therapy, LGBT, Paraguay, Unification Church, Bulgarian Orthodox Church

CNN: 'God, please fix me': Inside the dangerous resurgence of 'ex-gay' conversion therapy

"He remembers walking towards the worst experience of his life. The dorm hall was a concrete tunnel, with chipped white paint on the walls and a stench of sweat trapped inside. The stairs, he recalls, squeaked underfoot. They led to a wooden door, which Andrew Pledger pried open.

He stepped inside, sunk into a peeling black couch and locked eyes with the man sitting across the desk.

And then something happened.

"Everything around me just faded away," Pledger says. He floated out of his body. "I almost couldn't hear him anymore … time just completely slowed down."

The next thing he remembers is leaving the office, a pounding pain in his chest. An hour had passed. Whatever happened in that room had shaken Pledger, then a tormented, depressed student at a private evangelical university in South Carolina. A voice filled his head, telling him: "You cannot do this. This is unhealthy. This is not good."

Pledger had just experienced conversion therapy – the discredited, pseudoscientific practice that purports to help a gay person change or resist their sexuality. The practice doesn't work: Virtually every major medical association denounces it as junk science. A flood of studies has warned of its dangers; young people who experience conversion therapy are more likely to suffer depression and attempt suicide, researchers have found.

But conversion therapy is still practiced in nearly every state, monitoring groups say. Efforts by right-wing lawmakers to repeal city and state-wide bans have claimed their first successes. And former leaders of the "ex-gay" religious movement told CNN the practice is enjoying a resurgence — this time in more cloaked, subtle, secretive forms.

Pledger wasn't sure that he wanted to change his sexuality, but he needed something to change. In the months before he sat on that dusty couch, he had been relentlessly bullied, he had harmed himself, and on one dark evening in his dormitory, he'd held a bottle of medication in his hand and considered ending his life. He remembers it all.

And yet the meeting itself is lost to the deepest recesses of Pledger's mind. "I just disassociated," he says. His response is not uncommon — multiple conversion therapy survivors told CNN they had blocked out the details of the practice. It might as well never have happened.

Except that there is one more thing that Pledger remembers: fumbling into his pocket in the moments before the session began, pulling out his phone, and hitting "Record."

Pledger said he was told in a conversion therapy session on the BJU campus: 'We're going to deal with this sin like we would deal with any other sin.'"

BBC: Why a South Korean church bought a village in Paraguay (The Documentary Podcast)

"How a controversial religious group from South Korea gained ownership of a remote village in Paraguay.

Puerto Casado is a remote village in Paraguay, in South America. It's not dissimilar to many other rural towns in the area: red-brick houses, small grocery stores and unpaved roads. But what makes Puerto Casado an exception is that it's at the centre of a land dispute between the Paraguayan state, local residents and the Unification Church, a controversial religious group from South Korea."

Bulgarian Synod warns against neo-Hindu "spiritual teachers" with false Christian elements

"The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has issued a strongly worded statement warning Bulgarian citizens against what it calls "pagan neo-Hindu propaganda with false Christian elements" being spread by touring gurus and self-proclaimed spiritual teachers.

In the statement published yesterday, the Church leadership expresses concern about religious groups that "interweave their pagan beliefs with incorrectly used elements from Christianity" with the goal of leading "as many people as possible into spiritual delusion" to increase their followers.

The Synod specifically names several prominent figures including Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Sri Chinmoy, Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi, Osho Rajneesh, Sai Baba, Shibendu Lahiri, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar among the "neo-Hindu spiritual leaders" whose initiatives are being promoted in Bulgaria and abroad."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/5/2025 (Jehovah's Witnesses, Book, LGBT, Geelong Revival Centre, Australia, Gloriavale, Child Abuse, New Zealand, Legal)

Jehovah's Witnesses, Book,  LGBT, Geelong Revival Centre, Australia,  Gloriavale, Child Abuse, New Zealand, Legal

Eric Schaeffer: A Lie Told Often Enough Becomes the Truth, Exposing How the Watchtower Deceives Jehovah's Witnesses

"In the late 1800s, a religious organization known as the Watchtower was born. This group places much emphasis on Christ's return and Armageddon, aggressively seeking to spread their doctrine to all who will listen. These efforts were successful, for their influence can be seen in countries and languages throughout the world. Many of the Watchtower's deceptions were easy to spot in the early days, but with almost 150 years of practice, they have found ways to fine-tune their inconsistencies. Millions have been misled by the Watchtower and have become personal carriers of their fraudulent message. These carriers are known as the Jehovah's Witnesses. After having hundreds of conversations with Jehovah's Witnesses, I began to understand that most are sincere people who generally want to please God, but fail to recognize that they have been duped by doctrinal deception. This book examines the variety of ways these deceptions take place by comparing the Bible, the original languages, church history, and the Watchtower's own material. After exploring this information, the reader will be able to see how the Watchtower has been deceiving Jehovah's Witnesses with false prophecies, misquoted scholars, historical untruths, and even purposeful changes to the Bible. This writing is respectful but does not pull any punches. It is straightforward truth that exposes the Watchtower's manipulation of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

AvoidJW: Jehovah's Witnesses Create Three New Businesses in Ireland to handle financial assets

Independent: The Jehovah's Witnesses who left the faith and never looked back: 'I was 37 and had only ever held a boy's hand

" ... McAllen, 39, who lives in Greenwich, south-east London, is today active in support groups that help people who leave high-control religious groups. She has also created a safe space online through her TikTok channel, Apostate Barbie, where she educates others about the realities of life as a Witness. A series of videos on "Random Things You Can't Do as a Jehovah's Witness" has amassed hundreds of thousands of views. "I try to keep things very factual and light," she says of her content. "I don't want it to be heavy or [involve] calling people names. I try to show that there is life after religion. That it's not all doom and gloom, that we're all happy and fine, and in fact life is better."

Like a lot of ex-Witnesses, McAllen describes leaving the religion as "waking up". She had devoted her entire life to the faith, attending regular meetings at kingdom hall and spending dozens of hours a week knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets.

Jehovah's Witnesses are prohibited from socialising with nonbelievers, higher education is often discouraged to prioritise witnessing, and dating is strictly reserved for those seeking marriage. Former members say they were warned that questioning or leaving the faith could lead to "removal from the congregation", a formal practice of excommunication that was, until recently, known as disfellowship.

A person who is disfellowshipped stands to lose everything. They are effectively shunned by the community and end up "grieving the living" after losing contact with family and friends. Nicolas Spooner, a counsellor who specialises in working with Jehovah's Witnesses who leave the organisation, says exclusion from the faith can have a lasting negative impact on mental health, career prospects and quality of life, but it can also present an opportunity for self-discovery and new experiences that would change their lives completely.

"Looking at the sorts of things they're finding out about themselves, I think mostly they're starting to realise how many life skills they lack," Spooner says. "This is what I hear more than anything else. It's quite common for [former members] to find that they shy away from social situations, because they lack certain life skills that everybody else takes for granted – like how to make friends, how to treat friends, how to be a friend. These are things that we learn as we're growing up. If you're growing up as a Witness, it's not the same."

But it's never too late to learn, he adds, as he points to his wife, Heather, who left the Jehovah's Witnesses at the age of 48. Since then, she has completed a PhD in psychology researching the effects of religious ostracism, authored a number of academic articles on the subject and is a lecturer in psychology at Manchester University."

Canberra Times: 'You could hit kids': ex-members in 'cult' abuse claims

"Former members of a fundamentalist church have lifted the lid on abuse of kids and slammed working with children checks as a sham.

Ryan Carey was born into the Geelong Revival Centre, a Pentecostal doomsday church run by pastor Noel Hollins for more than six decades until his death in April 2024.

Mr Carey, whose father was second-in-command to Hollins, said the damage from his and others' time in the church lingers.

"I might have lived in the state of Victoria but I answered to the cult and the cult leader," he told a state parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday.

The inquiry into recruitment and retention methods of cults and organised fringe groups was green lit in April following claims of coercive practices within the church.

Mr Carey and his wife Catherine, who joined the church at age 19, were the first witnesses to give evidence at the public hearing."

AP: Leader of secretive New Zealand commune admits abusing young female church members

"The leader of an isolated and conservative Christian commune in New Zealand pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a dozen indecency and assault charges against women and girls who were members of the religious group.

The admission of guilt from Howard Temple came three days into a trial at which he was accused of abusing members of the Gloriavale commune, aged between 9 and 20 over a period of two decades.

Complainants who appeared in the opening days of Temple's trial at the Greymouth District Court said he had touched or groped them while they were performing domestic duties, including in front of other Gloriavale members during mealtimes, Radio New Zealand reported.

They told the court they were too scared to challenge the leader and feared being told the abuse was their fault.

