Mr. John Maddex: Welcome back to Transformation, an Orthodox look at Christian faith and same-sex attraction. I’m your host, John Maddex, and in the first episode we introduced you to Gregg Webb, Eleni Allison Erickson, Margaret, and Jennifer (not their real names). In this episode, we want to explore what the Church and Scriptures, as well as the Church Fathers, teach about this subject. While there have been attempts to twist and apply bizarre interpretations to the clear teaching of the Church, there is nevertheless an unwavering witness in Orthodox history that cannot be denied. Same-sex sexual activity is inherently sinful; marriage is a sacramental act of the Church, only to be entered into by one man and one woman. Same-sex marriage has never been blessed by the Church, and frankly never will be. Here is His Eminence Archbishop Michael from the OCA Diocese of New York and New Jersey.
His Eminence Archbishop Michael (Dahulich) of New York and New Jersey: There is no discussion on changing the Church’s teaching on marriage. There’s no intent to embrace gay marriage. I haven’t spoken with every hierarch in the United States about the issue, but I don’t know of any bishop in this country who advocates an acceptance of gay marriage. Our liturgical theology is reflective of our dogmatic teaching, our dogmatic theology. The wedding service is written for a man and a woman, and there’s a prayer for the procreation of children. This is because monogamous, heterosexual marriage is the only expression of human sexuality that is blessed by God, and again by his Son. Therefore, this is the only expression of human sexuality that his Church is given the authority to bless.
Mr. Maddex: The archbishop went on to address the individual power of any one bishop to make changes in the historic teachings of the Church.
Archbp. Michael: No true Orthodox bishop would change this, and even if he tried he couldn’t change it by himself. That certainly is not going to happen.
Mr. Maddex: So what about the occasional attempts to make Scripture say what it doesn’t say in order to fit the Church into a modern-day construct? Dr. Jeannie Constantinou is professor of biblical studies and early Christianity at the University of San Diego.
Dr. Jeannie Constantinou: There have been sort of two ways to look at it. There’s a traditional understanding, and then there’s the more modern take that people are trying to reinterpret some of these classic passages from the Bible. Of course, in the Old Testament, I think the classic passages are in Leviticus, which is a very clear denunciation of same-sex activity. It doesn’t talk about your orientation; it doesn’t really care. Judaism has not classically cared about your thoughts so much as your actions; that’s been very typical in Judaism. What matters is that you don’t do the wrong thing; they don’t really focus so much on your thoughts.
Now, modernly some people are saying, “Well, that’s just part of the law of Moses,” because Leviticus, so much of Leviticus and the Torah has to do with ritual purity. So they’re trying to dismiss the prohibition against same-sex activity by saying that that’s just about ritual purity and it doesn’t apply anymore, or it doesn’t apply for Christians. But you can’t really make that argument because in that section in Leviticus it speaks against incest and it speaks against bestiality and things like this which have nothing to do with ritual purity, so that section is not about ritual purity; it’s about what we’ve been discussing: the proper use of sexual desires, as God intended it to be done, and that’s in marriage between a man and a woman. So if we’re going to be honest, we have to acknowledge that. And, by the way, I can understand if a person says, “Hey, I don’t believe in the Bible. I’m going to do whatever I want.” Actually, I would prefer that they say that rather than to try to distort the Scriptures to saying something that they never were intended to say, because I think the truth is that we know what the Bible says. So you can sort of dance around it, try to reinterpret it and say, “Oh, that word doesn’t really mean that; it means this”… I’ve had somebody tell me that “virgin” doesn’t mean “virgin.” I said, “Since when!?” I mean, we know what it means, so it’s better to be honest and say, “I don’t care what it says. I’m going to live my life.” Hey, you’re entitled. God gave us free will. Do what you want. But don’t try to justify it with the Bible, because I think that makes it worse.
Mr. Maddex: It does.
Dr. Constantinou: It really does. It’s disrespectful to God. If you want to turn your back on what God has said and do what you want, that’s fine, but don’t compound the situation by saying, “Really, it’s okay in the Bible and there’s nothing wrong with it.” I think that that and anybody who tries to make the case for that, I think that that’s a mistake.
Mr. Maddex: There seems to be more concern about this issue here in the West than there is in Orthodoxy. We often see the culture pushing an agenda and making assumptions, but Dr. Constantinou sees this issue in a uniquely Orthodox context.
Dr. Constantinou: So here we see: this is the foundation of Orthodoxy, not being obsessed with homosexuality, with same-sex attraction or same-sex actions. We’re not obsessed with it because the Fathers of the Church weren’t particular focused on that, but on everything that takes us away from God. We have to recognize that the Church did not conform to the culture of the Roman Empire, and it’s not going to conform to our culture either. It’s never going to accept that, because the Church was born in an era when this thing was acceptable, and we know that it’s not acceptable, because only sex within marriage is allowed, is a proper expression of sexual—is a proper sexual union, we could say.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, and that marriage is between a man and a woman, right?
