Silent Gays’ primary objective is to help LGBT+ people who have suffered religious abuse.

But what actually IS religious abuse?

The most obvious that we all think of is “conversion therapy” (aka reparative therapy, Sexual Orientation Change Efforts [SOCE], ex-gay ministries, and many other deceptive names).

However, we seem to think of it as organisations set up specifically to do this, such as Exodus, Living Waters, Restored Hope Network and many others. The reality is far more insidious.

While laws are slowly coming into effect that ban or regulate these organisations, the real danger lies in the churches themselves. There is always someone in a church willing to “pray away the gay”, and that’s where things can get really destructive.

These people usually have no psychological training and invariably “trust the holy spirit” to guide them. They also often delve into “deliverance” which involves “casting out” demons. Much of the work these days is centred around the idea that we have had some sort of childhood sexual trauma, a lack of fathering or emotional bonding to the father, over attachment to their mother, and similar ideas. All of these premises have been completely debunked by all professional psychological/psychiatric organisations.

My own journey is a prime example of all this…

I didn’t enter an official conversion therapy program (Living Waters) until I was around 40. Up to that point however, I’d had years of Christian counselling and deliverance sessions.

I’d submitted to the most bizarre and dehumanising processes that involved long sessions of uncovering and repenting of hidden sins, naming every sexual encounter I’d ever had, repenting of the sins of my parents and ancestors, destroying all sorts of books, music, objects etc that had demonic attachments, allowing people to make assumptions about my spiritual, emotional and mental state, being told that I’m broken and headed for hell. The list goes on.

Each episode of these “counselling” sessions eroded and finally destroyed my entire sense of self worth.
I was a complete failure.
I couldn’t resist the lies of the devil.
I was rebellious and being defiant to God.
I didn’t have enough determination.
I hadn’t experienced the real “father heart” of God.

There was nothing of value in me except the Holy Spirit, and often this was in doubt.

I suffered from chronic depression, which I had to hide with every bit of strength I could muster. This led to anxiety and suicide ideation, coming right to the edge of taking my life on many occasions. It was a never ending cycle where I would go to some ministry, submit to it for help, find a glimmer of hope, only to lose it when nothing worked, and then dropping back into depression. All this while trying to maintain the image of a good Christian man with a family and ministry (worship leader and elder).

This is abuse – constant, degrading, life swallowing and utterly soul destroying abuse.

And I can assure you that this goes on all the time for millions of LGBT+ people all over the world.
Some walk away early enough to recover.
Some hang in there until they are utterly broken and mental health issues destroy them.
Most are silently dying in some way.

Religious abuse for LGBT+ people is a long way from over. It’s effects are life long and deep.

If you have experienced any of this, please be gentle with yourself. Get help. Find peers and friends who accept you just as you are. Get out of the toxic environment, even if it means losing friends and family – better that than living a lie that destroys us. There are so many of us who are willing to help and support you. You aren’t alone!

Check our Resource page for information and help.

Live Loved

COR is a radical and potentially life changing book for LGBT+ people who have suffered any form of religious abuse.

You can now easily select the free edition or the fully supported Workbook from our website’s Resource page.

I’ve just updated the COR books to v1.2 with three pages worth of edits and new material. In particular I’ve expanded on the “it’s a relationship, not a religion” issue.

The full Workbook has Application Exercises after each chapter as well as lifetime membership to the Facebook support group and email support.

The COR books provide succinct insights into the nature of

• LGBT+ – a complete breakdown of sexuality and gender
• Religion – what it is and the underlying psychology
• Religious abuse and Conversion Therapy
• Mental Illness
• Finding a new life free from religious dogma

(Here are Pt1, Pt2, Pt3)

So far, I’ve presented some background info around the terminology I use and some basic premises on humanity’s need for gods and religion.

Before we dig any deeper, one of the most important things we need to understand as human beings is our personal “paradigms”. This can be referred to as our “world view” (the particular way we each see life and interact with it) but that doesn’t really have the depth or significance of they way this works and how each of us end up so unique. It is also the foundation for understanding our biases.

From the moment we are aware (even in the womb) we absorb masses of information about the world. Every single event, no matter how small, is “absorbed” by us and slowly builds the “lens” we not only see everything through, but also the way we understand, react, communicate etc.

This means everything, from the first emotional senses in the womb, the smiles or frowns we get as a baby, the anger, the fear, our environment, family, economic and social status etc – every single conversation and argument, abuse and trauma, love and acceptance – absolutely every single thing we’ve ever experienced – shapes who we are at this moment, even down to the movie we watched last night, the argument we had with a loved one, the smile a child gave us an hour ago in the supermarket – EVERYTHING!

This is why we are so unique – and so isolated!

