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

Rob Picheta

CNN

August 6, 2025

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."

Pledger says he always felt different. That was a problem, because he grew up in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where followers are expected to follow a strict rulebook of conservative teachings. No dancing, secular music or friends from the outside world were allowed, he says. And from a young age, he heard a bad word a lot: sodomite.

Then, at 16, his worst nightmare came true: he got a crush.

“I would just pray and pray to God — ‘just take this away from me, change me, change me,’” he told CNN. “I was so terrified of my sexuality being found out … (I thought) if I don’t change my sexuality, God is going to kill me.”

For this story CNN spoke to several people who have undergone conversion therapy over recent years and decades, as well as former practitioners and leaders of the “ex-gay” movement. The practice took different forms for each of them, but aspects of their experiences were strikingly similar.

Everyone was pushed into the practice at a vulnerable moment, some after suicide attempts, by parents or figures in their church. It was never labelled as “conversion therapy,” and some did not realize its true nature until years later. The experiences were painful, twisting their tortured minds towards a breaking point. Some, like Pledger, blocked the sessions from their memories.

They left – still gay – and endured years of depression or addiction. Some again attempted to take their lives. And months, or years, or decades later, they reckoned with the true toll the therapy had taken.

Pledger arrived at Bob Jones University in South Carolina in the fall of 2020 adamant on hiding parts of his life. The private evangelical school is renowned for its own strict conservative teachings – it only allowed interracial dating in 2000, and its student handbook calls homosexuality a “sexual perversion.”

“I wanted to be as small as possible and unnoticed, like a fly on the wall,” Pledger says. He didn’t make friends. He shrunk into silence.

But fellow students identified something unique about Pledger anyway. Some followed him around campus making kissing noises. A hallmate stood outside his dorm room, yelling down the corridor that a “gay boy lives in this room.”

Pledger said he was given an "ex-gay" book by a BJU staffer, which was discussed in his conversion therapy session. After leaving the school, Pledger tore the book up.

The night he contemplated suicide, Pledger remembers thinking: “I can’t imagine being alive tomorrow … This is the way that you can leave. You can leave by taking your own life.”

It was at this point in his life that Pledger was offered another way out. He bore his soul to a member of the student-life team, explaining his suicidal ideation, the self-harm, the bullying. In response, Pledger says he was told he was “paying for (his) sin.”

“It was like a knife to my spirit,” he says.

But that winter, in early 2021, Pledger was open to the possibility that his sexuality could be changed. Those who provide conversion therapy often stress that same-sex attractions can be “overcome,” rather than eliminated, and ground their motivation in a strict interpretation of biblical teachings on homosexuality.

“I wanted relief,” Pledger says. He says the Bob Jones staffer gave him a book, written decades earlier by Joe Dallas, a leading figure in the ex-gay movement.

Dallas writes that his book, “Desires in Conflict,” was designed for “Christian men who are sexually attracted to other men but don’t want to give in to those attractions.”

“Expect to grow. Expect your homosexual desires to diminish in both their frequency and their intensity,” he promises readers.

Later, Pledger attended the session that remains blocked in his mind. He has never listened to the audio recording of that meeting, but he shared it with CNN.

“We’re going to deal with this sin like we would deal with any other sin,” the BJU staff member told Pledger, according to that recording. He read excerpts from the book and praised Dallas’ approach.

“I still remember you saying to me early on: ‘This lifestyle disgusts me, I think it’s gross,’” he told the student.

“Without Christ, this isn’t getting solved,” he added. “You were living it — you were seeing it wasn’t getting solved. And that’s what was making you so mad, frustrated, angry.”

Pledger says he never returned for another session. Neither Bob Jones University or the staffer who conducted the session responded to CNN’s requests for comment on Pledger’s account. The session was not formally assigned to Pledger through the school, but its content is in line with the institution’s instructions to students.

Governor Jared Polis banned conversion therapy in Colorado in 2019. A challenge to that ban will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall, and campaigners fear justices could rule state-level restrictions unlawful.

There is no suggestion that the university acted illegally. South Carolina is not among the 23 states that ban conversion therapy, and those bans apply only to services given to minors by licensed practitioners, not to adults in private or religious settings. Four further states have restrictions on conversion therapy but stop short of an outright ban. Only DC bans the practice for adults as well as minors.