Dr. Constantinou: Correct.
Mr. Maddex: She went on to talk about what sets Orthodox apart on this matter as well as on most matters where culture clashes with theology.
Dr. Constantinou: Let’s just talk about the general approach to everything in the Orthodox Church, and it’s a really good measure, if you will, if you want to figure out the position the Church would take about something, we always come back to the same thing, and this is uniquely Orthodox, and that is image and likeness: the fact that we were created in God’s image and are supposed to spend our lives trying to acquire his likeness. So God made everything in the world, including us, including our desires, our passions as we call them, and he made everything good, but humanity sinned, and we live in a fallen world. So it’s in that context that the Orthodox Church understands and explains and takes a particular position on same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual activity.
The Orthodox Church historically has not been specifically focused on same-sex attraction or activities as something especially sinful. We don’t really have a history of that, which has been an unfortunate focus, I think, among Evangelical Protestants and fundamentalist Protestants. Sometimes like a campaign, there’s a denunciation of same-sex attraction, lifestyle, relationships as especially sinful or corrupt, and this has really left a lot of people feeling very unwelcomed and very attacked, and the Roman Catholic Church has also been much more strident in its sort of denunciation of this. And the rhetoric has been strong I think possibly for the Catholics because of the fact that they have an unmarried priesthood, and I think they have had more difficulties with that, so they have had to come out and denounce it in more strident terms. And the Orthodox on the other hand are comparatively relaxed about it, which people might be surprised at, because we are the most ancient Church—we are the original Church.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we consider same-sex activity as acceptable, but we have not felt the need to denounce it or emphasize it or distinguish it particularly from other kinds of sin—serious sins, of course. We don’t really focus on rules and then insisting that people follow the rules, because the Church does not see itself as a set of intellectual concepts that you have to accept and then rules that you’re expected to follow. Instead, we talk about, consistently, image and likeness, that we are all made in the image of God, and our purpose in this life is to acquire his likeness, to become more like God. And to that extent, we know that everybody is suffering from some distortion of our nature as God intended us to be, as God created us. All of us have our stuff that we’re dealing with, and we’re all in the same situation: we’re all struggling with our salvation, and whether your passion is same-sex attraction or it’s over-indulgence in food or greed or jealousy or anger, we are all suffering from something that besets us, a passion that we are expected to try to control and try to subdue so that we can acquire the likeness of God.
So Orthodoxy has never felt the need to isolate or identify specific people as having something, some kind of sin that’s worse than other people.
Mr. Maddex: So what does the Bible say about homosexuality? Dr. Edith M. Humphrey.
Dr. Edith M. Humphrey: So my name is Edith Humphrey. I usually write under “Edith M. Humphrey,” and I am professor emerita of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and I’m enjoying my first year of retirement.
I think we shouldn’t be surprised at the consensus of the historic Church, because wherever Scripture mentions homoeroticism, the teaching is consistent, so it’s not a matter of just cherry-picking unconnected texts, but understanding that from the beginning of the canon through to Revelation, human beings are understood as created male and female with conjugal love designed by God to be expressed in the single covenanted male-female relationship for life.
Mr. Maddex: And what about Jesus himself, as well as the Apostle Paul? What does the New Testament have to say about this? Dr. Constantinou.
Dr. Constantinou: Jesus doesn’t specifically speak about homosexuality, and, for that reason, some people have said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with it, because Jesus didn’t condemn it.” But, first of all, we don’t know—we only know a very little bit about what Jesus said. There’s a lot of things Jesus didn’t condemn, and we wouldn’t want to say that they’re okay. Jesus didn’t condemn, let’s say, spousal abuse or something like that, or incest or Psalm 51 something—that doesn’t mean that it’s okay. So we can’t make an argument from silence when it comes to Jesus, because his whole point was repentance, holiness, sanctification. This is where we get these ideas from. The idea of trying to transform ourselves to become more God-like is really coming from Christ. We think of St. Paul and the letters of Paul, but really it’s Christ who shows us the model, and he talks about sexual sins and also the woman accused of adultery, where he says, “Go and sin no more.” He kind of seems just to suggest that—that response seems to suggest that she had been guilty of adultery, so he would probably have said the same thing to a homosexual. It’s hard to imagine that he would have said, “Oh, that’s okay.” And I don’t think it was just a cultural thing.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Edith M. Humphrey.
