Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age

Conclusion: American Grace and Evangelical True Believers

303 Conclusion American Grace and Evangelical True Believers ••• I have ended with an especially profound, intimate, and therefore scandalous model of evangelical conversion, describing ministries and people dedicated to transforming homosexuality (seen as a desire-based identity) into holiness (a faith-based practice of self). As Exodus’s ongoing struggles and recent dissolution demonstrate, such a nuanced transformation proves difficult to realize and communicate, let alone promote . To an increasingly gay-tolerant popular culture, as well as to the LGBT-affirming progressive left, the notion of living a life of self-denial and holy chastity seems bizarre and oppressive. To a hyper-partisan religious right, acknowledging limits to the mutability of same-sex desires— dispensing with the language of “cure” and “re-orientation”—seems like capitulation to a godless cultural tide. Discovering if and how post-Exodus SOCE groups navigate their place between risky nuance and political/theological rigidity must wait until a future project. I am presently more interested in the sense from those beyond conservative evangelicalism that organizations like Exodus, post-Exodus, and the Restored Hope Network would be better off disappearing from existence altogether. To be sure, such sentiments originate in part from the experience of harm that ex-gay survivors (and former ministers) attribute to Exodus and other SOCE initiatives. Still more 304 • preaching to convert criticism comes from those who have examined SOCE clinical claims and found them wanting. But, apart from those personally burned by SOCE ministries or well-versed in research about them, much of the bias against groups like Exodus exists on the level of the pop-cultural subconscious . It circulates, for example, as the trope of the snooty, hypocritical homosexual-in-denial or in the late-night talk-show barbs launched at self-avowed strugglers like Ted Haggard. Such humor depends less on personal experiences or rational conclusions and more on a tacit consensus that it is silly or improper to suggest that someone try not to be gay or lesbian. From this perspective, even Exodus’s attenuated, noncure , non-coercive version of sexual orientation counseling offends. An unspoken assumption exists that advocating holy celibacy as the best course of action for LGBT people—not just being celibate yourself but actually recommending to LGBT people that they be celibate—is bad form. It violates a sense of decency, a twenty-first-century US sensibility that, so long as no one is being physically hurt, people should be able to like who they like without being nagged about it. It’s a private matter, none of Exodus’s business. To varying degrees, many of the cases I have examined in this book inspire a similar sense of violation. The act of religious proselytization itself implies a double—and, in present-day culture, doubly offensive— assumption: (1) Your deepest religious beliefs are wrong, and (2) It’s my business to try to change them. What presumption! Can’t I walk down the street without having some stranger push a Bible tract at me? Does this friendly chat really have to veer awkwardly into a conversation about whether I’m aware that God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life? Do they really need not just a Creation Museum but a fully sized Ark? Must we have hell houses? Or, in words attributed to Jimmy Durante, “Why can’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?” Evangelicals fascinate me precisely because of their eponymous insistence on not leaving everyone else alone. They are compelled instead by what British missionary Lesslie Newbigin calls “the logic of mission.” For Christians, he writes, “the true meaning of the human story has been disclosed. Because it is the truth, it must be shared universally. It cannot be private opinion.”1 One insight I hope readers have garnered from my study is that debates about how to follow this missional logic remain varied and contentious. Evangelicals ask themselves some of the very same questions about evangelism—regularly, sincerely, exasperatedly— as annoyed non-evangelicals do. Hell houses, seeker-sensitive services, Conclusion • 305 Answers in Genesis, and more all endure some of their sharpest criticism from other evangelicals. Evangelical critics like Mark A. Noll have leveled devastating diagnoses of evangelicalism’s all-too-common antiintellectualism .2 Evangelical scientists and think tanks like the BioLogos Foundation regularly contest Ken Ham’s narrow creationism. Evangelical philosophers like Elmer John Thiessen elaborate complex ethical bases for distinguishing legitimate proselytization...