When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy last month, I immediately thought of Alana Chen, a twenty-four-year-old Catholic woman who died by suicide in 2019 after counseling from priests and other Catholic leaders about her homosexuality. I had worked with Alana’s mom, Joyce Calvo, to publish her essay pleading with Church leaders to protect LGBTQ Catholics from the dangerous practice of conversion therapy.
Chen’s story, also told in an eight-episode podcast called Dear Alana, is heartbreaking, and her death wasn’t inevitable. A quiet, sensitive teenager who excelled in school and loved ultimate frisbee and fashion, she dreamed of becoming a nun and began attending daily Mass. When Chen confessed to her spiritual director that she was attracted to girls, the priest told her to keep it a secret from her parents and directed her to therapists and programs that promised to change her same-sex attraction.
It didn’t work. Instead, Chen became overcome with deep shame and fear of going to hell and began to self-harm, cutting the word “defiled” in her upper arm. Her parents found reputable, in-patient therapy for her, but it was not enough. “I cry out to God every day, not only for the loss of Alana, but for the destruction that conversion therapy causes to the most sacred of relationships: the relationship between a child and their parents, between a child and God, and between a child and herself,” Calvo wrote in an amicus brief from parents of conversion-therapy participants in the Supreme Court case.
Now Alana’s home state, which had passed a law to protect young people from conversion therapy, must rethink the legislation, after the high court ruled that the ban represented an “egregious assault” on free speech and the First Amendment. In the 8-1 ruling in Chiles v. Salazar, the justices returned the law to the lower courts for “strict scrutiny.” The decision is expected to affect more than twenty other states with similar laws barring conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy refers to any practice that attempts to change an LGBTQ person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. That has included aversion techniques, such as electrocution while being shown images of people of the same gender, “exorcisms,” verbal abuse or humiliation, and even physical violence. Now sometimes rebranded as “reparative therapy” or “reintegrative therapy,” even the talk-therapy version has been discredited by most medical societies and mental-health organizations—not only because it doesn’t “work,” but because it can cause long-term psychological harm, including significantly increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide.
Conversion therapy is often sought by people whose religious faith disapproves of same-sex relations, and it has been especially popular in Evangelical circles. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court Case, Kaley Chiles, is a Christian who did her counseling training at the Evangelical Denver Seminary. The Evangelical umbrella group Exodus International once included more than 250 ministries in the United States and Canada, but shuttered in 2013 after its then-president renounced conversion therapy. Other prominent Evangelical “ex-gays” have gone public to say they are still gay, including one of Exodus’s cofounders. Some conversion-therapy counselors have sexually abused clients.
Although often seen as an Evangelical practice, conversion therapy is actually fairly common in Catholic circles, according to Chris Damian, a Catholic attorney and writer who explores LGBTQ issues on his social-media channels. His hourlong video on the history of conversion therapy in the Catholic Church traces its origins to Freudian psychoanalysis and exposes what he calls its “empty promises.” Damian says the ideology behind conversion therapy—that homosexuality is the result of earlier “wounding” from parental behaviors and trauma and thus can be “healed” through spiritual practices—permeates Catholic spaces, including seminaries and college student centers, and is often promoted unwittingly by Church leaders and in the confessional.
“Conversion therapists do have an outsized influence in the Catholic Church, including in the formation of priests and other leaders in the Church,” Damian told me. “It’s very prevalent and widespread.” Often, men and women who feel called to priesthood or religious life believe they must be “cured” of their homosexuality before pursuing their vocations. Damian cites Dr. Bob Schuchts, founder of the John Paul II Healing Center in Tallahassee, Florida, and Timothy Lock, director of psychological services at St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie) in Yonkers, New York, as two Catholic counselors who advance the “wounding” ideology of conversion therapy.
Other Catholic leaders were early proponents of orientation-change theories. Fr. John Harvey, the founder of Courage, a Catholic apostolate for “men and women who experience same-sex attraction,” coauthored a pamphlet in 1999 that urged therapy to prevent and treat homosexuality. Harvey, who died in 2010, was a supporter of Elizabeth Moberley, an early Christian theorist who believed homosexuality was a result of woundedness that could be healed and changed, and of the late Joseph Nicolosi, a Catholic who promoted what he called “reparative therapy” for male homosexuality at his Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Southern California and through regular appearances on EWTN. Nicolosi also founded the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in 1992. Joseph’s son, Joseph Jr., renamed NARTH as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity and today promotes what he called “reintegrative therapy,” which he claims is distinct from conversion therapy. Courage International, as an organization, no longer officially promotes conversion therapy.
Damian says he has never experienced conversion therapy but has spoken with many Catholics who have. Although some LGBTQ people grow in self-knowledge through counseling that may include conversion therapy, overall it is not helpful and can be dangerous, he said. Conversion therapists tend to overstate their claims and blame clients for not trying hard enough if they are not successful in “converting” to heterosexuality, only compounding the LGBTQ person’s shame and self-hatred. In addition, by focusing on the early parent-child relationship, conversion therapy can strain or irreparably damage family relationships. Those who claim success with heterosexual marriages often suffer from infidelity, divorce, and ongoing issues in their sexual life, Damian said. It also can damage the person’s spiritual life. “There is so much desperation and fear that they need this to be a good Christian,” he said.
That the Church supports something as dangerous as conversion therapy actually weakens the Church, Damian said. Many religious groups who opposed the ban saw it as “pro-trans,” in part because it seemed to make an exception for therapists helping a client through a gender transition. Much of the discussion around the case also framed it as a religious-liberty issue. The amicus brief submitted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Colorado Catholic Conference, and the Catholic University of America said they had not found “that either Catholic teaching or the available evidence allows it to draw a firm conclusion as to whether ‘a homosexual inclination can be changed with the help of some kind of therapeutic intervention.’”
Dr. Julia Sadusky, a Catholic psychologist in Colorado whose specialty is sexuality and gender identity, said she had no problem practicing under the ban, even though she and most of her clients are conservative Christians. She joined other faith-based mental-health professionals in an amicus brief in support of the legislation, arguing that conversion therapy is frequently harmful and ineffective, and that the law allows “value-congruent” treatment methods and does not prohibit expressing views about conversion therapy.
Sadusky said she was compelled by her Catholic faith to speak the truth about conversion therapy. “What’s true is that conversion therapy doesn’t help; it hurts. It’s ineffective. People are no longer alive because of the ripple effect of conversion therapy,” she said during a video podcast organized by Damian after the high court’s decision. “I believe that Jesus is indignant about a lot of this mess we’re in right now and not happy with where Catholics have taken this conversation.”
Simon Fung, the Catholic producer of the Dear Alana podcast and a conversion-therapy survivor himself, consulted with the Colorado attorney general’s office on the case. In the aftermath of the decision, he said there is a need to get more accurate information about conversion therapy to religious people. “The people most vulnerable to these practices are religious kids and well-intentioned families with parents trying to do good by God and their child,” Fung said on the video podcast. He wants those families to know that “there are other options besides conversion therapy—or whatever it’s going to be called tomorrow—to stay in your faith and your beliefs.”
Sadly, the Supreme Court’s decision seems to give a green light to this discredited and dangerous practice. We need to spread the word, especially in Catholic circles, that this is not a religious-liberty issue or a matter of therapists “turning kids trans.” It’s wrong for Catholic bishops and organizations to be supporting something so psychologically unhealthy and spiritually hazardous—and, in the case of Alana and so many others, so deadly.
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