Dr. Humphrey: But Paul did work in the Gentile world, and so, in 1 Corinthians 6, he challenges his people: “Do you not know that evil-doers will not inherit the kingdom?” And then he illustrates this by reference to those who steal, get drunk, scorn what is holy, pursue general sexual immorality, and practice two different modes of homoerotic behavior. These, he comments, were the practices of some of the Corinthians, but they have been transformed by God. Here, too, he uses a term that was well-known—two terms, actually, but one term that was well-known in the ancient world: malakoi. It literally means “soft ones”; in Latin it’s molles, or molli in the plural. And he also coins a word that seems to come from Leviticus 20:13; the term is arsenokoitai. It’s a compound, and it literally means those who go to bed with another man; a man who goes to bed with another man.
The term malakoi in the plural, malakos in the singular, is found in other Greek documents, usually with the slur intended. It can refer to the exhibition of various types of sexual indulgence, but often refers explicitly to the passive partner in a homoerotic relationship, the soft, receptive one. Here both terms are used in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 6 for the sake of thoroughness. In the pastoral letters, simply arsenokoitai is used to cover both. And there are people, even within the Orthodox tradition, who want to translate these terms as referring simply to male prostitutes or child abusers, and my argument would be that they’re simply engaging in special pleading here. If you actually look at the text, arsenokoitai and malakoi just mean a catamite, a male prostitute, and arsenokoitai doesn’t simply mean someone who abuses a child.
The ancient world engaged in same-sex relations in various contexts. Some of these were not commercially or cultically driven, say, in the temples, but they were just a form of everyday life. And Paul is speaking then about homoerotic activity in general, as part of the lifestyle that the Corinthians have exited. He encourages them to be chaste.
Mr. Maddex: So now we move into an area which is often misunderstood, and where it’s easy to categorize people in inappropriate and unfair ways. It seems clear and should be undebatable that same-sex sexual activity is condemned in Scriptures and in the Fathers. The problem is we often assume that a person with a same-sex attraction is sexually active; they are “the gays” and we’d rather not have them in our parishes. We’ll speak to that directly in the next episode, but for now let’s settle the question once and for all: same-sex attraction is not a sin. It only becomes a sin when acted on. Fr. Harry Linsinbigler is canonist of the Ukrainian Archdiocese of the USA and professor of canon law at St. Sophia Seminary. He gets us started on the topic by helping us understand how the Fathers and the canons of the Church saw the difference between a sexual preference and acting sinfully on that preference.
Fr. Harry Linsinbigler: According to the canons, same-sex sexual activity is, without exception, sinful activity—but I think this alone doesn’t answer the question. Stealing a pen from the bank is sinful activity, but this is not as grievous as robbing the bank of all of its money and letting it collapse. The canons also approach matters in the same way, as there are levels of gravity of same-sex activity, some worse than others, just as there are with sinful heterosexual activity. So this is part of a larger conversation about sin in general, but going back to the first question, on same-sex attractions… For those who want a simple answer, I will say that we need to further define “same-sex attraction” before I can answer, as the canons do specify leanings toward sin that are initial and simple, and do distinguish them from further progression in a particular line of sin. So same-sex attraction, if we mean just a simple inclination or preference really of arousal from one sex over another, then we would have to say: no, that of itself is not a sin.
But then, as with all sin, our level of participation in that initial impulse—are we entertaining that sin in our mind, and growing it, as it were—that particular attraction, are we growing it into a sin? So the canons of the Church only directly speak to homosexuality as the practice of sexual acts between two persons that are the same sex. So the modern definition of “orientation” really doesn’t apply. In fact, in the ancient world, it would have seemed quite absurd to define someone by what their normal category of sexual attraction was, just a preference of who they thought was more beautiful in a stimulating way, a sexually stimulating way. But now once we get to the level of proclivity is to action and to action itself. That is what the canons have in view.
Mr. Maddex: Archbishop Michael agrees that it’s very important to distinguish between attraction and action.
Archbp. Michael: Fr. John Breck, I use his book as a textbook in my ethics class, and it’s of utmost importance that we maintain this clear distinction between acts and orientation. There’s an element of same-sex attraction that is not condemned by the Church. Fr. Thomas Hopko, beloved, writes, “It’s when we fall into lustful thoughts and actions that are purely sexual, that the Church condemns those behaviors as sinful and unnatural.” And so, you know, this is true whether the lustful behavior is homosexual or heterosexual; it’s not discriminating. It’s the same truth.
Mr. Maddex: So what do we have to offer to people who are prone to sin—sin of any kind—like me, like you? You may not be struggling with a same-sex attraction. You may struggle with pornography, or fidelity in your marriage, or gossip, for that matter. Dr. Humphrey reminds us that the Church Christ established was designed to be an infirmary, a field hospital, where the sick and wounded come for healing.
