Brett McCraken of The Gospel Coalition helps us think through a new film questioning the Bible’s position on gay identity
Boy Erased is a well-acted and moving film based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir of the same name, due to be released in the UK on 8 February.
It charts the journey of the son of a Baptist pastor as he attends a traumatising gay ‘conversion therapy’ programme. It uses unethical practices. the kind that spring to mind when one hears criticism of the suggestion that therapy can help people who are gay ‘move away’ from their lifestyle.
The ultimatum
One of the saddest scenes finds protagonist Jared (Lucas Hedges) confronting his father (Russell Crowe) about their strained relationship. ‘There’s no changing me,’ Jared tells his father. ‘You are going to have to be the one who changes.’ For Jared, there can be no meaningful father-son relationship so long as his dad thinks a gay lifestyle is sinful. ‘I’m gay, and I’m your son,’ he says. ‘And both of those things are not going to change.’
The father’s fidelity to Scripture’s witness on sexuality, however, is the only variable that can be changed, Jared implies. Change your view, or lose your son. This is the ultimatum implied to anyone in the audience with LGBTQ loved ones. It’s black or white. Lose your old-fashioned religious view of sexuality, or lose us. It’s your choice.
This is one of many simplistic binaries in Boy Erased, that traffics in the ‘no shades of grey’ neo-fundamentalism of contemporary progressivism.
Valid critique
The film is ostensibly an advocacy piece presenting conversion therapy as unnecessary, ineffective and dangerous malpractice that threatens the safety of LGBTQ youth. Panned by almost every mental and psychiatric health organisation, banned in many countries, and increasingly critiqued by evangelical institutions, gay conversion therapy appears to be a phenomenon on the wane.
When Jared comes out to his father (Crowe) and mother (Nicole Kidman) in the film, they ask: ‘In your heart, do you want to change?’ Jared, then 19, replies: ‘Yes.’ And he really does seem to desire change. But by the film’s end, having survived the horrors of a Memphis conversion therapy programme called Love in Action, but without having his attraction to other men altered, Jared concludes that he cannot be changed. He embraces what he views as the only alternative: wholly embracing a gay identity.
Tragically, the nature of ‘change’ Jared is offered at Love in Action is not the change found in the New Testament, where ‘new creation’ growth is the by-product of our union with Christ in the context of a community of discipleship. At Love in Action, a supposedly ‘Christian’ organisation, the desired change seems less about becoming like Christ than about becoming less gay and more manly.
Though the programme’s leader seems well-intentioned, his tactics are brutal and wrongheaded. In one scene a boy is literally beaten with Bibles while he hunches over a coffin in a fake funeral for himself. Horrifying stuff. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse, spiritual abuse, and trauma that contributes (in at least one case) to a boy’s suicide. Boy Erased is right to critique these approaches to conversion therapy.
Is change impossible?
The problem is that the film’s binary posture makes no room for any approach to sexual desire that involves change in any form. The film reflects our progressive secular culture’s oddly rigid view of sexuality as something fixed and immutable, even as this same culture insists on total gender fluidity. So one’s gender can be changed, but not one’s sexual desires?
Imagine being told that your unwanted desires to drink or gamble or envy are ‘just who you are’ and that changing your desires is impossible. To suggest an unchangeable given-ness to the matrix of desires that constitutes a supposedly fixed ‘identity’ is a truly novel and unbiblical anthropology. It is a notion fundamentally at odds with a faith defined by resurrection and renewal, where to be in Christ is to be a ‘new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5.17).
By targeting Love in Action-style conversion therapy (‘pray the gay away’), Boy Erased finds an easy target to justify its position that attempting to change sexual desire does more harm than good. But the film is wrong to suggest that conversion therapy is the main or only way Christians approach discipling of LGBTQ persons. Thousands of churches around the world are walking with men and women who are same-sex-attracted (SSA), working out the complexities of what discipleship and sanctification looks like for them, without asking or expecting their disordered desires to suddenly disappear. The main concern in discipling Christians who feel tension between their sexual feelings and their faith is not sexual orientation but spiritual orientation. The latter is the root issue, affecting all of our desires and behaviour, sexual or otherwise. Indeed, the most important ‘conversion’ in the Christian life involves a changed heart posture toward God.
Truly erased
Garrard Conley’s story is his story, and Boy Erased does it justice. It’s a story Christians should reckon with, listen to and learn from. But Rosaria Butterfield’s story1 also exists, as does Jackie Hill Perry’s2, Christopher Yuan’s 3 and Sam Allberry’s, and countless others who have chosen faithfulness to Scripture and identity in Christ over faithfulness to identity in sexuality. Where are the movies about these stories? Would progressives be willing to reckon with, listen to and learn from these stories?
If anyone is truly being ‘erased’ today, it is those who fall in the category of pursuing Christian faithfulness despite SSA; those who have chosen the costly path of celibacy or the complex pursuit of heterosexual marriage; those who have embraced the cost of disciple-ship in choosing Jesus over sexual fulfillment. We need more stories like these, showing how Jesus followers can pursue Christian faithfulness even while living with the challenges and complexities of sexual desires.
Every Christian will at some point feel tension between faith and sexual desires, and films like this suggest that there is no way to manage such a tension unless one’s beliefs are adjusted to accommodate one’s sexual desires.
True liberation
One of the saddest things about Boy Erased is that Jared is sent away from his church in his time of need. He’s sent to a ‘specialist’ parachurch programme to work on his temptations in a context far from his local church family. But church members tempted by greed or pornography or heterosexual lust are not sent away to specialist camps to be ‘fixed.’ Why is Jared? Same-sex-attracted Christians should be discipled within the church family, along with everyone else. Their cost of discipleship may look higher than others but, as Sam Allberry has pointed out, the cost is high for everyone.
Sam writes: ‘Jesus said: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8.34). The key word is “anyone”. To follow Jesus, all of us will have to say a deep and profound no to some of our deepest intuitions and longings. Jesus doesn’t put “self” in front of “identity”; he puts it in front of “denial.” This call needs to be spelled out. Jesus goes on to say there is a sense of “losing our life” in following him, that there will be times when it feels as if obedience to him is taking life from us. And yet the glorious paradox is that by going through this loss we are actually gaining life. By denying self and following Jesus we don’t become less, we become most truly ourselves.’4
In the upside-down kingdom of God this is what true liberation looks like. It is the freedom to follow Christ rather than our fickle hearts; the freedom of being caught up in God’s story rather than our own; the freedom of not being slaves to our desires.
Contrary to the tragic reductionism of Boy Erased, there are many paths of faithfulness and flourishing for the Christian with SSA. There are certainly paths of unfaithfulness: sanctifying one’s desires rather than submitting them to God; shrugging off Scripture’s authority when it feels confining. But many are walking the faithful paths daily. They are in your church. They are in your family. Their testimonies need to be heard. They need your love and accountability on their journey, just as you need theirs.
This is an edited version of an article on the Gospel Coalition website, the full article can be read here: www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/boy-erased-sexual-desire-cant-change-religion-must/