Conversion therapy has morphed and evolved since the “pray the gay away” style of camps, conferences and retreats that drew controversy in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Proponents of conversion therapy understand that this is not a popular practice, and in recent years we have seen them once again rebranding and using new terms,” Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, told CNN.

But the suicide prevention nonprofit for LGBTQ minors said in a 2023 report that conversion therapy was still offered in 48 states and identified more than 1,300 practitioners. Last year, 13% of LGBTQ youths surveyed by the group reported being threatened with or subjected to the practice. Most major medical bodies, including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, condemn the practice as unethical, ineffective and dangerous.

More than half of US states now ban the practice for minors, but those bans are under threat. Last month, just 100 miles southeast of Bob Jones University, the city of Columbia, South Carolina, repealed its ordinance banning conversion therapy. Kentucky once banned state funding for the practice, but a Republican-led effort undid that ban in March.

Those rallying to undo the bans say they are an attack on parental and professional freedoms. David Walls, the director of the Kentucky-based Family Foundation which campaigned for the ban to be scrapped, called it “a one-sided counseling ban designed to suppress free speech and religious liberty, while trampling the rights of parents to seek out counseling that they desire.”

“The other side can use terms like ‘torture’ — that’s not what we’re talking about here,” Walls said during a March debate. “I can’t really think of another area of counseling where we would say that you can only counsel someone one way.”

And Elizabeth Woning, the co-founder of the Changed Movement and one of the most prominent ex-gay leaders in America, told CNN: “We believe all people should have the freedom to pursue counseling and personal life changes that bring them true happiness.”

Woning herself claims to have formerly been a lesbian but now runs the influential California-based group, which pledges to help people leave “LGBTQ subculture and identity.” Its website states: “When a person is no longer compelled or controlled by same-sex sexual desires, that person is free.”

The group is one of the leading proponents of conversion efforts in the US, though Woning distanced herself from the term “conversion therapy” in a statement to CNN, calling it “a broad and ill-defined term that is often used to include forms of physical violence, force, manipulation, shame, or humiliation. We reject these practices as ineffective and harmful.”

Soon the ex-gay movement will have its day in court. A challenge to Colorado’s law prohibiting conversion therapy on minors is under consideration by the Supreme Court, in a case that imperils all existing bans against conversion therapy in the US. Justices are expected to hear arguments this fall, with a ruling expected by next June.

John Smid has a list, and every so often, he’ll look it over. It contains the names of every person whose sexuality he tried to change. “I think about all of these people from time to time,” he says. “I remember their faces.” There are 475 in total.

Smid is one of the people most responsible for the rise of conversion therapy in America. For two decades he served as the director of Love in Action, an influential branch of the Exodus International organization, which ran programs that promised to eliminate homosexuality from people’s lives.

Smid preached at conferences across America, using his own compelling story as an example: He used to be gay, he said, but now was happily married to a woman.

“We all knew it didn’t work,” Smid tells CNN now. Other once-prominent ex-gay leaders say the same.

“I don’t think anyone changed,” says Randy Scobey, the executive vice president of Exodus until the group disbanded in 2013.

“I do not believe that you can change a person’s sexual orientation,” adds Bill Prickett, who founded an ex-gay ministry in Alabama.

All three men stopped preaching conversion therapy in the 2000s, then denounced the practice altogether. Each now has a husband. But regret pains them like a knot in their shoulders.

“We hurt people,” Prickett says. “We didn’t do it intentionally. But I know we did.”

Scobey estimated that during the peak of Exodus’s influence in the mid-2000s, about 10,000 people attended one of its many local ministries across the United States every month.

Smid too has quantified his impact: He estimates 38,000 people watched his speeches over two decades until he left Love in Action in 2008. “My influence, globally, was really quite extreme,” he says.

He has reached out to most of the people on his list who directly attended his program. Some have forgiven him. He is friends with many on Facebook, watching their lives from afar, wishing them a happy birthday. But “there have been some that are very, very angry,” he says.

And a small handful – three or four, he estimates – have since taken their own lives.