Temple, who is 85 and known as the Overseeing Shepherd of Gloriavale, earlier denied the two dozen charges, and was scheduled to face a three-week trial. But on [July 30th], his lawyer said the leader would admit to an amended list of 12 crimes."

RNS: Gloriavale leader assault trial enters third day

"Three former Gloriavale members have told a court they were touched, grabbed and groped by the Overseeing Shepherd Howard Temple, on the second day of his trial in Greymouth. Mr Temple has pleaded not guilty to 24 charges of sexual assault and doing an indecent act."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

The Jehovah’s Witnesses who left the faith and never looked back: ‘I was 37 and had only ever held a boy’s hand’

There can be severe social consequences to leaving your religion behind, but many continue to do it, spurred on by a desire to live and learn independently. Taz Ali meets the people who’ve used their freedom from faith to discover themselves for the very first time – and often far later in life than the rest of us

Independent 

July 31, 2025

Micki McAllen speaks matter-of-factly about all the times she was told the world was about to end. The September 11 attacks. Donald Trump’s election. Covid. Each time, she and her family – strict Jehovah’s Witnesses – would wait with a mix of dread and anticipation for the salvation to come. Of course, Armageddon didn’t arrive on any of those occasions. But McAllen was told to always be prepared – it was right around the corner, after all. It was only when she was 35, and first began questioning her faith, that she asked herself a simple question: why prepare to die when I could choose to live?

The pandemic was the final nail in the coffin for McAllen. Confined to her home during lockdown in Auckland, New Zealand, she found herself searching for answers online. Gradually, the doubt set in. “I started reading people’s experiences, especially going through Covid,” she says. “A lot of people were affected by not having to go to kingdom hall [a place of worship for Witnesses] or any meeting or field service. We all had time to slow down and to think.”

Witnesses who have left the organisation told me that abandoning or even questioning the faith has severe social consequences, particularly shunning. Driven by this fear, McAllen kept all “worldly” people – a term used by Witnesses to describe anyone outside of the religion – at arm’s length. But it did nothing to quell her desire to learn and think independently. “I want to be my authentic self, and have an authentic life,” she recalls saying to herself. “I don’t know who I am, but I want to begin and I want to figure this out.”

After just a weekend of poring over online forums and speaking to former Witnesses, McAllen decided to leave. Within a week, she had dyed her hair bright pink and began her dream career in dog grooming, something she says she would never have been able to do as a Witness, when she spent all of her free time preaching. The rest of her thirties were spent catching up on the firsts she'd missed in her teens and twenties, from late-night parties to first loves and even losing her virginity.

I knew I wasn’t a good Witness. So from a child I was like, ‘whenever Armageddon hits, I am done’. Also, I hated all the Witness boys, I hated this patriarchal idea of what they stood for. Hating men was a part of me - Sian Harper

“Being able to do that took some time,” she says. “It wasn’t until two years after I left [the religion] that I had sex for the first time. I was 37.” Up until that point, McAllen adds, she had only ever held a boy’s hand. “I was so nervous. My friends were like, ‘make sure he uses a condom, and that you pee after sex’ – bits of information that I had missed out on that most people know by now.”

McAllen, 39, who lives in Greenwich, south-east London, is today active in support groups that help people who leave high-control religious groups. She has also created a safe space online through her TikTok channel, Apostate Barbie, where she educates others about the realities of life as a Witness. A series of videos on “Random Things You Can’t Do as a Jehovah’s Witness” has amassed hundreds of thousands of views. “I try to keep things very factual and light,” she says of her content. “I don’t want it to be heavy or [involve] calling people names. I try to show that there is life after religion. That it’s not all doom and gloom, that we’re all happy and fine, and in fact life is better.”

Like a lot of ex-Witnesses, McAllen describes leaving the religion as “waking up”. She had devoted her entire life to the faith, attending regular meetings at kingdom hall and spending dozens of hours a week knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are prohibited from socialising with nonbelievers, higher education is often discouraged to prioritise witnessing, and dating is strictly reserved for those seeking marriage. Former members say they were warned that questioning or leaving the faith could lead to “removal from the congregation”, a formal practice of excommunication that was, until recently, known as disfellowship.

A person who is disfellowshipped stands to lose everything. They are effectively shunned by the community and end up “grieving the living” after losing contact with family and friends. Nicolas Spooner, a counsellor who specialises in working with Jehovah’s Witnesses who leave the organisation, says exclusion from the faith can have a lasting negative impact on mental health, career prospects and quality of life, but it can also present an opportunity for self-discovery and new experiences that would change their lives completely.

“Looking at the sorts of things they’re finding out about themselves, I think mostly they’re starting to realise how many life skills they lack,” Spooner says. “This is what I hear more than anything else. It’s quite common for [former members] to find that they shy away from social situations, because they lack certain life skills that everybody else takes for granted – like how to make friends, how to treat friends, how to be a friend. These are things that we learn as we’re growing up. If you’re growing up as a Witness, it’s not the same.”

But it’s never too late to learn, he adds, as he points to his wife, Heather, who left the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the age of 48. Since then, she has completed a PhD in psychology researching the effects of religious ostracism, authored a number of academic articles on the subject and is a lecturer in psychology at Manchester University.

“She got her life back,” says Spooner, who met Heather a year after she left the Witnesses. “She reached the point where she had to say to herself, ‘they’ve had 48 years of my life, they’re not having any more’. The people that recover the best do inevitably have to get to that point… realising, ‘I left so that I could get my life back’.”

McAllen and other former Witnesses I’ve spoken to – all of whom have since come out as bisexual or gay – said the organisation initially gave them a sense of belonging, but proselytising left them with a feeling of vague disquiet. They would preach that God condemns homosexual acts, feelings and thoughts, a message that clashed with their own internal struggles about their sexuality.

“Leaving the religion and having time to figure out who I am and think about things I’ve never thought about, I realised I was bi,” says McAllen. “I got to talk to other people from the queer community and it was such a really nice, fun and creative environment.”

For some Witnesses, coming out can be a painful and terrifying ordeal. Ben Gibbons, 37, had been outed by another member of the organisation when he was in his early twenties. He was forced to attend Bible studies with an elder in the congregation for days on end and wasn’t allowed to leave his house without another member of the group present. Some of the practices he was subjected to were so extreme that he describes them as a form of gay conversion therapy. While the religion does not officially endorse the practice, its teachings can put strong pressure on LGBT+ members to suppress or reject same-sex attraction.

Gibbons says he was made to drink a bitter liquid to make himself sick every time he had an “impure” thought. “I was told how wrong it was, told to hide it, constantly read from the Bible,” he adds. “I used to bleach my hair and wore bright colourful clothes. By the end of it I had a shaved head, everything was monochrome, nothing too tight, all to make me look ‘straight’.”

It took years of therapy for Gibbons to be able to recover from the trauma, but he says he is now in a much happier place. He left the religion, married his partner, Lee, in 2022, and they live in the Norfolk town of Dereham, where Gibbons works as a wedding videographer.

When he talks about his past as a Witness, he says it feels almost otherworldly. “It was like I was in a PC game. The crowd filler, the random humans walking around the screen – that was me, because I couldn’t live authentically there. Leaving has allowed me to live a much freer life and do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to do. If the younger me could see me now … the idea of being married, having a roof over my head, being free and OK with everything and now speaking out, I would never have believed it. That is my goal, to be the person that I needed back then.”

The fear of isolation leads many to live double lives, like Sian Harper, 28, a building manager in Oxford, who was born and raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She had friends outside of the organisation, and did just enough not to raise suspicion at her church. She later came out as lesbian, got engaged to a woman and told her family about her sexuality and intention to leave the religion, which they didn’t take well, although they admitted they had seen it coming. “I knew I wasn’t a good Witness,” Harper says. “So from a child, I was like, ‘whenever Armageddon hits, I am done’. Also, I hated all the Witness boys. I hated this patriarchal idea of what they stood for.” She laughs. “Hating men was a part of me.”

Like McAllen and Gibbons, Harper has little to no contact with her family today. While none of them has been formally disfellowshipped, they have taken the difficult decision to let go of their old lives and everyone in them in order to build new ones.

The relationship didn’t work out for Harper, but she allowed herself to heal and grow from the heartbreak. “We grew apart, unfortunately, but that’s OK. I hope that they continue to grow and I hope I do too. I am more open to new experiences, moving different places and not being worried that this is some kind of moral failing. I’m going to die either way – I might as well just have fun, go out and snog some girls.”

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/jehovahs-witnesses-leaving-apostasy-b2798731.html

CultNEWS101 Articles: 7/18/2025

Jimmy Swaggart, Obituary, Jonestown, Jehovah's Witnesses, Video, LGB, Grace Community Church, Public Shaming

The Conversation: Jimmy Swaggart's rise and fall shaped the landscape of American televangelism

"Jimmy Swaggart, one of the most popular and enduring of the 1980s televangelists, died on July 1, 2025, but his legacy lives.

