We already know that people don’t choose to be gay. But some people have claimed to become straight through prayer or therapy. Was that true, or were they just hiding their true feelings?
Wait! First we need to define our terms.
As we saw in another article, we generally use the words “gay” and “straight” to describe someone’s attractions, not their behavior. So what we’re asking is whether someone who is attracted to the same sex and not the opposite sex (“gay”) can become attracted to the opposite sex and not the same sex (“straight”).
We’re not asking whether someone can change their sexual behavior. We already know people can choose their behavior. But if a straight man chooses not to have sex with women, that doesn’t mean he’s become gay, and if a gay man chooses not to have sex with men, that doesn’t mean he’s become straight. His behavior has changed, but his attractions haven’t.
Some people say “gay” doesn’t describe attractions or behavior, but that it describes a chosen identity. But that’s not a helpful definition for us here. If it only refers to a chosen identity, then any gay person who says “I’m not gay” would magically stop being gay because they don’t identify that way—even if they’re still attracted to the same sex and even having lots of same-sex sex! That would be silly.
In this article, then, we’re talking about attractions.
So can someone who is only attracted to the same sex choose to become only attracted to the opposite sex?
Well, the evidence overwhelmingly says no.
Many, many Christians—perhaps millions—have tried. Only a few publicly claimed to succeed, and most of those claims were later disproven.
Let’s look at the most well-known claims of the last few decades:
- Colin Cook founded one of the first Christian “ex-gay” programs, Homosexuals Anonymous. He became a famous gay-to-straight conversion story, and his testimony and theories influenced Christian approaches to homosexuality to this day. He was later discovered to be sexually abusing other men who’d come to him for therapy.
- Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper were two of the co-founders of Exodus International, which would become the largest “ex-gay” ministry in the world. In 1978, although their ministry had hundreds of people trying to go from gay to straight, Bussee and Cooper were two of the only ones who said they’d actually done it. They traveled to churches across the country to tell their amazing gay-to-straight testimony, but eventually broke down and confessed that they were both still gay and had fallen in love with each other.
- By the 1990s, John Paulk was the most famous gay-to-straight success story. He was chairman of the board of Exodus and the homosexuality specialist for Focus on the Family, an influential evangelical nonprofit. He appeared in magazines and on national talk shows sharing his testimony of having become straight, and he wrote an influential book about his story: Not Afraid to Change. Even after he was photographed in a gay bar in 2000, many people refused to believe his story wasn’t true. He didn’t publicly admit the truth until over a decade later: He now admits he never became straight, even though he was married to a woman.
- After John Paulk’s scandal, Exodus president Alan Chambers claimed that there were still “tens of thousands of people who have successfully changed their orientation,” including himself. Today he also admits that wasn’t true. Although he’s still married to a woman, Alan Chambers publicly acknowledges that he never became straight, and that in all his years running the world’s largest gay-to-straight ministry, he never met anyone who actually went from gay to straight.
- Exodus closed in 2013, but McKrae Game was determined to keep its ministry going, so he ran a similar organization, called Hope for Wholeness, in its wake. In 2019, he, too, finally admitted that these ministries never worked, and publicly apologized for his role in them.
In short, we’ve seen decades upon decades of people trying to become straight. People have tried prayer, psychotherapy, exorcisms, electric shock treatment, spiritual healing, aversion therapy, laying on of hands, or even just taking steps of faith and marrying someone they weren’t attracted to, hoping the opposite-sex attractions would eventually come. None of it worked.
On those rare occasions when people have claimed to change, over and over, their testimonies have turned out to be about behavior change (“I stopped having sex”) or identity change (“I stopped calling myself gay”) and not actual attraction change.
These stories and many others are detailed in the 2024 edition of Justin Lee’s book Torn, which devotes multiple chapters to the history and legacy of the conversion therapy movement.
But what if there really is someone, somewhere, who did it?
Even if someone did finally go from gay to straight, it would still be extremely, extremely rare. That still leaves millions of people whose attractions never changed, and they still have to go about their daily lives, figuring out how to serve God with the bodies and brains they’ve got.
As Christians, we believe that God can do anything. But that doesn’t mean God will always do what we want. In this case, despite many, many, many prayers from people with the faith to move mountains, God hasn’t chosen to make them straight.
So the next question is, how can these Christians live holy, Christ-honoring lives?