Suicide is an inescapable shadow that haunts many of those involved in conversion therapy. UCLA’s Williams Institute found that those subjected to the practice are almost twice as likely to consider or attempt it. Scobey and Prickett both lost friends to suicide who had tried, and failed, to change their sexualities.

“It tore the blinders off my eyes,” Scobey says through tears, remembering a friend who took his life. “I knew this man. I knew that this ideology had just killed him. I really wish I’d listened.”

These three men straddle a delicate line between victim and perpetrator. Without their influence, conversion therapy may never have become so widespread. But they subjected themselves to the same beliefs they now consider poisonous, and each suffered in silence too.

One evening in 1990, in a rented one-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, Alabama, Prickett’s suffering nearly overtook him. He cradled a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a revolver in another.

“The plan was to get myself drunk enough that I could go through with it,” he says. “At one point I screamed out: ‘I’m done.’ And inside me, I felt this voice that says: ‘I’m not.’”

For a few years, as they built new lives as openly gay men, the three former conservative leaders and others like them formed an unlikely alliance: ex-ex-gay figureheads finally embracing their sexuality. They would speak occasionally – Prickett is part of a messaging group with a few of his peers.

And they took solace in one hopeful belief. Prickett recalls a conversation they had five years ago. “We said: It’s dying. It’s going away. Ex-gay conversion therapy groups will be extinct shortly.”

He pauses. “Well, then the climate changed.”

The revitalization of the Christian far right lit the tinder. For the three men, there’s now an urgency to their remorse: The practice they promoted, then condemned, is alive and unbound.

“There’s a resurgence,” Prickett says. “You have churches that are pushing it, parents that are pushing it, and now politicians who are pushing it.”

“Unfortunately, I think it’s a lot bigger than it was before,” adds Scobey. “It’s just not as organized.”

And Smid is clear-eyed about his own influence. “Conversion therapy happens in pastor’s offices, and those pastors were educated by the ex-gay movement,” he says. “That’s where they got their exposure. That’s where they got their experience.”

“Our dogmatism was just wrong. And that dogmatism is still present today.”

Rhonda Tishma’s son was running late for school, and he hadn’t come downstairs for breakfast. “I shook him,” Rhonda recalls. But Rocky, her 16-year-old whose grades and charm filled her with a fierce pride, didn’t wake up.

Hours earlier, Rocky had called “good night” to his mother, then snuck into his parents’ gun cabinet. He held the weapon in his hand, until a voice – the same voice, perhaps, that had crept into the tortured minds of Andrew Pledger and Bill Prickett – talked him down. Rocky instead took a handful of his father’s sleeping pills.

The dose wasn’t deadly. At last, Rocky’s tear-soaked eyes opened.

In the blurred aftermath of his suicide attempt, Rhonda paced a hospital corridor near their Las Vegas home as doctors pumped her son’s stomach. “I blamed myself,” she says. Rocky had told his mother what had pushed him to the verge of catastrophe: He was gay.

“Rocky, I’ve known since you were little, and I love you anyway,” she recalls telling her son in the hospital.

But several years of strict conservative messaging at church and in school pulsed through Rocky’s head. “It wasn’t enough,” Rocky says, remembering the same conversation. “I still had that feeling inside that God hated me.”

Rocky says he would pray every night, asking God to “please change me, please change me, please fix me – I’m broken. Help me, help me, help me.”

Nearly three decades have passed since Rocky tried to take his life. He reflects on the ensuing years with anguish flooding his face: several sessions of conversion therapy; excommunication from his church; a devastating crystal meth addiction that brought fleeting release from his pain; a distant relationship with his mother; a years-long quest for belonging.

His story is a warning. Conversion therapy is not one experience — for many, it is a wound that takes decades to heal. In his sessions, which he says were administered through the Family Services arm of his Mormon church, Tishma says he was asked to detail his sexual experiences to a room full of adults.

Rocky says a climate of secrecy shrouded his sessions, which he says took place after school once or twice a week.

“They told me that it was very bad and very wrong, and they said: Do not tell your friends, do not tell anyone else at church, because once it’s out, it’s harder to fix.”

He recounts other details, his eyes welling and his features straining as he does.