Dr. Humphrey: One of the things that distinguishes Orthodoxy is our emphasis upon the Church as a hospital for those whom Christ is healing, and our healing isn’t just about repentance-forgiveness, is it? It’s also about the re-ordering of our will and our desires. So sin isn’t our only enemy, but also our corruptible condition, that is, the process of dying that all of us have inherited because of ancestral sin. And Romans 5 speaks both about the dying condition of humanity and about our sin. So these are interrelated, but they’re not identical, and the Church is wisely subtle regarding different kinds of sin, those that are witting and unwitting—you’ll hear, we have some prayers about that: those that are known, those that are unknown—and these are important distinctions that we have to make as we struggle with Jesus’ warning that say not only murder is sinful but so also is anger. So there’s a relationship between longing and passion and sin that’s also hinted at even in the original Ten Commandments, which forbid not only adultery and theft, but even coveting something that’s not mine.
Mr. Maddex: And where do these tempting thoughts come from, and what are we supposed to do with them when they present themselves? Dr. Constantinou.
Dr. Constantinou: The Church distinguishes between involuntary thoughts and our actions. Now a thought can go from being involuntary to voluntary, so here’s how they look at it, the Fathers of the Church, the monks, the saints. We cannot control our thoughts. We have to be vigilant about what we do with our thoughts, but a thought comes into your mind—that’s not coming, usually, from you, especially if it’s a temptation. Because it—I don’t know if you remember, but me growing up, watching cartoons, sometimes they’d have a little angel on one shoulder of the person and a devil on the other, and they’re each talking to the person? Well, there’s actually some truth to that.
So these sinful thoughts, involuntary sinful thoughts, are not coming from us. They come from the evil one. So we’re not responsible for that, in the teaching of the Church. I don’t know about you, but it gives me some comfort.
Mr. Maddex: Oh, a lot! [Laughter]
Dr. Constantinou: But what we’re supposed to do is shoo them away. Now, if you take that thought and you ruminate on it and you think about it, you develop it, and then you create that lust within yourself—that becomes a sin, even though it’s just a thought. So the action is definitely a sin, so the question then is whether or not we are— Of course, this is the same for heterosexuals, too, so you can have a thought that comes to your mind because the evil one is trying to tempt you, and you say, “No, I’m not going to think that. I’m not going to do that.” On the other hand, if you nurture it, then it becomes a sin. And Jesus gave us that paradigm, we could say, when he talked about adultery. “It was said before, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ but I say to you, ‘Don’t even look at a woman with lust.’ ” He didn’t say, “Don’t look at a woman.”
Mr. Maddex: Good point.
Dr. Constantinou: He didn’t say, “Stop all thoughts about women from entering your mind,” but “Don’t look at a woman with lust.” That means that you have cultivated that thought in your mind and now that, even that thought has become a sin.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Humphrey agrees, and goes on to give a practical example of a thought progressing from a non-sinful temptation to an actual sin.
Dr. Humphrey: Certainly temptation isn’t sin, and if someone is predispositionally attracted to someone of the same gender, then that is not in itself sin, nor, thank God, would it be common to find Orthodox counselors who say so. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, but he remained sinless. But I do think that in pastoral counseling—and this is not my expertise, but I’ve talked to many people—desire and sinful action can be disclosed as interrelated. There may be a process where temptation is indulged or cultivated or fantasized about, and then a point at which someone crosses from temptation to lust, the committing of sexual sin, in this example, in the imagination, but it works for every other sin. So if I wished that I had my neighbor’s beautiful mansion next door rather than my bungalow with its leaky basement that needs a new sump pump, that is temptation, but then if I dwell on this, making what is not mine the object of my disordered desire, I’m moving into lust. And then of course if I swindle my neighbor so that he loses the house, that’s theft.
And the book of James describes this process quite clearly when it talks about temptation giving way to lust which, when it conceives, gives birth to sin. So all this to say that same-sex attraction, like any other temptation, is not in itself sin, though it appears that the tradition of the Scriptures call it disordered: desiring something that is not meant to be mine. Romans 1 mentions the disordered passions for both men and women for their same sex, and Paul here gives this as a sign of general human sin and idolatry. And at the same time, 1 Corinthians 6 urges its readers to flee from sexual sin, including same-sex activity, recognizing that temptation of one sort or another is universal. But we worship a God who doesn’t ask us simply to struggle against temptation but who helps us, by the Spirit and by discipline, to still our warring passions.