We have agreed terminology and words that work well for average daily stuff, but even then, every single word and concept we speak is completely coloured by our paradigm. So much so, that if I used the word “church” in a conversation, for example, my paradigm would be based on a life of struggling with religious abuse and all that entails, whereas the person I’m talking to might have had nothing but loving experiences that quickly create a completely different sense around the nature of our conversation.

We think we are communicating successfully, but the reality is that every word we speak to each other is underscored by a lifetime of emotional responses, stored in our subconscious, creating complex filters in our understanding.

Once we become aware of this, we can begin to observe ourselves and others in a way that brings empathy and understanding. Until we can grasp the significance of this, we can never really understand our spiritual/religious needs or the why we “believe what we believe”.

Take some time to examine some recent conversations you’ve had and what you were trying to communicate. Think about the words you used and what they mean to you. Did the other person really understand? Was there a level of emotional triggering going on for either of you? Also think about the way you feel about certain topics in the same light.

Now we start to get into a rather tricky area!

In part 1 and part 2 I laid a bit of a foundation around my purpose and terminology.

Having looked at how religion is the beliefs we apply in our attempts to grapple with our sense of spirituality, it quickly becomes apparent that humans love to assign anything like this to some sort of god. Christianity is just one very successful attempt to address spirituality, but there are literally countless others throughout human history.

Another reason we like gods is that they can be used as an authoritative source of ethics and morality, providing any culture/tribe with an unquestionable value standard that can be used to hold together the structures of their society.

There is also the need to provide meaning and answers to phenomena we don’t understand – natural events, the weather, the movement of the stars etc. Anything we lack empirical knowledge on can be ascribed to a God. Of course, we see this reason being slowly eaten away as “science” provides more and more answers to these things, but it’s still valid as science is a long way from finding the “answer to life the universe and everything”.

These needs (and other smaller considerations) can be combined very successfully into the characteristics of a deity – a being or beings infinitely more powerful/knowledgeable than us who control everything (to greater or lesser degrees). It provides an emotional and cultural focal point or reference that can be used to explain all aspects of life. Plus, using a deity creates a sense of security and stability when we realise how fickle we, and our world, can be.

Religion, when viewed in this simplistic way, has proven to be very valuable to humanity. In fact, it could be considered an evolutionary tactic in helping preserve the species. This is a very cold and analytical approach of course, but we’ll look at other aspects later.

So why do YOU need a God? What does your God look like? I ask because when we really peel away the layers of jargon and cliches, wrapped in biblical (or other religion’s) semantics, there is a way our hearts and minds perceive God that is unique to each of us, no matter what our particular doctrines define. Under all this is the simplicity of which of these basic needs are being met.

The next part will be about “paradigms”, sometimes called world views, lenses, filters, biases etc.

In my introduction I asked the question “Why do we believe the things that we believe?”.

To truly get some perspective on this, we have to do some groundwork on spirituality and religion, especially in terms of semantics. We have to know what we are talking about otherwise we may not understand each other!

It’s all very ambiguous and everyone has different paradigms (world views) that colour the description, meaning and emotional background of these terms.

As we look at this unraveling process I’ll be working on the assumption that “spirituality” is the innate sense of awe, wonder, mystery, purpose and meaning of life and the universe that we all have.

The term “religion” will be used to describe any system that attempts to define spirituality into a system of beliefs that we can apply to our lives in some meaningful way.

One saying I’ve heard so often is “I’m spiritual but not religious”. I totally get what people mean by this, but it is rather ambiguous when we consider my description above.

For the sake of clarity then, we can’t BE spiritual, in the sense that it’s a belief system. We experience “spirituality” however when we look at the stars, for example, and feel that deep sense of wonder and amazement inside us. This can often trigger a range of emotions from feeling exhilarated and inspired to feeling insignificant and lost, and anything in between!

The moment we ascribe an explanation to those feelings, we enter the realm of “religion”. The most obvious is ascribing some sort of all powerful being as the source of what we experience. But it can be any form of belief from universal consciousness, karma, paganism, new age teachings, chakras and energy etc – anything really, that tries to capture and provide meaning to these deep and powerful feelings.

I realise that this may be difficult for some people, but as I work through this complex topic, you’ll see why I approach it in this way.

As a result then, we have to break “religion” down into many subsets and look at their benefits and short-comings – how well  they serve humanity and how much objective criteria they meet in any practical sense. Mind you, objectivity (as in being able to apply scientific methodology) in anything to do with spirituality is exceedingly difficult. We can, however, look at what we currently know objectively with things like quantum physics and apply it to a certain degree, but it’s still a long way off providing the level of objectivity demanded by the discerning atheist!

So before I move on, take the time to think about your own beliefs in the context of my definitions. Try thinking in terms of how well they “work” in addressing our innate spirituality. This isn’t to undermine any beliefs and faith we have as such. It’s to provide a framework for us to examine “why we believe what we believe”.