“If you live this life, you will get AIDS and die alone,” he recalls being told. “If you live this life, you will be ostracized by everyone you know … if you choose this, it’s because you’re weak. This is just an addiction.”

“They would talk about masculinity, about lowering my voice, about (my) facial expressions: ‘don’t be too expressive, because that would be a cue to other gay people,’” he says. “I’ve worked on myself a lot,” he adds, “but to this day, I have a hard time smiling in pictures because I feel like I’m too effeminate.”

“When I meet people, my first five sentences are an octave lower than my regular voice, because I’m afraid of being seen,” he adds. He would frequently wake up in a sweat, having dreamt he was in a room filled with people from his past, laughing at him. “All of that shame came right back up to the surface.”

But Rocky found a way to heal. He trained to become a psychotherapist, then specialized in treating other conversion therapy survivors. And when the pandemic brought his world to a stop, he founded a group that provided support for those reckoning with the experience.

Today, at his practice in New York City, he listens to stories that mirror his own. “I get to be the therapist that I needed,” Tishma says.

But there was one more conversion he needed to have. He told his mother every detail of his conversion therapy sessions, and how it impacted his life. He even brought her to a retreat with more than a dozen other survivors in the Adirondack Mountains.

“A lot of the kids’ parents just abandoned them,” she says. “I don’t know how a mother can kick out a child.”

Rocky and Rhonda had stayed in each other’s lives in the decades since his conversion therapy, but they had never spoken about its impact. Their conversations broke a 23-year silence.

“I’ve been sending you your whole life to this church,” Rhonda recalls telling her son. “That’s who I should have been protecting you from.”

“What kind of people are those? What God would tell them to do that? That’s not the God I believe in.”

Curtis Lopez-Galloway made a similar journey. As a 16-year-old, he would sit silently in the back of his parents’ minivan, making the nearly two-hour drive from the family’s southern Illinois home to a Christian counselor in Kentucky.

Curtis would gaze out the car window, staring at “a whole lot of nothing,” watching the sun slip from the sky until the glass blackened to reflect his own tormented face. Occasionally, an argument would shatter the silence. His relationship with his parents became more strained with each session, and he contemplated running away — to his grandparents, to an aunt, to anyone that would take him.

Years later Lopez-Galloway obtained his counselor’s file, filled with detailed notes from his conversion therapy session and a 14-step treatment plan, which he shared with CNN. Anxiety and shame spills from the pages.

“Curtis is going to limit his time with friends who are gay affirming,” his treatment plan instructs.

“Curtis is going to do more masculine characteristic activities and adopt a more masculine persona. He will learn to frame things in a masculine frame. Male characteristic activities could be taking charge, being in control, and feeling competently powerful.”

“Curtis will study women to figure out what types and characteristics are attractive to him.”

“Curtis will bounce his eyes and thoughts to something else whenever he begins to have an attraction toward a male.”

Other details stick in Lopez-Galloway’s memory, some of which still make him shudder.

His counselor told him that “some people are predisposed to be murders, rageaholics, rapists, and child molesters, but they are not born that way,” and that “homosexuality is similar,” according to the counselor’s own notes.

Lopez-Galloway, who now lives in California, would ultimately mend his relationship with his parents. Then he advocated in support of a proposed ban in Kentucky on licensed professionals receiving state funding while administering conversion therapy to minors. The ban went into effect last year.

But in March, Republican state lawmakers voted to overturn the short-lived ban. Treatments like the one Lopez-Galloway received are legal and protected in Kentucky again.

Wisconsin Republicans did the same last year, and similar efforts have been raised in other states.

Lopez-Galloway made amends with his parents, then set up his own support group, the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, after Tishma’s wound down. His is the only major such group in the US. One person showed up to its first meeting in 2019; now it counts more than 100 members, and dozens join a weekly online meeting to share stories.

“It is a specific kind of trauma … only someone who has been through it would know what it’s like,” Lopez-Galloway says.

Conversion therapy, he says, “ruins lives.”

“The stories (members) tell are world-ending for them – it’s the darkest time in their life,” he says. “It takes years and years for (people) to get some semblance of peace. Some people never do.”