Along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he drew an audience in the millions, amassed a personal fortune and introduced a new generation of Americans to a potent mix of religion and politics.

Swaggart was an old-time evangelist whose focus was "saving souls." But he also preached on conservative social issues, warning followers about the evils of abortion, homosexuality and godless communism.

Swaggart also denounced what he called "false cults," including Catholicism, Judaism and Mormonism. In fact, his denunciations of other religions, as well as his attacks on rival preachers, made him a more polarizing figure than his politicized brethren."

NY Post: Jonestown mass death survivors who didn't 'drink the Kool-Aid' weigh in on the site becoming a tourist attraction

"Jonestown is seared into the American psyche as one the darkest tragedies of the modern era, where 918 people "drank the Kool Aid" and ended their lives under the command of cult leader Jim Jones.

Located in the remote Guyanese jungle, the site where the army first discovered the mass of dead bodies of People's Temple members in 1978 is now opening as a somewhat morbid tourist attraction. It is designed to pay somber tribute in the manner of Auschwitz and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

The curious can pay $750 to visit the clearing where Jones' religious cult, mostly US citizens who had traveled with him to Guyana, unraveled in the most gruesome way imaginable."

ICSA International Conference 2024, Barcelona, Spain: Waking Up: What the Narratives of Former Jehovah's Witnesses Bethelites Reveal About Their Experience of Realizing They Were in a Cult - Andre Jackson

RNS: Former member sues John MacArthur's megachurch for public shaming

"A former member has sued Grace Community Church, led by prominent evangelical pastor John MacArthur, saying church leaders disclosed confidential information about her during a church service.

In a complaint filed Thursday (July 3) in Los Angeles County Superior Court, lawyers for Lorraine Zielinski said she went to leaders at the megachurch in LA's Sun Valley neighborhood, where MacArthur is the longtime pastor, seeking counseling for her troubled marriage and was told her conversations would be kept confidential.

According to the complaint, she told counselors she was afraid for her safety and the safety of her daughter, alleging that her then-husband was physically abusive. Her lawyers said church leaders pressured Zielinski to drop her request for a legal separation.

When Zielinski tried to resign as a church member, pastors put her under church discipline for failing to follow their counsel, according to the complaint. They also allegedly told her to either come to a meeting with church pastors or details of her counseling would be made public to the congregation.

'When Plaintiff did not attend the meeting, GCC made good on its threat and shared information gained through confidential communications relating to her marriage with GCC membership,' according to the complaint."

Waking Up: What the Narratives of Former Jehovah's Witnesses Bethelites Reveal About Their Experience of Realizing They Were in a Cult

Andre Jackson

ICSA International Conference 2024

Barcelona, Spain

https://youtu.be/bGmzO-wcQRc?si=-FtiQZy2owWtZ2WJ 

Sexual misconduct allegations lead Arizona ex-gay therapist to surrender his license

Floyd Godfrey, an LDS conversion therapy activist is a major player on the "ex-gay" speaking circuit.

Commentary by Wayne Besen
LGBTQ Nation
March 8, 2024

An exclusive report by Truth Wins Out revealed today that in May 2023, Floyd Godfrey, an infamous conversion therapist, who once compared homosexuality to cannibalism, was forced to surrender his license to practice therapy in Arizona.

An investigation by the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners concluded that Godfrey had made “sexual advances” against two of his employees and included “an additional allegation that Respondent (Godfrey) asked to get naked in front of him.”

Leading “ex-gay” conversion therapist has a disturbing history of domestic abuse
“Godfrey is a fraud who secured his income by claiming to cure LGBTQ people, but never changed his own sexual orientation,” said Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen. “This latest scandal proves conversion therapy is a dangerous front for con artists who use the practice to conceal their moral depravity and disturbing penchant to engage in sexual impropriety.”

One of the whistleblowers “provided screenshots of written correspondence to corroborate this allegation.” Truth Wins Out, working with anti-conversion therapy advocates Matt Ashcroft and Stevie Inghram, found that the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners:

In 03/23…received four separate complaints against Respondent [Godfrey] alleging unwanted sexual in nature advances.

[The Board] voted to offer the Respondent an interim consent agreement that would prohibit him the ability to see client’s directly or provide clinical supervision. Additionally, at the Board meeting, the members issued an Order for a psychosexual evaluation to be completed within 60 days for the Board’s review and consideration.

After this Board meeting, prior to Board staff’s formal investigative interview with Respondent, and without completing the psychosexual evaluation, Respondent contacted Board staff requesting to voluntarily surrender his license.

Based upon the foregoing Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law, the parties agree to the provision and penalties imposed as follows: 1. Respondent’s license, LPC-10466, shall be surrendered to the Board. 2. The surrender shall be considered a revocation of Respondent’s license.

Respondent’s agreement not to provide direct client services or provide clinical supervision will be considered an active restriction of their license.

His scandal is a severe blow to the “ex-gay” industry. Godfrey, an LDS counselor, is tied to the notorious Brother’s Road organization. He is also an author and a popular speaker on the conversion therapy circuit. Godfrey was on the board of People Can Change, spoke at the now disbanded LDS Evergreen International and the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (formerly NARTH).

In 2013, Godfrey was an anti-LGBTQ presenter at the United Nations. In 2017, he gave a seminar, “Homosexuality and Etiological Concerns,” for St. Lucia’s Governmental Affairs agency. His most recent seminar was in 2023 at the AACC Global Summit, where he spoke on, “Program Development for Adolescent Males with Compulsive Pornography Problems.”

Godfrey still serves on “the Executive Team at Family Strategies Counseling Center in Mesa, Arizona as an advisor and consultant.” He “supervises other therapists who work in the field of sexual addictions, reparative therapy and other mental health issues.”

“What kind of counseling agency would allow such a troubled individual and certified charlatan to supervise therapists?” asked Matt Ashcroft, a conversion therapy survivor and an activist who played a key role in banning conversion therapy in Canada. “Conversion therapy is a harmful practice that attracts dishonorable hucksters who manipulate clients and abuse their power.”

The website for Family Strategies Counseling Center used to be HealingHomosexuality.com but has since been changed to the more nebulous FamilyStrategies.org, likely as an attempt to avoid controversy at a time when conversion therapy is considered toxic and politically unpalatable.

Despite his recent scandal, Godfrey still appears to practice conversion therapy, hawking “ex-gay” snake oil on his personal website, where he offers private online sessions for “Identity/Gender Confusion” and ‘Unwanted Same Sex Attraction”.

“Should an unethical, disgraced therapist who unceremoniously lost his license for sexual impropriety be offering counseling to anyone, no less vulnerable LGBTQ youth?” asked Stevie Inghram, who studies and researches conversion therapy. “What we see here is a recipe for abusive behavior. Godfrey should take down his deceptive website and find a new field of work.”

Godfrey made news when he appeared on right-wing commentator Linda Harvey’s show in 2012 and metaphorically compared homosexuality to cannibalism. Addressing a question by Mission America’s Harvey, Godfrey said:

Dr. Elizabeth Moberly had talked about homosexuality like cannibalism because we’re so hungry. And that is what it feels like to those who struggle with homosexual feelings, they’re so hungry they just want to eat it up, they want to assimilate, they want to eat what they don’t feel like they have. If you look at cannibals they would eat the leaders of the tribe, they would eat those that have the qualities they so admired. A young man with homosexual attractions is so envious, he’s jealous of other boys, he puts them on a pedestal, he might idolize them, he’s jealous of them, so he’s trying to assimilate what he feels like he doesn’t have. So that’s where that metaphor comes from.

Godfrey has always been at war with his nature. According to his testimony, he married a woman in 1992 and had three children. However, from the beginning, his marriage was no honeymoon:

“Unfortunately, during my first year of marriage I became overconfident and neglected some of the things that had been essential in my process in therapy…I made some wrong decisions that resulted to have sexual relations with another man for first time in my life. I felt so bad and so devastated! I had to constantly feed my masculinity and participate in activities with men.”

Godfrey’s depressing life-story represents classic conversion therapy’s prosaic “cause and effect” model. In a video testimony on Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) website, Godfrey claims he felt rejected by his male peers. He said he felt like he was “always the last one picked for a team” and that his “longings to fit in” led him to “be constantly tortured by that desire to be one of the guys.”

Godfrey had the requisite difficult relationship with his father who was hyper-religious and “very legalistic and very demeaning, very critical, it was very hard to please him.” He said that due to the ill treatment by his father he “felt less and less of a man less and less masculine.”

His family’s conservative religious practices made it difficult for Godfrey to accept that he was gay. “The whole time trying hard to reconcile with my faith that that’s just not who I was.”

Conversion therapy attracts clients by creating a false model that deliberately confuses stereotypes with science. The discredited practice often ensnares LGBTQ people who identify with experiences such as Godfrey’s, creating a cause and effect where none exists.