Mr. Maddex: Andrew Williams is a therapist, an Orthodox Christian, a father living in the UK, and someone who has faced these issues head-on. In a journey that eventually led him to an Anglican church in Moscow, he had to grapple with the theological ramifications of his own lifestyle. He was prepared to defend his own position, but it backfired.
Dr. Andrew Williams: And it was in the Anglican Church, actually, in Moscow, that I was challenged again with the question of: How do you work this out, being Christian and being gay? So I was prepared, because I had read a lot of this when I was at university. I had spent a lot of time in the library. I had been through all the books on all of the interpretations of all of the various scriptural passages and so forth, so I was very prepared for this, and I had a little debate, and I led the one side, and one of the ministers led the other side. I presented all of my detailed arguments about all of these various scriptural passages, and over time I started to somehow, instead of convincing him, I unconvinced myself, because it felt like I was explaining things away rather than explaining something that made sense.
Mr. Maddex: So the premise that you were arguing was the acceptance of that lifestyle.
Dr. Williams: Right, exactly. So I was explaining why the various biblical passages didn’t mean what you usually think they mean, why the words have been misused and mistranslated, and the context can explain it in a different way, and all those kind of things, in order to make it acceptable, exactly. But I unconvinced myself somehow. It began to seem like there was a bigger picture that I was somehow missing. I’d got all these details, and I’d found a way to sort of get them all lined up, but it was like twisting pieces of a jigsaw out of shape, and I couldn’t put them back into the puzzle any more.
So I changed my mind at that point, but the problem was that I had no idea what to do about that. And I think this is something that… It’s almost like when people make this argument to try and convince somebody that they should not—I don’t know, not be gay or not act on being gay or whatever, however they want to put it, they don’t really think about the possibility of that argument being accepted, because when I accepted the argument and said, “Well, now what am I supposed to do?” there was no answer, and I think that’s a really important lesson. If you’re going to propose to somebody that they change their whole life, you’d better have some suggestions as to how they’re going to go about doing it! [Laughter] Because otherwise it’s just cruel. I had no idea what to do.
Mr. Maddex: We sometimes spend a lot of time debating the origins of a person’s attraction to members of the same sex. Were they born this way? Did they have father or mother issues? Were they abused as a child? Is it a fad or a phase that will pass? How did the Scripture or the Fathers talk about it? Dr. Humphrey.
Dr. Humphrey: When they’re talking about reasons for this, they tend to be practical rather than drilling back to naturalistic explanations for same-sex attraction. And as I mentioned before, there were various theories among the ancient pagans regarding why human beings are this way, of which I’m pretty sure Paul would have been aware. But I think we could maybe consider Jesus’ response to the disciples who asked whether a man had been born blind because of his own sin or that of his parents. And Jesus sort of deflects that question and says, “Neither, but so that the glory of God might be revealed.”
So the kind of questions that we get from the Scriptures and from the Fathers are of that sort. St. Paul describes it in Romans 1 as a strong symptom of the Fall, that it shows the breach between male and female that’s a result of the breach between humanity and God: don’t give thanks to God, don’t recognize who he is, and the next link on the chain is the breach between male and female, made in the image of God. Here he also describes homoeroticism as a dishonoring of each sex, because masculine is misunderstood as needing to be completed by another male, and the same with two females. Here in Romans 1 he’s echoing Genesis which speaks strongly about the complementarity of the male and the female, and we could think about that complementarity in terms of anatomy, potential for procreation, and psychology. And then St. John Chrysostom later associates the prevalence of same-sex activity in his day with the decadence of society around him.
But all of these are practical explanations; they’re not scientific. As for “I was made that way,” that I think is already dealt with in the whole story of our created nature and the Fall. All of us were made to be something that we don’t naturally find it easy to be right now. We don’t naturally walk with God. We don’t naturally labor the way that we should have. Women don’t naturally have children except in pain. So things have changed, but all of us are under this kind of—various kinds of compulsions and chains as a result of what’s happened in our human history.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Constantinou goes even further by saying it is not useful to try to figure out the human origin of a same-sex attraction, because it’s impossible to know for sure, and we all have something that we’re dealing with.
Dr. Constantinou: I don’t think that that’s useful, because we have no answer to that. We don’t know. I’m the only fat person in my family. Why am I overweight? Why is this my struggle? Why have I spent my whole life trying to control this desire? And that’s considered a major sin. We don’t like to think about it, but gluttony is considered a major sin. So this is something that I’m actually, at my age—I’m 64—I’m just beginning to figure out how to handle it. So I can’t tell you why I was born with this. I just remember having it from the time I was a little kid. So whatever it is, each of us have some kind of a predisposition to certain sins. We just do. And I’ve kind of wrestled with that myself, and I thought, “My goodness, every time I go to confession, it’s the same thing, over and over and over!” [Laughter] Am I ever going to confess, I don’t know, gambling or something like that? You know, it’s always the same thing over and over—because that’s our problem. And it is unfortunate that I do keep confessing the same things, but hopefully there’s some progress along that line, but I’m not likely to start indulging in other kinds of sins just to mix things up. I’m not likely to start abusing drugs or cheating on my husband. It’s just not who we are.
