Queer Conversions

In November 2006, after months of denying allegations of homosexual liaisons with a male prostitute, the Reverend Ted Haggard was removed from his position as pastor of the New Life Church, a nondenominational evangelical Protestant megachurch in Colorado Springs. It was quite a comedown for the charismatic showman who had built New Life into a multimillion-dollar ministry with over fourteen thousand members. Immediately thereafter, Haggard entered into a Christian program for “sexual addiction.” After three weeks of intensive counseling, Haggard emerged “completely heterosexual,” according to one of his spiritual overseers, the Reverend Tim Ralph. Rev. Ralph elaborated that Haggard’s sexual dalliances had been “acting-out situations,” not evidence of a lasting disposition. The reverend may have spoken prematurely. In February 2008, the New Life Church announced that Haggard had ended his ties with his ministerial “restoration team.” The “process of restoring Ted Haggard is incomplete,” wrote New Life’s new senior pastor Brady Boyd in an open letter to the congregation.

And yet, even as many on the left, queer and straight, chortled at the spectacle of another traditional values-spouting evangelical minister brought to earth by a sexual scandal, for Haggard’s followers and many evangelical Protestants across America, Haggard’s fall revealed something else: no one is beyond the reach of sin, no one is without need of Jesus’ saving grace. The contours of his story would be painfully familiar to the men and women at the center of Tanya Erzen’s absorbing and important ethnography of ex-gay ministries, Straight to Jesus. Ex-gay ministries are a national and, increasingly, transnational movement that joins “a culture of self-help, with its emphasis on personal transformation and self-betterment, to evangelical Christianity, with its precepts of conversion and personal testimony” (20). What began as a small movement of residential treatment centers and unaffiliated evangelical Protestant churches in the 1970s has grown into a “global para-church movement” (20), with “over 200 evangelical ministries . . . under the umbrella of Exodus International” (42). But despite these transnational aspirations, this is a quintessentially American story about the convergence and co-construction of religious and sexual identities.

Erzen’s study focuses on the New Hope Ministry in Northern California. Erzen spent eighteen months observing it, conducting formal interviews with forty-seven men and women, and interacting with both residents and counselors in less formal settings: over meals, at ex-gay conferences and church meetings, and in the New Hope office, where Erzen helped work on the Web site. The extended participant observation and interviews allow Erzen to move beyond the clichés, the alternately exoticizing and condescending tones that characterize many of the short-form journalistic exposés about ex-gays. Her attunement to the words and, more pointedly, to the feeling structure of her interview subjects also complicates the political condemnations heaped on the ex-gay movement by GLBT organizations and queer activists.

Erzen shows some unexpected links between the way ex-gays narrate their gay behavior and identity and queer theory’s own stress on the way sexual practices and desires change over time and do not neatly align with identifications from within or without. The bonds forged at residential treatment centers such as New Hope also “queerly” overlap with forms of belonging prized by many queer theorists and activists. Erzen observes that the “ministry’s close-knit, highly regulated programs foster a sense of religious belonging based on same-sex bonds rather than the conservative Christian ideal of heterosexual marriage” (17). The intimate communities thereby forged have not gone unnoticed within the ex-gay world; the ex-gay movement has come to refer to those who “remain in ministries and support groups indefinitely” as an “ex-gay ghetto” (121). This term is not meant approvingly; it captures something of the ambivalent status of ex-gay identity, which does not equate to heterosexuality. Indeed, as Erzen explains, by their own testimony most of the men and women who complete ex-gay therapy will continue to struggle with same...