Most despicably, Godfrey offers the canard that homosexuality is caused by being molested as a child, although there is no evidence to back this assertion. “I’d also had friends who had been sexually molested and said that contributed to some of their problems and their attractions,” he claims without evidence.

The false conversion therapy model flies in the face of reality. LGBTQ people come from every imaginable background and family dynamic. There are gay professional athletes! Some LGBTQ people are sexually abused, as are countess heterosexuals. Godfrey’s male rejection didn’t lead him to “sexualize” his feelings toward men, as he claims.

Instead, he is a victim of misguided ideas, fueled by guilt, shame, stigma, and religious conditioning, which, tragically, led him to illegitimately “medicalize” his natural sexual orientation, against the advice of every respected medical and mental health association in the world.

The result of suppressing his true self finally burst out in the open, with the now-disgraced therapist acting out in unhealthy, humiliating ways that led to unethical decisions that undermined his career.

In his video testimony, Godfrey claimed, “My wife and I have a wonderful marriage and have a wonderful life. At this point, I don’t feel like I’m repressing who I am.”

Godfrey’s dishonorable actions and career collapse belie his sugarcoated words and carefully curated life story. When it comes to “ex-gay” leaders, their ignoble actions always speak louder than their slippery words. Just like recently scandalized conversion therapists Christopher Doyle and Jayson Graves, Floyd Godfrey is a two-bit charlatan who unscrupulously peddles “ex-gay” poison to clients, even though his magic cure clearly didn’t work for himself.


https://www.lgbtqnation.com/channel/queer-state-of-the-union/

Religious trauma still haunts millions of LGBTQ Americans

Some mental health experts are advocating for religious trauma to be considered an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.


Spencer Macnaughton
NBC
January 28, 2024


Kellen Swift-Godzisz, 35, said he doesn’t go on dates, struggles with erectile dysfunction and is hesitant to trust people. For more than 20 years, he’s experienced intense bouts of anxiety and depression that have had a “major hold on his life.”

“Imagine being told by everyone you trusted that you’re going to hell because you like men,” Swift-Godzisz, a marketing project manager living in Chicago, told NBC News.

At just 11 years old, Swift-Godzisz recalled, he would sit in his bedroom every night praying or writing letters that said, “Please God, remove my affliction of same-sex attraction,” and would then store each letter in an overflowing shoebox in his closet.

Swift-Godzisz, who grew up in an evangelical Baptist church in rural Michigan, believed Bible verses like Matthew 21:22 — “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” — would help him “pray the gay away.”

As he entered his teens and realized his feelings of same-sex attraction were only intensifying, Swift-Godzisz finally accepted that God would not be answering his prayers. Things went downhill from there, he said.

Swift-Godzisz is among the 1 in 3 adults in the United States who have suffered from religious trauma at some point in their life, according to a 2023 study published in the Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry Journal. That same study suggests up to 1 in 5 U.S. adults currently suffer from major religious trauma symptoms.

Religious trauma occurs when an individual’s religious upbringing has lasting adverse effects on their physical, mental or emotional well-being, according to the Religious Trauma Institute. Symptoms can include guilt, shame, loss of trust and loss of meaning in life. While religious trauma hasn’t officially been classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), there is debate among psychiatrists about whether that should change.


Experts say LGBTQ people — who represent more than 7% of the U.S. population, according to a 2023 Gallup poll — experience religious trauma at disproportionate rates and in unique ways. Very little research has been done in this field, but a 2022 study found that LGBTQ people who experience certain forms of religious trauma are at increased risk for suicidality, substance abuse, homelessness, anxiety and depression. And as political animus toward the LGBTQ community intensifies ahead of the 2024 presidential election, many queer people say their pain is resurfacing.


‘It’s basically a mind rape’
The concept of religious trauma has been around for centuries, and, according to experts, it can have serious consequences that can last a lifetime.


“In its worst manifestations, it’s basically a mind rape,” said Marlene Winell, a psychologist who coined the term “religious trauma syndrome” in 2011. “These doctrines that are taught to you over and over are so damaging and so hideous and so hard to weed out. In many cases, you have been violated, you have been abused or you have been shamed, and the impact is very deep and can be everlasting.”


Dr. Jack Drescher, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who specializes in LGBTQ populations, agreed, noting that growing up gay or transgender in a nonaccepting religious environment could have serious mental health consequences.


Evan Jenkins for NBC News
“When you hide or morph your behavior in an effort to conceal your queer identity, you wind up hiding other things about yourself,” he said. “There may be strengths or aspirations you have that you never access because you’re afraid they’re associated with your gender identity. This can affect your self-esteem, it can affect your confidence, and even your capacity to be realistic about what you can do and achieve.”


At 14, when Swift-Godzisz accepted that he could not “pray the gay away,” he confided in his youth pastor, who in turn told his parents and the entire church leadership.


“My mom was hysterical and ashamed and wanted us to pack up and move to a new town,” he said. “My parents very much viewed it as a sin and a choice that I made that we were going to fix.”


For the next three years, Swift-Godzisz said, he was grounded indefinitely. He said his parents controlled the friends he was allowed to hang out with and enrolled him in so-called conversion therapy, a discredited practice that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation. For this type of therapy, Swift-Godzisz said, his parents forced him to speak with various people from the fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family, which is widely known for its anti-LGBTQ advocacy.


“They weren’t trying to understand me,” he recalled of his sessions with the Focus on the Family leaders. “All of their advice was just, ‘Practice abstinence,’ or ‘Don’t do that; that’s against God’s wishes.”


While conversion therapy has been made fully or partially illegal for licensed mental health practitioners in 27 states and Washington, D.C., these laws don’t apply to religious leaders.


Swift-Godzisz’s mother, who declined to address her son’s allegations, told NBC News that while she and her son “differ on some things,” she would give her life for him in a moment. “I’m proud of my son, I love him and I’m glad the Lord gave him to me,” she said.


Focus on the Family did not reply to a request for comment.


“The church has been the villain in my life story,” Swift-Godzisz said, adding that he’s been traumatized by his family and religious leaders. “Anything I’d do that’s ‘gay’ was considered a sin.”


Evan Jenkins for NBC News
Now, decades later, Swift-Godzisz said he struggles with severe ADHD and — though he’s never been officially diagnosed — what he described as post-traumatic stress disorder, or “PTSD-like feelings.” He also said growing up queer in an ultrareligious household has led to persistent issues in his romantic life, including erectile dysfunction.


“When you’ve spent decades of your life reinforcing not getting a boner around another guy, and now even though you are ready to do that sort of stuff, your brain still kind of goes like, ‘I don’t know, we’re not supposed to do that,’” he explained.


He also said he avoids romantic relationships altogether.


“Still, to this day, one of my biggest fears is that I’ll get married to a man, have children and get old with him, and on my deathbed I’ll denounce it all because I’m afraid that I might go to hell,” he said. “So I just don’t do it.”


Winell said many of her patients’ trauma response is so active from what they experienced as a child that their brain gets confused about what’s past and what’s present, which causes the fear response to fire up in situations where they are doing something related to their sexuality or gender identity.


“Sometimes there’s a real split between what you think in your head — your intellectual understanding of everything — and your gut-level emotional condition and response to situations,” she explained. “So someone like Swift-Godzisz might be comfortable with his identity but can still have this gut-level fight-or-flight response in the amygdala to all the trauma from the past, and if that happens constantly, that can really screw you up.”


She added that people experiencing this can also develop physical symptoms like digestive problems and headaches.


The effect of familial and community rejection
Religious trauma for LGBTQ people may be particularly intense, because it “goes to the very essence of who the person is,” according to Winell.


“There’s so much condemnation in conservative kinds of churches about being LGBTQ, that the trauma is felt as a direct attack on them,” she said.


LGBTQ people experiencing religious trauma may also be met with instant rejection when they come out or when their queer identity is discovered, she said, noting that they could lose connection with family, friends, church leadership and other forms of community overnight.


“In a biological way, we all want to belong, and we are attached to our parents — we’re dependent on them and need their approval. So if you have their love growing up and then one day, boom, they reject you for something you can’t control, that can create long-lasting anxiety and trauma,” Winell said. “The icing on the cake is that you might simultaneously be losing friends, mentors or entire communities.”


Jamie Long, 40, is among those who quickly lost her support system due to a clash between her LGBTQ identity and her religion.


“Religion has obliterated my life,” she said.


Growing up in Greensboro, Alabama, where her father was the deacon and Sunday school teacher of her Pentecostal church, Long — who was assigned male at birth but now often uses she/her pronouns — remembers feeling different about her gender and sexuality as early as kindergarten. She spent her youth “in hiding,” doing everything to beg God to give her the power to change the feelings she had about her gender and her attraction to men.


“I would pray for hours nonstop,” said Long, who, decades later, is still trying to figure out her gender identity. “Nothing worked. It was terrifying.”