That’s one reason why, by the way, we have to have compassion for people with a same-sex attraction. So we can’t say, “Oh, that’s disgusting. They’re terrible,” because, you know, you and other people are certainly saying the same thing about me, because I can’t hide my sin; my sin is not easily hidden. So you can’t… It’s easy for somebody who’s never struggled with alcohol to say, “Well, just stop drinking,” or never struggled with food to say, “Well, why is it that you have that problem? Oh, she’s whatever—lazy in spirituality” or something like this. It’s easy, when you don’t have that problem, to be proud of yourself and think that somehow you’re better. And actually St. John Chrysostom talks about this. He says, “That’s not your sin, so you don’t get any, we could say, brownie points or bonus points for not having that sin.” Do you see what I’m saying?
Mr. Maddex: I do.
Dr. Constantinou: That’s not a virtue, believe it or not. He actually says this. He says, for example, “If you naturally are patient, if you have natural patience, that’s not a virtue.” Isn’t that interesting? Because it comes to you naturally. But if you are naturally impatient, and you train yourself and you struggle with your impatience, and you become patient, you have acquired a virtue, and that is something that is praiseworthy. So the fact that I’m not oriented toward other women sexually, that’s not praiseworthy; I have nothing to be proud of for that. Do you see what I’m trying say?
Mr. Maddex: I do.
Dr. Constantinou: But also, the person who has that same-sex attraction has nothing to be ashamed of for that, and I think that this has been part of the problem.
Mr. Maddex: Exactly.
Dr. Constantinou: Especially in Western Christianity, which has made such a big deal about having same-sex attraction and has shamed people, and this is why they feel that they have to be proud of it, so we have “gay pride,” a whole month devoted to gay pride, which is unfortunate, because they shouldn’t be proud of it, but they shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It should just be their particular…
Mr. Maddex: It’s a fact.
Dr. Constantinou: Yeah, it’s their particular orientation or inclination, we could say, to struggle against in their life, and they may have to struggle a lot. If I have to struggle with food, I can imagine… And people struggle with alcohol, they struggle with anger… Everybody’s got something.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Al Rossi is director of field education and serves as the resident clinical psychologist at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary.
Dr. Al Rossi: It’s a really “octopus” question to get our arms around. There’s always the question of nature and nurture. Freud said it’s all nurture, it’s all upbringing; others say it’s all biology. Your question of me and my patients—I don’t know. And I walk along in my little moccasins with the word “both.” Persons are this way for both nurture and nature, and when we start to talk this way, one cannot exist without the other. You can’t have nature without nurture or nurture without nature. And I don’t get into causation in my mind, certainly not with them much. I’m interested in from this minute forward: “Okay, what can we do from now on.”
Mr. Maddex: Remember Margaret from episode one? Gay and celibate in her mid-60s, not comfortable with being identified by name or voice in the documentary? I asked her whether early in life she thought that this was her destiny, that she was just born this way.
Margaret: Oh no, absolutely did not. No, no, no, I absolutely did not. And I was optimistic that it would change. I didn’t have a picture of how it would change, but I think there was an assumption that I would find healing in the Lord, and “healing,” of course, meant that I would be like other people. I would be normal; I would become normal. This is what God wanted for me, which I still believe, of course, but that it would happen soon. I held out a hope and assumption that it would happen soon and that it would happen… well, that I would be healed, that this was something that would be healed. So I just needed to keep praying and keep seeking the Lord.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Roxanne Louh is a clinical psychologist and Orthodox presvytera with a practice in Jacksonville, Florida. She says the current science is revealing some interesting findings about whether people are born this way.
Dr. Roxanne Louh: Scientists don’t really know the exact cause of same-sex attraction. It’s been sort of theorized that it’s really the result of a very complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, environmental influences. And really, despite this major disparity that the world tries to put us in these sort of dichotomous places, between either something we are born with or something that we choose, the scientific community doesn’t really accept that sexual orientation or same-sex attraction is a choice. And spiritual schools of thought tend to assert that the truth lies somewhere between nature and nurture, somewhere between sort of this dichotomy.