Tishma and Lopez-Galloway represent the pain and despair that conversion therapy can cause. But they’re also proof that there is an escape.

Andrew Pledger, whose conversion therapy at Bob Jones University became a watershed moment in his life, is following that path. After leaving the school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Southern New Hampshire University. He now works as a social media manager in South Carolina, focusing his efforts in helping publications and organizations that work with cult survivors, including the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion.

He still struggles with expressing his sexuality and his sense of self. But he says: “I am at peace with who I am, and my sexuality. There’s no desire to change that.”

Pledger was asked to leave Bob Jones University in the months that followed his session. After he renounced his faith in a live-streamed conversation on social media, he says he was told his values didn’t align with the school’s. For him, it was a release.

As he ate his last meal on campus – a deluxe sandwich, fries and a lemonade from Chick-fil-A – he “felt a weight lifted.”

For a couple of days, fate played one final joke on Pledger: a rare snowstorm trapped him at the school, delaying his departure. But at last the snow melted, and the world finally started to feel solid beneath his feet. Pledger packed his belongings into a friend’s car, ignoring the prying eyes of other students.

“I looked back at the buildings for the last time,” he remembers. A smile crossed his lips. “I got out.”

EDITOR’S NOTE:  If you feel you are in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 24-hour Suicide Crisis Lifeline.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/us/gay-conversion-therapy-lgbtq-resurgence-cec

Conversion Therapy Dropout Network

Conversion Therapy Dropout Network Created by conversion therapy survivors.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between survivors of conversion therapy and provide a support network to those harmed by the practice.

The Conversion Therapy Dropout Network is a 501c3 nonprofit and a network of conversion therapy survivors, or dropouts, that have come together to provide support for other dropouts to cope with their trauma.

We were formed to provide a space for conversion therapy survivors to heal and find solace in knowing they are not alone. We believe that knowing others who have experienced the same trauma and sharing your experiences helps heal the deep trauma felt by survivors.

"Conversion therapy, or reparative therapy, is an attempt by a licensed therapist or otherwise to change someone's sexuality or gender identity. This practice has been labeled pseudoscience and harmful by every major mental health organization and has been banned in many states and the District of Columbia.

Conversion therapy takes on many forms, and no two experiences are exactly the same. According to the SAMHSA report, those affected by conversion therapy are eight times more likely to attempt suicide, six times more likely to have high depression, three times more likely to use illegal drugs, and have three times the normal risk of HIV or STD infection. Many LGBTQIA+ minors are subjected to this practice against their will. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 individuals have gone through conversion therapy with nearly 350,000 being minors.

Conversion therapy leaves many individuals feeling isolated and broken with limited resources to help them. As a result of the isolating nature of conversion therapy, many survivors do not seek help due to fear of exposure, family pressure, and PTSD around mental health providers. Many cannot share their experiences without extreme emotional responses. The Conversion Therapy Dropout Network strives to bridge that gap between survivors and provide a support network through shared experience."

Conversion Therapy Dropout Network

PO Box 691331

West Hollywood, CA 90069

(844) 419-CTDN

info@conversiontherapydropout.org

https://www.conversiontherapydropout.org/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 3/28/2024 (Clergy Sexual Abuse, Conversion Therapy, Book, Transcendental Meditation, Ishmael Chokurongerwa, Apostolic Church, Zimbabwe, Child Abuse, Angola, Legal, Witchcraft, Hillsong)

Clergy Sexual Abuse, Conversion Therapy, Book, Transcendental Meditation, Ishmael Chokurongerwa, Apostolic Church, Zimbabwe, Child Abuse, Angola, Legal, Witchcraft, Hillsong

AP: Former Mormon bishop highlighted in AP investigation arrested on felony child sex abuse charges

"A former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was featured in an Associated Press investigation into how the church protects itself from allegations of sexual abuse was arrested by police in Virginia this week after being indicted on charges he sexually abused his daughter while accompanying her on a school trip when she was a child, according to court filings.

Police and federal authorities had been searching for John Goodrich after a grand jury in Williamsburg on Jan. 17 found probable cause that he committed four felonies, including rape by force, threat or intimidation, forcible sodomy, and two counts of felony aggravated sexual battery by a parent of a child.