As time went on, it became harder for Long to hide her effeminate behavior. So she came out as a gay man and started hooking up with men on “the down-low,” which she said is omnipresent among men who have sex with men in the Black church.


“The pressure to subscribe to heterosexuality and masculinity is so intense, so there’s this culture in the Black religious community of guys keeping their hookups on ‘the low,’” she added.


As people close to Long started to find out she had come out as gay, the rejection ramped up. Her choir director — whom she described as a prominent figure she looked up to — pulled her aside after a Sunday service and said, “We can’t have a homosexual singing in the choir. I’m going to work with you to get that evil spirit out of you,” Long recalled. Her mom, who had been her “biggest supporter,” broke down in tears and said, “You will burn in hell,” and her brother berated her and called her anti-gay slurs for the duration of a 30-minute drive through Alabama, she recalled.


Long’s brother told NBC News that he “doesn’t remember” that car ride and — using male pronouns for his sibling — said that while he loves Long, he does not respect the path Long has chosen. “I don’t believe in gay; I believe it’s a spirit,” he said. Long’s choir director did not respond to a request for comment.


Now, years after losing most of her support systems because of her LGBTQ identity, Long has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder.


“I blame 100% of my identity crisis, of who I am as a queer person, on my religious upbringing,” Long said. “I had to create a mask and suppress my feelings all because of how I was brought up in the church. I was conditioned to believe my life was wrong.”


When religion meets politics
In addition to feeling isolated or rejected by family and community, many LGBTQ Americans say the current political climate is exacerbating their experience with religious trauma.


In 2023, a record-shattering 510 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures, with more than 80 of them passed into law, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Transgender people’s access to health care was a key talking point in the Republican presidential primary debates, and, before he was in Congress, recently elected House Speaker Mike Johnson called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos” and suggested it could lead to people wedding their pets.


“For me, the religious aspect is almost inextricable from the political aspect,” said Amberlyn Boiter, a business analyst for a software development company, who lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.


She remembers attending a 1,500-person megachurch just months before she came out as trans where the entire audience applauded after the pastor went on a 10-minute “transphobic rant.”


“I had to go up and play the bass in the church band after that, and I remember hating every second,” Boiter, 36, said.


Shortly after that, she came out to her family and they rejected her, stating that she was “betraying God and in turn she had betrayed them.”


“I think the biggest hurt is seeing our family members choose mythology over a relationship with their own flesh and blood,” she said.


Boiter cited the 20 anti-LGBTQ bills that were introduced in South Carolina’s state legislature in 2023. Some bills would strip trans people of gender-affirming health care, while others would criminalize them if they use public bathrooms that match their gender identity. Many of the bills were backed by Christian legal groups and think tanks like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council.


“Being able to tie the policy to religious sources, it makes me feel doomed,” Boiter said. “There have been some pretty dark days, some of which have gone into the territory of suicidal ideation, where I’m worrying about whether I am going to have to uproot my wife and my child and move them from a place that I was born and raised.”


Boiter said she has ancestral ties in Spartanburg that go back to the 1780s.


“I have more than once spiraled into a place of thinking, ‘I might not only need to move to a different state, I may need to consider moving to another country.’ When people like Mike Johnson — who I would call a religious fanatic — are elected to higher and higher positions and even federal office, what am I supposed to think? More than a couple of times, I’ve looked at Canada’s refugee policies. I legitimately and truthfully worry that a day may come where my family and I are refugees.”


Swift-Godzisz shares those sentiments.


“I’m keeping the lid on a pot that is ready to boil over,” he said, adding that Johnson’s anti-LGBTQ track record is “one of the scariest things that has happened in my perception of politics.”


Healing from religious trauma
Mental health experts say in order to heal, those suffering from religious trauma should work toward building a new, affirming chapter in their lives.


Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center, said building that next chapter may involve cutting off those who hurt you.


“You say, ‘I love you, I forgive you,’ and you take the initiative to move forward. That will help heal you,” he said.


Koenig added that LGBTQ people who have experienced trauma but don’t want to leave religion entirely should consider joining an affirming church where leaders may be able to help with the healing process.


“Christian acceptance of [the LGBTQ] community is growing,” he said. In fact, majorities of every major religious group favor laws that protect LGBTQ people against discrimination, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2022 American Values Survey.


To move forward, Drescher recommends rebuilding self-esteem by forming new relationships. “It’s important to find new communities, new friendships that are affirming and that can help you heal,” he explained.


For those who leave their religion — as Swift-Godzisz, Long and Boiter have all done — it’s “like the rug gets pulled out from under you,” according to Winell.


“Your life needs to be gradually reconstructed,” she said. “It’s a reconstruct of who you think you are and what you believe now. One of those new beliefs is that being LGBTQ is OK.”


In terms of treatment, Winell said she first helps her patients learn to take care of themselves.


“Instead of outsourcing all that care to God, I teach them how to be self-reflective and how to regulate their feelings from their own perspective, rather than from the Bible’s,” she said.


From there, she teaches skills that help with the trauma response, like writing down negative messages you grew up believing and changing them to something that can read as positive and hopeful.


“What used to be, ‘My life is a trial, and then I die and go to hell,’ can change to, ‘My life is an adventure and a journey,’” she said.


She also works with her patients on relaxation by teaching them breathing exercises and body scan meditations, among other techniques. In certain cases, she recommends combining these tools with medication.


A debate among mental health providers
As more LGBTQ people share their experiences with religious trauma, there is debate among mental health experts about how it should be characterized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s reference guide for coding, classifying and diagnosing mental disorders.


In the decades-old manual’s fifth and latest edition, the DSM-5-TR, religious trauma falls under the category “Religious or Spiritual Problem,” as a Z code, not an official mental disorder. Z codes are listed in the back of the DSM and are referred to as “other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention.” Other examples include various forms of “Child Psychological Abuse,” “Unsheltered Homelessness” and “Victim of Terrorism or Torture.”


Koenig is now working with a group of public health experts and psychiatrists at Harvard University to expand “Religious or Spiritual Problem” as a Z code in the DSM to include “Moral Problems,” such as moral injury.


Moral injury, which is not currently listed in the DSM, may occur when an individual believes they have acted in a way that deeply conflicts with their morals and values, which produces guilt, shame or profound feelings of broken trust. It has been applied to war veterans and, more recently, to health care professionals who did not feel like they were able to provide appropriate care to those suffering during the Covid-19 pandemic.


“For centuries, people have been manipulating and weaponizing religion by condemning LGBTQ individuals,” Koenig said. “Moral injury — particularly for religious LGBTQ people — can create a whole life of shame and guilt. To live with it can result in mental health problems over time, like suicide, depression and anxiety, because that’s what moral injury does, and you can get stuck in it for years and decades.”


Koenig said it’s critical that the combination of “Religious or Spiritual Problem” and “Moral Problem” — which is currently under review by a DSM committee — finds a spot in the manual as a Z code. By adding moral injury, he explained, providers will be able to collect more specific data and prescribe more targeted treatments, such as whether it’s appropriate to recommend pastoral support for those suffering. They’ll also be able to more effectively document which part of the patient’s trauma came from their family’s or community’s religious beliefs and which part came from a separate worldview that being LGBTQ is immoral.


“For religious people who identify as LGBTQ, it’s not just Christianity at play,” he said. “It’s the whole moral fabric of the culture that’s been passed down through generations that has caused this condemnation.”


Getting a new disorder or code added to the DSM involves submitting an extensive proposal to the manual’s steering committee, which is then reviewed and forwarded along to the American Psychiatric Association’s board of trustees for approval.


“Having it as a Z code will validate and stimulate funding support, and then there’ll be more money for research, which will help us learn more about how we can treat folks experiencing moral injuries like religious trauma,” Koenig said.


A further step would be changing “Religious or Spiritual Problem” from a Z code to an official disorder in the DSM. While Koenig is unsure about his stance on this, as the process would be even more rigorous and could take years, Winell said she “definitely thinks it should be in there” as a disorder.


“Right now, most therapists don’t know much about it. They’ll do an intake with a new client and talk about family, schooling, substance abuse, but they won’t touch religion,” she said. “So if it was a real thing in the DSM, it would get covered and the millions of folks who are struggling with it across this country could get better help.”


Winell added that a disorder classification in the DSM would give religious trauma more credibility in the eyes of medical professionals and would give those experiencing this type of trauma the ability to name what they’re going through. She also predicted this would result in more research in the area and religious trauma becoming part of the curriculum in university psychology courses.


Drescher, who was part of the APA committee that in 2013 changed gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria in the DSM in an effort to remove stigma, disagrees with Winell on this matter.


“We don’t need diagnoses to understand what’s going on. … Medicalizing social issues is how homosexuality was originally labeled a mental disorder,” Drescher said, noting that homosexuality wasn’t officially removed from the DSM until 1973. “So the idea that now we’re going to turn anti-LGBTQ ideas into psychiatric diagnoses doesn’t sit well with me.”