And in terms of the genetic data… I mean, if we’re just looking at the empirical studies, it’s been consistently found that genetics do seem to play at least some part in the development of same-sex attraction, programmed into the brain before birth, and it’s based on a mix of genetics and prenatal conditions. And there’s a wealth of research on this, and there’s a lot of things that have been found to be consistent cross-culturally and within genders. So it’s thought that there are hundreds or even thousands of genetic areas that influence same-sex attraction, and each of these all kind of have a very—what is looked at as a very small effect, but collectively they combine to influence what’s called sexual behavior. And the genetics are showing somewhere between 8-25% of the variation that’s existing with regards to sexual preference is accounted for by genes.
And really, although certain genes do influence the propensity for same-sex attraction, there is not a particular gene that they are saying can predict it. So this is sort of the genetic piece. Then that leads us to: Okay, well, that’s a pretty big factor for environment. That’s a pretty big factor, and I like to say in my practice, and as I’m working with kids or adults, in what society is, considering a very sexually fluid society, we do have kids who are trying on lots of different hats, as they do in development, identity development: trying to figure out “who am I?” So as they’re trying out different hats, this tends to be a hat that they may or may not try on, because it is generally more accepted in society now than it ever has been before.
However, there are those who—the hat is not a fad, and it’s something that they come back to time and time again. It’s consistent over a period of years, and you can actually see it creating a lot of desperation, despair, emotional distress, and internalized rejections of self, of who they are. And so when we’re looking at sort of the environment, we have the hats, but then we also have the variance that’s explained by hormone exposure to the developing fetus in the womb
Mr. Maddex: Interesting.
Dr. Louh: So with the influence of hormones—and specifically we’re talking about prenatal levels of the testosterone exposure and androgen exposure on the developing fetus—this is the most influential causal hypothesis of the environment when it comes to the development of same-sex attraction.
Mr. Maddex: One of the more controversial areas where the Church does not have an official position is reparative therapy. There are those who say same-sex desires can be “reprogrammed” into heterosexual desires, certainly not in every case, but at least for some. But most now view it as a dangerous and damaging method, of trying to help those who wish their attractions were normal. Dr. Roxanne Louh.
Dr. Louh: So reparative therapy: this is sort of the range of practices that claim to change somebody’s sexual orientation or their gender identity. And most of the opposition to conversion therapy at this point points to the conclusion that those practices have not traditionally been supported by any empirical evidence, and have in many cases caused undue harm. Now, what we’re seeing as a result of side effects, what’s been reported from these practices—and I’ll describe what those practices are in just a bit—we’re seeing depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, substance abuse, emotional intimacy struggles, sexual dysfunction, and actually high-risk sexual behaviors. And interestingly, the risks are even greater for youth who are going through this, with one study finding that 42% of youth who underwent conversion therapy reported a suicide attempt in that year, and this is more than twice the rate for their peers who did not go, undergo the conversion therapy. And that number increased to 57% for people who identify as transgender who were going through conversion therapy.
So what is this therapy and what does it look like? Nowadays it might be talk therapy, and very commonly used now is hypnosis, which is trying to sort of create an aversion to the same-sex attraction. But in the past, these practices used very aversive behavioral techniques—and this is not so very long ago, by the way—to decrease same-sex attraction, and it included inducing nausea and vomiting, paralysis, electric shock, snapping elastic bands around the wrist of an individual in relation to same-sex images or thoughts, and basically other forms of self-injury. And the non-aversive treatments were really focused on using educational processes around how to date, how to be assertive, “affection training” with reinforcement for the opposite-sex sexual behavior. And other attempts were really aimed to trying to change thought patterns and even reframing desires and using hypnosis with the goal of changing sexual arousal and orientation toward same-sex individuals.
But really, if you think about how many people have undergone this—research is now showing somewhere around 700,000 people have gone through conversion therapy—so the reports of what they are experiencing is a conglomeration of this very large amount of people who’ve undergone these sort of reparative therapies. And it’s estimated that around 80,000 minors over the next few years will undergo some sort of conversion therapy. I mean, really if we’re considering the fact that we’re all broken in some way—we exist in a fallen world; there are many problems we face, dispositions that we enter the world with—so as it relates to reparative therapy, what we really have to ask ourselves is: What are we, as human beings, actually trying to repair?
A review of research literature on the change efforts that you’re trying to repair conclude that, really, the ability to change sexual orientation has been unsuccessful in that enduring change is uncommon. What they have been able to do is show that there’s a lessened physiological arousal in general to sexual stimuli, but in terms of creating a change toward same-sex attraction, they’re not finding that any level of reparative therapy has been able to do that. Because of the side effects that we’re seeing and the harm that we’re seeing, there’s really a lot of opposition toward reparative therapies.
Mr. Maddex: Fr. Harry Linsinbigler would frame it less as a therapeutic remedy and more as a spiritual one.
