Abstinence-only education, purity pledge cards, virginity renewal ceremonies, tirades against same-sex marriage: U.S. culture is saturated with Christian sex talk, though we know surprisingly little about the everyday impact of such speech on the tradition's adherents. Scholars of North American Christianity have thus far not been of much help in this regard, analyzing official pronouncements and publications rather than regular hearers and readers of these ideas. Tanya Erzen's splendid ethnographic account of a group within the Christian ex-gay movement thus appears at an opportune moment, showing how some self-professed homosexual Christians have taken up and adjusted current cultural and religious dogma about sexuality. Amassing and analyzing a set of intricate testimonials that illustrate both the hopefulness and the suffering at the heart of this process, Erzen has written a smart and affecting book that one hopes will make it increasingly difficult to keep those voices closeted.
What does it mean to call oneself ex-gay? Contrary to declarations made by Christian Right figureheads, Erzen argues, the label ex-gay does not indicate a “definitive change” but rather “a conversion process that has no endpoint” (3). The person who identifies with the label “ex-gay” does not necessarily consider himself or herself “cured” of homosexual desire or occasional falls into sexual sin; rather, the term describes a repentant homosexual who has asked Jesus to enter his or her heart and has then committed to an ongoing personal relationship with him. In their expectations, Erzen tells us, “sexual conflicts … diminish as their Christian identity [is] strengthened” (55); and the script is flexible enough to encompass many of the unforeseen difficulties that continue to occur (though script and real life, of course, do not always match). Today's conservatives who attempt to use the ex-gay movement to prove that thoroughgoing transformation from a homosexual to a heterosexual identity is possible have not been paying attention to what ordinary evangelical Christians in the ex-gay movement say.
Following a standard trajectory, Erzen's book begins by providing important historical context for the ex-gay movement generally as well as the particular residential ex-gay program she studied in depth, New Hope. (As she tells us without apology, she worked as an informal volunteer in the office of the program for eighteen months, an ideal position from which to conduct her research.) Her second and third chapters focus on central themes within that ministry: religious and sexual conversion, and the forging of new types of relationship and belonging. Two subsequent chapters explore the historical and contemporary intersections between the ex-gay movement and self-help/recovery models, analyzing stories of family formation along with the meanings of gender identity, addiction, and healing. The final chapter directs attention toward the complicated political space occupied by the ex-gay movement, open to distorted appropriation (one might say exploitation) by Christian Right groups who lobby against gay marriage, yet also in conflict with parties in the broader gay rights campaign who scorn as deluded the concept of sexual conversion and who disparage the ex-gay movement more generally. Although in no way endorsing ex-gay convictions, Erzen is humane to her subjects, writing that however their stories are (mis)appropriated by outsiders, “these men and women speak back” (20).
As an ethnographer, Erzen is meticulously observant and expressive. She elegantly brings her characters to life with the precise, illuminating detail possible only for the writer willing to risk empathy with her subjects. Hostility toward this stance, of the sort faddish in dyspeptic corners of religious studies today, seems newly absurd in light of the connections Erzen forged in the course of her research and the memorable personages she depicts with warmth and literary grace. She is, as she tells her interview subjects, in no way religiously partisan, or for that matter religiously anything; through her questions but without condescension, she allows herself to bare doubts and disagreements with New Hope's model of ministry. As a student pointed out to me upon reading the book, Erzen, who was trained in American studies rather than religious studies, seems at times to believe that extreme religiosity of this sort is itself an addiction, or perhaps the spiritual methadone used to subdue whatever physical or emotional cravings one perceives as afflictive. Yet Erzen's acknowledged critical distance from evangelicalism never leads to the sort of panicky dissociative techniques increasingly evident in studies of conservative religion, whose authors wink calculatingly at scholarly readers: really I'm one of you, not one of them. Her self-possessed analytic voice fittingly abstains from such anxious avowals, providing a more exemplary model of authorial engagement and ethnographic positionality than several recent works in this genre (including otherwise commendable books by Dawne Moon and Saba Mahmood).
Stringent opponents of the Christian Right may view Erzen's disciplined refusal to attack the ex-gay movement as weakness, and some readers will wish she had come out with a less subtle strike against it for intensifying the self-hatred of gays victimized by church. But in fact, such criticisms miss the whole point of this significant book. Erzen spent enough time with ex-gay men at New Hope to comprehend what they seek and sporadically find in evangelical modes of self-change and belonging, though she does not shy away from the broken relationships and the deaths that haunt the ministry's community of men. In one tragedy, a resident died mysteriously during Erzen's time in the New Hope office, yet after the emotional memorial service his shocking death was treated, she says, with bewildering silence. Erzen admits to feeling “confused” by this response, and her attempt at analysis is uncharacteristically flat (124). She occasionally stops short at other, similar points where the reader wishes to know, in vain, what dreams and desires lie beyond the available language, those narrative scripts to which the men in New Hope have aligned their lives.
Still, Erzen's portrait of gay Christian men coping with the paradox at the core of their lives is original, insightful, and moving. Scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates alike will appreciate this important and timely book.