This, he added, could enable a future generation to “just flip the switch” and pathologize homosexuality once again.


And while Drescher — who has been practicing psychiatry for over four decades — isn’t optimistic about changing the hearts and minds of today’s anti-LGBTQ church leaders who are “set in their ways,” he is still hopeful about the future.


“Younger religious people don’t think of LGBTQ people as their enemies. They know them as their friends, their neighbors and their fellow congregants,” he said.


“So as the new generation grows up, religious LGBTQ people will be met with greater acceptance rather than being stigmatized and having to hide who they are, and less hiding who you are means you can grow up feeling better about yourself and perhaps experience less anxiety, depression and other mental health struggles.”


If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.


Spencer Macnaughton
Spencer Macnaughton is an Emmy-nominated and Gracie Award-winning producer and an adjunct professor at New York University, where he teaches journalism with a focus on LGBTQ issues.


Ohio board stands by disqualification of trans candidate, even though others are allowed to run
A county board in Ohio has refused to reconsider the disqualification of Vanessa Joy, a transgender state House candidate who omitted her former name from circulating petitions.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/millions-lgbtq-americans-religious-trauma-psychiatrists-want-help-rcna135728

Aussie school blocks religious group that claims to free children from autism-causing demons

Wendy Crouch ·News Reporter
Yahoo News Australia
August 6, 2023

The Queensland Department of Education has spoken out after a controversial religious group that says it can "free" people of autism, cancer and homosexuality promoted an indoctrination event at a Brisbane school.

The Last Reformation (TLR), an evangelical Christian church founded by Danish baker-turned-pastor Torben Sondergaard, angered locals by announcing it would hold a "Kickstart" at a public high school next month.

"Am I reading this right: a religious group that performs child exorcism is travelling to Australia and has been allowed to use Cavendish Road State High School to recruit followers?" a concerned resident asked online, sparking a firestorm of complaints from community members.

Torben Sondergaard, founder of The Last Reformation religious group, says the power of prayer can cast out demons that cause illnesses, autism and homosexuality. Source: YouTube

Autism and exorcism

TLR, has been described in previous reports as a "cult" — although the group rejects this label — has made headlines over the years following concerns that their teachings and practices were sending "dangerous" messages about conditions such as autism.

In an interview with Spain's The Local in 2016, Mr Sondergaard clarified he does not claim to "heal" autism but instead, "frees" people of the "demons" that cause it.

"It happened in Australia to a nine-year-old-girl who suffered autism. She was freed from demons and she was happy," Mr Sondergaard said. "It wasn't something shocking like a big man holding her down. She was with her mother and we all prayed and the demon was cast out and she was happy and the mother was happy."

The claim prompted autism advocacy groups to slam Mr Sondergaard and TLR for "targeting vulnerable people" by saying those with autism have demons inside them.

The group announced a series of training events — or "Kickstarts" — in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide this September. These events are meetings where "people learn about what the gospel is and how to share it, how to obey Jesus when it comes to healing the sick and casting out demons, and how to be led by the Holy Spirit," Mr Sondergaard explained in his book Kickstart Package.

Mr Sondergaard is currently in detention in the US after he was arrested in July 2022 for alleged gun smuggling – an accusation that TLR vehemently denies.

Department of Education responds

A spokesperson from the Department of Education addressed concerns about TLR booking Cavendish Road State High School in a statement to Yahoo News, denying that permission to use the venue was ever granted to the group.

"Cavendish Road State High School received a request to hire the school hall from the faith group The Last Reformation for an upcoming event. This request was not accepted by the school prior to the event being publicly advertised by the group," the spokesperson said.

"The school will not be facilitating the event on school grounds and have advised the organisers to make alternate arrangements and amend promotional materials on the event location," the spokesperson added.

Events cancelled

After the Department of Education addressed TLR's request, the group announced a change of venue and has since cancelled all forthcoming events in Australia, citing "attacks and persecution".

An update on TLR's Eventbrite page states that the events couldn't go ahead as one of the church's preachers, Jón Bjarnastein, was denied a visa to enter the country, and two venues "cancelled" bookings.

"False complaints and accusations were received, mentioning that we were dangerous and that we are dangerous to children; and because of these allegations and complaints, the venue was cancelled. After this, other allegations were made that TLR is a cult and allegations of child exorcisms," TLR's statement reads.

"So from all of this, it's very clear that there are people working behind the scenes; and they seem to be working very hard to prevent us from continuing. As a result we have made the decision to cancel the upcoming Kickstarts in Australia."

The Australian branch of TLR did not directly address Yahoo's questions about its practices, instead pointing to its website for further information.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/aussie-school-blocks-religious-group-that-claims-to-free-children-from-autism-causing-demons-025954470.html

This Church Promised to Save Their Souls. Defectors Say It Was a 'Cult'

How a group of Christian outcasts banded together to expose alleged sexual assault and manipulation that was happening within its ranks

ANDREA MARKS
Rolling Stone
AUGUST 3, 2023



IN 1991, WHEN Chele Roland was a college student, regular customers at the diner where she worked persuaded her to come to the Los Angeles International Church of Christ, a protestant evangelical church with a handful of locations in the greater L.A. area. “I was always a seeker and a do-gooder,” she says. “They made me feel like God himself had sought me out, and I was going to help them change the world.” The same day she first attended a service with them at the Wiltern Theater, she learned her father had died unexpectedly. When the woman from the diner called her that evening to follow up, she told her what had happened. The woman assured her God had brought her to the church for a reason. Looking back, she feels like the ICOC exploited her vulnerability to draw her into a controlling group that dominated the next 17 years of her life.

According to two lawsuits filed July 13 in L.A. County Court, the International Churches of Christ (ICOC) is not a church, but a “cult,” a high-control group where leaders allegedly take advantage of the members. The crux of the claims in the lawsuits is the allegation that leaders at the ICOC, as well as some related entities, have for decades covered up sexual abuse and rape to protect themselves from scandal. In one lawsuit, four women claimed they were sexually abused as children in the 1990s by the same then-church member, who is now serving a 40-year sentence for child rape, and that when their parents reported the abuse, church leadership actively discouraged them from going to the police; in the other, a woman claimed she was sexually abused by a children’s ministry teacher, also in the 1990s, and that after her parents reported the abuse, leadership failed to remove him from his role in the ministry, known as Kid’s Kingdom. Beyond the abuse claims, the plaintiffs allege that a hierarchy of church elders known as “disciplers” monitored and controlled “every aspect of every member’s life,” imposed “recruiting quotas” on members to increase the group’s ranks, demanded large portions of their income as part of a “highly profitable pyramid scheme,” and subjected some LGBTQ members to “conversion therapy.”

The allegations in the L.A. lawsuits, which refer to alleged incidents in the 1990s and 2000s, first appeared among a set of six federal lawsuits filed around the start of 2023 in California’s Central District. In July, the plaintiffs withdrew the federal suits. Their attorney says they plan to temporarily shelve federal RICO claims related to the alleged “pyramid scheme” and to refile all of them — with an emphasis on the abuse claims — in state courts. “Our thinking was, let’s focus on what’s important here, which are the claims relating to the sexual abuse of these survivors,” says Bobby Samini, attorney for the plaintiffs.

After Rolling Stone covered the filing of the first federal lawsuit at the end of December, more than a dozen former ICOC members reached out, sharing allegations similar to those enumerated in the legal filings, including claims that they’d endured sexual abuse, controlling behaviors, and conversion therapy as church members. These defectors, and the thousands more organizing on social media, see themselves as part of a wave destined to finally bring down the ICOC. Samini, the plaintiffs’ attorney, believes the child abuse allegations are a good starting point. “This type of abuse was happening in the ICC and the ICOC without any obstacle,” Samini says. “There was nobody in the organization that had the power or the ability to get in front of this and to stop it. Filing these cases was the only mechanism by which to bring it to the attention of the public and to turn the microscope on these organizations, so that the conduct will stop.”



ICOC FOUNDER THOMAS “KIP” McKean, born in 1954, was baptized through a campus ministry program at the University of Florida. In 1977, according to a letter from an archived page on McKean’s own website, he was fired from a Protestant church in Illinois for teaching doctrines “not in accordance with the Bible,” including denying people baptism until they were deemed ready, holding that people must suffer for the salvation of others, and the idea that Christians should confess their every sin to a prayer partner, “no matter how personal, how intimate, or how destructive that might be.”