Those charges were filed weeks after the AP investigation revealed how a representative of the church, widely known as the Mormon church, employed a risk management playbook that has helped it keep child sexual abuse cases secret after allegations surfaced that Goodrich abused his daughter Chelsea, now in her 30s, at their home in Idaho as well as on a school field trip to the Washington, D.C., area 20 years ago."

University of California Press: Demons in San Francisco Bay: How a Street Preacher Launched Modern-Day "Conversion Therapy"

"In 1967, street minister Kent Philpott began outreach to lesbian, gay, and bisexual hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Over the next decade, he counseled those who purportedly wanted out of what he referred to as "the gay lifestyle," combining charismatic religious beliefs in demons, divine healing, and glossolalia with psychological theories on gender and child development. This article examines Philpott's efforts to provide the nascent "ex-gay movement" with cultural, social, and intellectual foundations. This article specifically documents how sexual liberation, hippie culture, and conservative religion converged in San Francisco and spawned the "ex-gay movement." Philpott, swept up by the Jesus People Movement, incorporated religious and psychological beliefs prominent in the Bay Area and infused charismatic Christian influences and traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity into the 'ex-gay movement.'"

Christopher Publishing House: TM And Cult Mania, by Michael Persinger

"TM and Cult Mania is a non-fiction book that examines assertions made by the Transcendental Meditation movement (TM). The book is authored by Michael Persinger, Normand Carrey and Lynn Suess and published in 1980 by Christopher Publishing House."

"TM and Cult Mania analyzes the efficacy or lack thereof of the TM meditation process, concluding that it is, "no more effective than many other meditation techniques". The authors write that, "Transcendental Meditation has achieved international recognition through commercial exploitation" and "poor scientific procedures". The book notes that physiological changes observed due to partaking in TM methodology are very small.[9] Persinger, Carrey, and Suess conclude in TM and Cult Mania, "science has been used as a sham for propaganda by the TM movement."

A positive capsule review in the Los Angeles Times noted that the authors use logic to point out transparencies in the assertions of Transcendental Meditation. John Horgan, in his book Rational Mysticism, questions Persinger's neutrality and says that in his book he treats religious beliefs and spiritual practices as mental illness."

"TM and Cult Mania takes a look at the assertions made by the Transcendental Meditation movement and analyzes them from a scientific perspective. The book acknowledges that those who practice the Transcendental Meditation technique feel relaxed and experience an increase in creativity. According to the book, the physiological effects reported by the scientific studies on Transcendental Meditation are relatively small from a scientific perspective and "no more effective than many other meditation techniques". Transcendental Meditation is seen as most noteworthy due to its ability to manipulate stress and expectancy.

"Transcendental Meditation has achieved international recognition through commercial exploitation" and "poor scientific procedures", write the authors. The book notes, "Frankly, the reported effects of TM upon human behavior are trivial. Considering the alleged potency of the TM procedure, the changes in physiological and behavioral measures are conspicuously minute." TM and Cult Mania comes to the conclusion that, "science has been used as a sham for propaganda by the TM movement."

AP: Zimbabwe police rescue 251 children used as labor and find graves in religious sect compound raid

"Zimbabwe police on Wednesday said they have arrested a man claiming to be a prophet of an apostolic sect at a shrine where believers stay in a compound and authorities found 16 unregistered graves, including those of infants, and more than 250 children used as cheap labor.

In a statement, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said Ishmael Chokurongerwa, 56, a "self-styled" prophet, led a sect with more than 1,000 members at a farm about 34 kilometers (21 miles) north-west of the capital, Harare, where the children were staying alongside other believers.

The children were being used to perform various physical activities for the benefit of the sect's leadership," he said. Of the 251 children, 246 had no birth certificates.

"Police established that all children of school-going age did not attend formal education and were subjected to abuse as cheap labor, doing manual work in the name of being taught life skills," said Nyathi.

Police said among the graves they found were those of seven infants whose burials were not registered with authorities.

He said police officers raided the shrine on Tuesday. Chokurongerwa, who called himself the Prophet Ishmael, was arrested together with seven of his aides 'for criminal activities which include abuse of minors.'"