Fr. Harry: The Church does not have this concept of a homosexual orientation or a heterosexual orientation. It has it of behavior and the thought-patterns before the behavior, but the thought-patterns meaning not entertaining your lusts, like not satisfying them, and rather entertaining good thoughts, holy thoughts, and increasing good actions and holy actions in one’s life. So that is the only place that I can see where it would be beneficial to get a person to start reprogramming their thinking—but, again, it’s not you reprogramming their thinking, it’s them with God reprogramming it. That’s what the penance is. [Laughter] It’s not the therapist or the priest or anyone else! It’s them doing it with God.
I think that that’s of utmost benefit, and again, supplementarily, some people might need a psychologist or just a counselor as a supplement to try and get them back to where they need to go, because there might be a bunch of other things involved that they need to work out, and they can help them. This is what the Church gave us, is them with God reprogramming their thoughts, just as we all should be doing, us with God, on a daily basis, in prayer and in Scripture reading and in reading the Fathers and the Lives of the saints or listening to them on a regular basis. That is the best and only workable way, and certainly the Church-recommended way and canonical recommended way to reprogram our minds, as we all need to do, as we get thoughts hammering us and temptations from all directions on a daily basis. That walk with God, that prayerful walk with God, where we talk to him and he consequently, through Scripture and the other means, talks to us. That is how we “reprogram” our minds, and we all need to do it with various inclinations toward different sins, but we all need to do it against sin in general.
Mr. Maddex: Dr. Philip Mamalakis is assistant professor of pastoral care at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.
Dr. Philip Mamalakis: The Church offers “reparative therapy” in the sense that when we convert ourselves over to Christ, when we engage in this penitential relationship—we repent—that there’s a real transformation of our minds and of our hearts. We become Christ-like; we die to the “old man,” and we are born again. And that ongoing process is reparative, but, notice, we are called to become Christ-like, and so what reparative therapy in the world does is it says, “These desires are bad, and we want to change these desires toward these other desires which are good.” And that’s a problem for a couple of reasons. Number one, because the Church says our desires are problematic. It’s not… The Church doesn’t bless lusting toward the opposite sex and condemn lusting for the same sex; the Church says lust is a passion that will really cause damage that’s a sin. The Church heals us from the power of lust. And number two, we might carry this impulse toward the same-sex or even excessive impulse toward the opposite sex; we might carry that struggle with us to the grave. What the Church provides is not “I will take this struggle away from you,” but more “when you die to the old man, these struggles will no longer control you.”
Mr. Maddex: Andrew Williams had first-hand experience with groups attempting various ways to help him “re-orient” his desires.
Dr. Williams: Nowadays it’s very popular for people to talk about reparative therapy, as if that’s a thing, a one thing, and encompasses anybody who has any kind of desire to change sexual orientation. It’s very, very unhelpful, because there’s actually a massive—or there certainly were a massive variety of organizations and groups and ministries who were trying to do this in many, many different ways. Reparative therapy is only one of them. It’s the thought of a psychologist called Joseph Nicolosi. It’s not a religious concept; it’s a psychological one, and he came up with the idea of reparative therapy, and he practiced it extensively with not great results for his whole career, I think, more or less. He himself died about four years ago.
And reparative therapy, there’s not a lot of evidence that it’s ever been very successful. But then there are all these other ministries. There were a variety of Protestant ministries, the leader of one of which actually became Roman Catholic, so I guess you could call it a Catholic ministry now. They were all focused in different ways; the only thing they shared, I think, perhaps you could say, is the idea that changes in sexual orientation were possible. They’re not necessarily… See, one of the things that the ministry I went to really focused on was: You don’t aim to change your sexual orientation. You’re not here to aim to change your sexual orientation. You’re here to orient yourself to Christ. But they also believed that that could lead, in some cases, to changes in your experience of sexual orientation.
Now, for me, that was the only place—I think you could even say the first place—I ever felt understood or accepted as a person, because here were some people finally who said, “Yes, you’re a Christian, and, yes, you’re gay, and, yes, those are both real.” And they didn’t say, “You’ve got to change this in order to be that. You can’t be both,” or any of these things. They said, “Yes, this is your actual, real situation.” And to me that was really, really helpful, and I found the whole experience of that ministry actually encouraging, and the acceptance that I found there I think was life-giving.
Mr. Maddex: In our third episode, we will address how we grapple with this as a Church. Are we willing to be welcoming to everyone, regardless of their looks and their lifestyle?
Dr. Williams: I think the key is that we are called to love the person who agrees and tries to live by the Church teaching, and we’re called to love the person who disagrees and doesn’t choose to live by the Church teaching just as much.