In 1979, he founded the ICOC in Boston. Thanks in part to its practice of recruiting members via campus ministries, it reportedly became one of the fastest-growing Christian groups of its time. Today, plaintiffs say the ICOC has more than 120,000 members across 144 nations. Originally called the Boston Movement, the church took theological cues from the conventional Churches of Christ, a loosely associated group of conservative Protestant congregations, including relying on scripture as the sole basis for its teachings, and holding that baptism by full immersion in water is necessary for salvation. The ICOC had its own practices, too, namely the system of “discipling,” where church elders offered members spiritual and personal guidance, and to whom members were directed to confess all their sins. Further, the ICOC, as designed by McKean, plaintiffs said, held that its members were the only Christians chosen by God for salvation in heaven.

It didn’t take long for the group to catch negative media attention. In the 1990s, several national outlets, from 20/20 to Seventeen, reported on allegations that the ICOC was a “cult” that took advantage of its members. By 1992, according to an article that ran in Time, despite its growth, roughly half the number of people who had joined since its founding had defected, claiming the church demanded authoritarian control over members’ lives. In 1994, the mainline Churches of Christ severed ties with the group. According to a 2000 U.S. News & World Report article, by that point, at least 39 colleges and universities had banned the ICOC, including Harvard and Georgia State, for harassing students or violating door-to-door recruitment policies.

In the early 2000s, McKean split from the group amid criticism of the allegedly “extreme” and “abusive” discipleship leadership structure. In 2006, he started another group, the International Christian Church (ICC), and has since urged Christians everywhere to join his new, more “zealous” movement.

Both McKean and the ICC are being sued in the two L.A. lawsuits, alongside the ICOC. McKean declined to comment on the allegations in the L.A. lawsuits and on the allegations that he founded a church with what plaintiffs describe as an “authoritarian” leadership structure. An attorney for the ICC did not respond to a request for comment on either the federal or the state lawsuits. Before the plaintiffs requested the dismissal of the federal suits, McKean and ICC had both filed motions to have the federal claims against them dismissed.

Attorney Byron McLain, who filed motions to dismiss on behalf of the ICOC in the federal suits before the plaintiffs withdrew them, says the ICOC is not a single entity anymore. “ICOC Inc. is a dissolved corporation, which no longer has any employees, directors or officers,” he says. His motion argued that because of this, the defendant had been improperly served. Two current members, who spoke with Rolling Stone anonymously, also pushed back against the ICOC being viewed as a whole. They say that while ICOC churches share the same doctrine and belief system, leadership varies greatly among them. “Each ICOC church is operated very differently from the next,” says one teen ministry leader. “You won’t really find the same policies and procedures from church to church.”

Another longtime member says there is a group of leaders making decisions for the ICOC regarding “planning” and “vision,” but no “head honcho” since McKean. He thinks the success of individual churches depends on the behavior of leaders at each one, but he reached out to Rolling Stone because he’s recently had misgivings about the church. “When you start telling people, ‘Here’s how you’re gonna spend your money,’ and you start holding people’s sin and secrets against them, and you start saying, ‘We’re this one church, and we’re the only ones that have it right,’ all those things 100 percent sound like a cult,” he says. “And that’s hard to come to grips with, because that’s not the reason I became a member of this church.”

TYLER CABLE-MONTECLARO, 23, who is not a plaintiff in any of the lawsuits, used to be what’s known in the ICOC as a Kingdom Kid — someone who was raised in the church. Growing up during the aughts in the South Bay Church, part of the L.A. Church of Christ, she was a good kid, even serving on a worship team to lead songs during services. From around age eight, she claims church members told her how to behave as a girl, and that included not “distracting” older men with how she dressed. “I have a little bit of a curvier figure, and when my hips started to develop, people would tell me I can’t wear shorts anymore,” she says. One time, she says, a member of church leadership came to her house and threw all of her shorts in the trash. By the time she was a teen, she would pack an extra outfit for church, in case someone didn’t like what she wore. While onstage with the worship team, she felt “on display,” she says. After services, older church members sometimes approached her. “I would have grown men coming up to me, telling me that they weren’t able to focus [during] the worship, because my outfit was too distracting,” she says. “It got so bad that when I looked in the mirror I just saw a body, something to look at for sex. That’s a confusing place to be, especially as a young person.”

At the same time, Cable-Monteclaro alleges, as she was growing up, she was trying to get church elders and leaders to realize that a family member, who was also part of the church, had been sexually abusing her from a young age. A 2016 police report she shared with Rolling Stone shows she accused that individual of abusing her for nine years, starting in 2007, when she was seven. She claims she tried to tell church members about it before then on multiple occasions, but she didn’t know who to trust, so she only hinted at problems, or mimicked the behaviors of abused children that she’d learned watching CSI — including biting her nails, sitting on her hands, and curling up in the fetal position. “Unfortunately, nobody understood what I was saying,” she says.

It was not until her junior year of high school that she told a teen leader at her church, who helped her report the alleged abuse to the police. That teen leader, who has since left the South Bay Church, confirmed Cable-Monteclaro’s account to Rolling Stone. “She couldn’t even say it out loud. She wrote it in a notebook,” she says. “I called CPS right away.” She believes Cable-Monteclaro’s allegations were credible.

Cable-Monteclaro says that because her relative led a children’s choir, she tried to bring attention to the abuse allegations after she went to the police. Church leaders told her they weren’t going to say anything because, she says, they feared litigation. That individual didn’t leave the church, she says, until she got a no-contact restraining order against them. The former teen leader says it’s true Cable-Monteclaro’s relative did not stop attending the church until after the restraining order, and that a church-wide announcement was never made, but she adds that the individual was no longer allowed to lead the choir after the police report was filed. Cable-Monteclaro’s relative was not arrested or charged with a crime related to the abuse allegations. The individual and an attorney representing them in an unrelated civil action did not respond to emails detailing Cable-Monteclaro’s allegations of abuse.



In June, the former leaders of Cable-Monteclaro’s church, Steve Gansert-Morici and Jacqueline Brown-Morici, were named as defendants in one of the since-dismissed federal lawsuits against the ICOC. In July, the claims against them — including failure to report suspected child abuse at a different ICOC church — were refiled in a state-level suit. The allegations refer to an incident, unrelated to Cable-Monteclaro, in the late 1990s, when the married couple allegedly failed to report the sexual abuse of a three-year-old girl to authorities, and, according to the complaints, “implored other ICOC members not to report it.” Shortly before the dismissal of the federal cases, Byron McLain, an attorney for the Moricis, offered a statement to Rolling Stone calling the federal claims against the Moricis “baseless and unfounded.” He said, “Steve Gansert-Morici and Jaqueline Brown-Morici support all efforts to hold accountable those responsible for such acts. But accusations of child abuse and misconduct against those who are not responsible for the abuse is reputationally and financially damaging.” He had filed a motion to dismiss the federal claims, stating the allegations “fail to meet the legal standard of pleadings at this stage of the proceeding and are barred by the statute of limitations.” He has declined to offer further comment on the state lawsuit, and it is unclear if he is representing them in the lawsuit.



As for Cable-Monteclaro, McLain stated, “The alleged abuse of Tyler Cable occurred in her home and not at the church. Nevertheless, the church helped Tyler Cable obtain a restraining order against her alleged abuser.” He added, “Steve Morici was at the police station with Tyler Cable and answered any questions the Special Victims Unit and DCFS had.” The attorney declined to comment about Cable-Monteclaro’s relative’s role leading the choir. Cable-Monteclaro says Steve Morici did come to the police station the night she was there, but she believes church leaders should be doing more to identify and prevent abuse of children and to keep alleged abusers from maintaining access to kids. “Maybe instead of having countless talks to young girls about purity and what not to wear, maybe we can talk about consent,” she says. “When grown men are confessing that they have feelings for children because of what they’re wearing … why not respond? You can clearly see where the issue is and how they as a church are perpetuating it. But they refuse to take responsibility.” She left the church in 2020.



IN SOME CASES, former members say, leaders and elders in the church took advantage of their power over other members. Mike Hammer, who is not a plaintiff in the lawsuits, says he was “groomed” and abused starting in 1985, under the guise of campus ministry, by an ICOC leader at the University of Alabama – Huntsville. A student when he discovered the ministry, he was enthusiastic about joining full time after he graduated. Private training with a campus minister slowly progressed from meetings at church to invitations to the man’s home, to “let’s go to the bedroom and let’s talk,” says Hammer, 60. There, Hammer says, the campus minister told him he and other church leaders used to give each other backrubs, so they started doing that, too.

It was during a conversation about sex that Hammer claims the campus minister first abused him. Hammer was taught to confess his sins to the minister, including premarital sexual activities. In early 1986, while exchanging backrubs, Hammer says he told the minister he had prematurely ejaculated while kissing his fiancée. “That’s when he touched me for the first time,” he says. Hammer was 22, of age to legally consent, but he believes his minister, in a position of leadership, took advantage of the situation. “This was abuse of power,” he says.