CBS: 50 killed in anti-sorcery rituals after being forced to drink "mysterious liquid," Angola officials say

"About 50 people have died in Angola after being forced to drink an herbal potion to prove they were not sorcerers, police and local officials said Thursday. The deaths occurred between January and February near the central town of Camacupa, according to Luzia Filemone, a local councilor.

Police confirmed that 50 people had died.  

Speaking to Angola National Radio broadcaster, Filemone accused traditional healers of administering the deadly concoction.

"More than 50 victims were forced to drink this mysterious liquid which, according to traditional healers, proves whether or not a person practices witchcraft," she said.

Belief in witchcraft is still common in some rural Angolan communities despite strong opposition from the church in the predominantly Catholic former Portuguese colony."

The Post: Mine is the Kingdom: How the Hillsong megachurch empire fell apart

"Investigative journalist David Hardaker's new book, Mine is the Kingdom, tells the explosive story of how Brian Houston's family went from humble Kiwi origins to run one of the world's largest megachurches. This extract reveals how their empire started falling apart."

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Demons in San Francisco Bay: How a Street Preacher Launched Modern-Day “Conversion Therapy”

University of California Press: Demons in San Francisco Bay: How a Street Preacher Launched Modern-Day “Conversion Therapy”

Chris Babits

Pacific Historical Review (2024) 93 (1): 63–96.

https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2024.93.1.63

PDF

"In 1967, street minister Kent Philpott began outreach to lesbian, gay, and bisexual hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Over the next decade, he counseled those who purportedly wanted out of what he referred to as “the gay lifestyle,” combining charismatic religious beliefs in demons, divine healing, and glossolalia with psychological theories on gender and child development. This article examines Philpott’s efforts to provide the nascent “ex-gay movement” with cultural, social, and intellectual foundations. This article specifically documents how sexual liberation, hippie culture, and conservative religion converged in San Francisco and spawned the “ex-gay movement.” Philpott, swept up by the Jesus People Movement, incorporated religious and psychological beliefs prominent in the Bay Area and infused charismatic Christian influences and
traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity into the 'ex-gay movement.'"

https://online.ucpress.edu/phr/article/93/1/63/198853/Demons-in-San-Francisco-BayHow-a-Street-Preacher

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

UCKG: Church pastor tells boy 'evil spirit' hides in him

Katie Mark

BBC Panorama

December 11, 2023

A UK branch of a Christian church has been secretly filmed trying to cast out evil spirits from a 16-year-old.

A Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) pastor was seen reciting what looked like so-called "strong prayers" to rid the boy of a demon.

BBC Panorama was also told by a gay ex-member he was given "strong prayers" at 13 to try to make him straight.

The UCKG says under-18s are not allowed into "strong prayers" services and it does not perform "conversion therapy".

A BBC Panorama investigation has found:

The church tells its congregations it can help with mental health conditions by casting out evil spirits

The leader of the church in the UK describes epilepsy as a "spiritual problem"

The UCKG has branches around the world, including 35 in the UK, where it is registered as a charity. It says it has more than 10,000 members across the country and describes itself as a Christian Pentecostal church.

Prayers to cast out evil spirits are not unusual in the Christian world. Some churches call them deliverance or exorcisms - although the latter is not a term the UCKG uses.

Dr Joe Aldred, a Pentecostal bishop who works to bring together different Christian traditions, says: "The Church of England has exorcists in pretty much every diocese. The question is how it is done."

"Strong prayers" in the UCKG usually involve a pastor laying hands on a member of the congregation and demanding an evil spirit leaves their body. The church says it conducts the prayers at so-called "spiritual cleansing" services each week to "remove the root cause of problems".

The UCKG came under scrutiny following the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, who was murdered by her great-aunt and the woman's boyfriend.

In the week before her death in 2000, the couple had taken Victoria - who was showing signs of abuse - to a branch of the church.

A pastor said he thought she could be possessed and initially suggested she be taken to a service where "strong prayers" were performed. Later, before the service took place, the pastor told the great-aunt to take Victoria to hospital.

A Charity Commission report highlighted that "the seriousness of Victoria's condition was not fully realised or reported to the relevant authorities" in the days before she died. It said it was "concerned" the church did not have a formal child protection policy.