Over time, what began as fondling turned into encounters that were more sexual in nature, including oral sex, Hammer says. After nearly two years, he divulged the incidents to a group of people in the church as part of their Bible study series, where they were prompted to confess their sins to the group. It was treated as an affair, he says. The campus minister left because of the “affair,” and Hammer says he was essentially told to “hush up and move on.” Hammer, who had by this point moved to Boston, stopped pursuing ministry work but continued going to church with the ICOC. The campus minister did not respond to a request for comment.



Michael Van Auken, a preacher with the Boston ICOC, acknowledged in a statement to Rolling Stone that Hammer had “a sexual encounter with a staff member” in the late 1980s. “Once Mr. Hammer made the situation known, that staff member was fired for adulterous behavior,” Van Auken said. He added, “The Boston Church of Christ stands firmly against the social, emotional, or physical abuse of anyone at any time. It is sinful, ungodly and will not be tolerated or protected. Our hearts break to hear of the possibility of anyone suffering abuse. The Boston Church staff and its elders are united in their determination to protect our members and staff in this regard.”



Hammer eventually quit the ICOC in 2009. His marriage fell apart, and he joined a support group to help him process the alleged abuse. Hammer has since remarried, but he can’t attend church anymore. “My wife and I go visit, but I have triggers,” he says. He sees his alleged abuser in church leaders everywhere. “It’s the personality type,” he says.

AFTER ROLAND’S FIRST VISIT to the ICOC, she says, church members hustled her through a series of Bible studies before she was baptized and thrust into a new life as a “disciple.” Roland claims she was monitored by senior members and chastised when she stepped out of line. Church members told her who to date and marry, how to dress, and how to bring in new members — which she says was a crucial element of her role as a disciple. She says she quickly became totally isolated from the outside world, convinced that the ICOC was right about saving her from hell.

She threw herself into the lifestyle, attending services multiple times a week, and working to meet “recruitment quotas.” She worked full time as an “intern” in the church, plus an extra part-time job on the side. Sometimes, she went days without sleeping. She claimed in a since-dismissed federal lawsuit that she tithed 20 percent of her income to the church the entire 17 years she was a member.

When Roland first started attending church with the ICOC, members taught her to be very reserved. She says she was chided for wearing a sports bra on a jog, and she was told women were required to wear shorts and T-shirts to the beach instead of bikinis. Once she was a member of the church and married to someone the leadership had chosen for her, however, she says sex talk was on the table, and not in a way that made her any more comfortable. Her and her then-husband’s discipler would grill her about her sex life, according to a since-dismissed lawsuit, where she was identified at Jane Roe 1. After her honeymoon, he asked her at a dinner with several other church leaders whether she’d had “an orgasm” with her new husband. She blurted out “No,” and ran to the bathroom and cried, the complaint alleged. The discipler later lectured her on having a “healthy sex life” in order to be a leader in the marriage ministry. He instructed her to practice and report to him when she was having orgasms.

“They have this weird under-sexualized culture in some ways, but over-sexualized in other ways,” Roland says. “People are making allegations of rape and abuse and being told they can’t go to the police about it. But I can’t wear a sports bra.” The lawsuits allege that church leaders repeatedly discouraged accusers from reporting abuse allegations to police to protect the church.

It wasn’t until she says she experienced serious health problems that she knew she had to leave. One day in 2008, she says, she drove herself to the hospital. “I was having heart complications,” Roland says. “The doctor came in and said, ‘If you don’t stop whatever it is you’re doing, and start sleeping and taking care of yourself, I give you about two years.’” Roland, then 38, decided she was done with the International Churches of Christ. “I was like, I’m out,” she says. “I’m out. I don’t care what I gotta do.”



LIFE WITH THE ICOC never started out bad — typically, it was quite the opposite. Former members who spoke with Rolling Stone say “love bombing” was part of the recruitment approach. Nicole, now a licensed clinical social worker, had just broken up with their middle-school girlfriend, when one of their teachers introduced them to the ICOC in Orlando, Florida, in the 1990s. They instantly found comfort for their heartbreak. “I felt like the most important person, because they wanted to spend time with me, they wanted to get to know me, they wanted to take me out for ice cream,” Nicole says. “And then, eventually, they wanted to start studying the Bible with me.” (Nicole asked to be identified by their first name only, to make it harder for ICOC members to locate them. They are not a plaintiff in the lawsuits.)

Nicole, 42, was out and open with their sexuality, even as a middle-schooler, but once they were committed to the ICOC, they say they were subjected to conversion therapy, which the American Psychological Association says can lead to depression, low self-esteem, and suicide. “After I made all these friends … they’re like, ‘You can’t be with God and be gay.’” The church members called gay people “same-sex attracted,” they say, and while the church acknowledged a person can’t help those feelings of attraction, you weren’t supposed to act on them. “Effectively, you have to either be celibate, or date heterosexually,” Nicole says. Beyond that, they claim, leaders pressured them to present themself as more feminine, by painting their nails, wearing dresses, and putting on makeup. “It was just constant censoring of my inherent gender, but also trying to get me to be something else that I wasn’t,” they say. “It sends this message that you’re not good enough as you are.” The Orlando ICOC did not respond to a request for comment.

By the time Nicole was in college, they had switched ICOC churches within Florida to be closer to their campus, and they were experiencing serious depression. It was around that time that they began self-injuring. They say they began seeing a church-sanctioned therapist, who told them they couldn’t play rugby anymore, or drive a truck, because those things would cause them to “struggle” — which multiple sources say is the church’s preferred term for feeling inappropriate sexual urges.



Soon, Nicole felt chronically suicidal. “I just remember one day, l was driving, and I had this thought of, ‘If I don’t leave the church, God, I’m going to kill myself,’” they say. They left, a decade after they’d joined. They lost their entire social circle in the process. “It’s like ripping every single structure that you have, or any idea that you had about how life is, and it’s just gone,” they say.

In recent years, multiple locations of the ICOC have hosted events with an LGBTQ ministry called Strength in Weakness, led by a man named Guy Hammond, who describes himself as a “homosexually attracted Christian” on his website. Megan Poirier, 24, a lesbian ex-ICOC member who was raised in ICOC churches in Boston and for a few years in Texas, first saw Hammond speak at a Friday night teen devotional outside of Boston almost a decade ago. She claims Hammond called himself “ex-gay,” and that some church members referred to his program as the “ex-gay ministry,” although never officially.

“I think that they have been trying to stay away from terms like that because it’s very closely associated with conversion therapy, and they don’t want to give people that impression, but it’s sort of the same thing,” she says. Hammond did not respond to a request for comment. The Strength in Weakness website denies using conversion therapy. “Strength in Weakness Inc. does not support conversion therapy and does not use conversion therapy in any manner,” it states. “It is not the goal of Strength in Weakness Ministries or Strength in Weakness Inc. to have any person change or alter their sexual attraction or identity.”

FOR DECADES, EX-ICOC and ex-ICC members have connected on internet forums, but in recent years, there has been a renewed rumbling among defectors in Facebook groups. Finding a more mainstream space to share their experiences with the church seemed to galvanize a new push for accountability. Roland describes it like the ICOC’s own iteration of the #MeToo movement. In 2021, she also began co-hosting a podcast about surviving cults and started getting contacted directly by former members of the ICOC. Many of the people she spoke with, she says, had stories of alleged sexual abuse within the church.

Roland connected with attorney Bobby Samini, who filed the initial spate of six federal complaints in California as well as the two complaints to be filed so far in L.A. County. Once word of the legal action began circulating among Facebook group members, more people joined the fight.

Anthony “Andy” Stowers Forest is one such plaintiff, who alleged in a since-dismissed federal lawsuit that he was sexually abused from a young age by multiple leaders while attending ICOC churches in Florida and Georgia. He’d posted earlier in the year about his experience of abuse in the discussion of an ex-member group. One day in late 2022, he got a DM from another ex-member telling him Roland had hired a lawyer for people who’d been abused as children in the church. “I contacted her immediately,” he says. After hearing some of his allegations, she asked him to fly out and meet with Samini, who agreed to represent him.

Roland estimates that she and Samini have fielded more than 1,200 calls from former members since she first got involved. They are planning to file some cases in Boston in the coming months, another major hub of the ICOC. She continues to urge former members to come forward. She and the other people who spoke with Rolling Stone hope this wave of legal action could be enough to finally stop the church’s alleged cycle of recruitment, control, and abuse.

As a former teen leader, Cable-Monteclaro worries about the girls she used to mentor who are still in the ICOC. She’s thought about reaching out to some of them, but she says her conversations with current members haven’t gone well in the past. “If someone who is not a part of the church reaches out, there’s this level of, ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about, they don’t know what they’re saying, because Satan has clouded their judgment,’” she says. “That’s the hardest part of trying to reach overzealous Christians. It doesn’t matter what you do or say to them, it makes them stronger, because they believe if you attack them, they’re being persecuted, and that makes their faith stronger.


https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/icoc-members-alleged-abuse-cult-behavior-1234798928/