Following this criticism, the church introduced a safeguarding policy. Now, it promises not to perform strong prayers on anyone under 18 - or in their presence.

BBC Panorama visited a UCKG youth group service in Brixton, south London, attended by young adults and teenagers.

A service led by Bishop Edir Macedo, the founder of the UCKG

The undercover filming shows the pastor splitting up the group according to age.

A boy, who told the undercover reporter he was 16 at the time, is seen receiving what looks like "strong prayers" from the pastor. "My God, let your fire burn the evil spirit that hides," the pastor says.

The boy's head is held by the pastor, who then prays for the evil spirit that has entered the boy to leave.

The BBC showed the filming to Jahnine Davis, who sits on an independent government child safeguarding review panel.

She says: "Given that the death of Victoria Climbie occurred over two decades ago, based on the footage you've shared, UCKG may want to ask themselves how much have they learnt.

"Safeguarding policies are one thing but they mean nothing if they're not being implemented. They're meaningless."

In a statement, the UCKG said: "Strong prayers… are mainly performed at deliverance specific services" and "anyone under the age of 18 is not allowed" in. It said it strongly rejects the suggestion it has breached its safeguarding policy.

With more than 30 branches in the UK, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God claims to transform lives.

BBC Panorama spoke to 40 former UCKG members - some of them left years ago, others in the past few months. Sharon joined the London Stratford branch when she was 19.

She says she told a pastor about her clinical depression and says he never advised her to seek professional help. She was subjected to "strong prayers", she says - contrary to the UCKG's safeguarding policy, which says they should not be performed on people with mental health problems. "It got to the point where I was very scared of going to those services because I was one of the targets all the time," Sharon says.

The church says "strong prayers" are not intended to be frightening or harmful and no-one should feel targeted. It also says if it is aware that "mental health concerns are involved", its "safeguarding team helps with referrals".

The BBC has also spoken to a former UCKG member, "Mark", who asked to remain anonymous because he was concerned about how the church might react. He says "strong prayers" were performed on him from the age of 13 to try to make him straight.

"When they found out I was gay, they started telling me that it was a demon causing it, that I needed to attend the Friday services where they would perform exorcisms," he says.

Mark says the prayers were performed every week for more than four years and that he tried to convince himself he was attracted to women. "I would cry myself to sleep," he says. "And it was a really hard time because the amount of self-hate was huge."

The UCKG told the BBC it does not perform "conversion therapy" and that "strong prayers are not given for matters of sexuality or gender alignment". It adds that it "welcomes people from all sexual preferences".

At a healing service secretly recorded by the BBC where "strong prayers" were conducted, Bishop James Marques - the leader of the UCKG in the UK - tells the congregation some sickness is a spiritual problem and mental health problems are linked to evil spirits.

He told an undercover reporter: "Depression is a spiritual problem. Behind depression there is an evil spirit."

He also said, "We know that epilepsy is a medical condition but in the Bible the Lord Jesus casts out an evil spirit that was causing epilepsy. So we can understand that epilepsy in reality is a spiritual problem that has a physical, visible manifestation."

In a statement, the UCKG said "strong prayers" are never "promoted as a replacement for medical or... professional help".

Many former members spoken to by the BBC say they found leaving the church incredibly difficult.

Rachael, who left the church and now leads a campaign against the UCKG, warning of the dangers she says it poses to other young people.

"They say, 'Do you remember that assistant who was sitting here? Well, they left the church and now they are getting a divorce. Now they have cancer.'"

Sharon says she was shown a graphic video about a former member who was in a motorcycle incident that showed "all their organs out".

She adds: "They said this is what happens when you leave the church, the devil will come and take your soul."

At an event secretly filmed by the BBC, Alvaro Lima - one of the UCKG's bishops - tells followers that straight after leaving the church, "my mother became very sick, cancer in the lungs".

However, he said, she later came back to the church "and now the cancer is shrinking and she's getting better and better".

The UCKG told the BBC it "does not employ scare tactics", is "based on (voluntary) devotions" and "does not have any interest in coercion".

The church says its many current members appreciate it and the good work it does.

But many of the former members the BBC spoke to say they would not go back.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67592961