A Letter on the Christian Response to Homosexuality

Dear Sister in Christ, 

Thanks for reaching out to me with your question about how to deal with the recent revelation that your beloved niece has chosen a lesbian lifestyle. I appreciate your honesty, and your desire to show love in the midst of the difficulty of wading through your family’s responses. I know that many of your family will pull away and say that your niece is “dead to them.” Many Christians think that this is a way to protect from sin and error, but this is not what we are called to do as a family, even if, eventually and through good process of accountability (Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5), one is eventually excluded from the communion of the Church for their own protection (1 Cor 11:30). While natural, I don’t think that pulling away in reaction and fear is the appropriate response. I agree with you that the relationship with your niece needs to be defined through a positive relationship with Jesus Christ, defined by a turning to one another in selfless love and in promoting one another to mutual repentance and faith towards God. It might not be successful in reorienting your loved one’s life choices, but it is the response that allows you to live as a Christian, pick up your Cross and follow Christ. 

Homosexuality is normally caused by trauma and broken relationships in the family. Sometimes it is caused by same-sex abuse or molestation, but this seems to be the minority of cases. Male homosexuality can be the result of older male predation on adolescent boys, and the younger male’s sexual arousal circuit being conditioned through associations with domination, submission and a self-loathing body image building up to a sexual release. Recent research shows that this occurs only in a small proportion of cases. Most male homosexuality occurs in much less dramatic settings. Lesbianism is far more likely to be a response to molestation from older males, which associates heterosexuality with fear, guilt and pain, than it is from female-on-female abuse. A daughter’s emotional conflict with her mother also may play a huge part in the psychosexual process of individuation during the childhood and pubescent years, leading to mutual alienation, habits of substitutionary co-dependency, and the need for an intense, heavily in-focused relationship with another woman. 

These relationships are normally typified by the conflation of sexual and emotional needs and extreme co-dependence, which is often unhealthy and exhausting for those involved. In both male and female instances, the homosexual practice becomes so central to social and emotional context that individuals cannot imagine redefining their relationships, and they often stay in abusive relationships in order to prove the rightness of the orientation itself, leading to confusion, depression, and general dysfunction. Homosexuals are less happy than the general population, struggle more with alcohol and substance abuse, and are more prone to domestic violence. Their dissatisfaction with life and feeling of helplessness and rejection may be one of the reasons why they have been so focused, as a group, on increasing social acceptance of homosexuality, because it is imagined that all of these negative psychological problems are a result of social discrimination and exclusion from the public forum. While certainly not the root of their general unhappiness, the overreaction and animosity that they experience IS one of the sources of personal pain, and highlights one of the underlying causes of homosexuality -  a lack of intimacy leading to alienation and self-hatred. 

All children have an intense desire for intimacy and approval from their same-sex parent, and when a child goes through puberty with an unmet need for closeness and approval from their parents, this often gets mixed up with their desire for sexual intimacy and makes the child look to their own gender for sexual fulfillment. This is how a biologically impossible and self-detrimental attraction becomes someone’s sexual orientation. Boys, especially, have to model their masculinity upon a positive father figure, who both challenges and encourages masculinity to "rise to the occasion." In the absence of positive male role-models, an organic and self-appropriated sense of male identity seems harder to form, and leads to a sense of both admiration and hatred that can lead some men to feel that they both don't measure up, and also that they wish to conquer the masculinity that was denied to them, leading to a fixation that can easily be played out as male-pattern homosexuality. With the proliferation of single-parent homes and the general absence of fathers in positive roles of child rearing in the West, homosexuality is the normal response to the unmet need of father-son emotional intimacy that leads boys to naturally assume a heterosexual role in society. 

Christian counseling for homosexuality would entail an ongoing study, not just of the Bible’s laws against homosexual behavior, but of the family breakdown that caused the homosexual attraction to manifest in the beginning. Re-associations could be made by asking the counselee to work through their life story, analyze why certain feelings and emotions arose, and work towards understanding what emotional needs are being confused with sexual needs. Recontextualization of feelings and associations, for the establishment of a new set of identity and arousal patterns, may take a lifetime to achieve, and many people find that they are not able to completely eradicate same-sex attraction. This is normal and allowable, and one of the reasons why the monastic pathway is available to the Church, so that celibacy can occur in a positive, spiritually-accountable and enriching context. The Christian approach always should focus on our identity in Christ, and why our sexual practices do not constitute our total identity as people, but are rather to be seen as accessories to our salvation. Whenever sex blocks our pathway to God, we set it aside and focus on Him above all else. One can be same-sex attracted without making this a whole identity, and without playing out sexual feelings through immoral and biologically self-defeating behavior, and this is why it is so important to put sex in its proper place, as an outworking of the personality and not as the foundation of personal identity.  

In conservative families, the revelation that someone “is gay” is devastating and can cause huge emotional pain. It often reveals the emotional dysfunction that initially caused the homosexuality to manifest. Remember, this is a cry for intimacy and a statement that the child did not feel fully accepted or affirmed by their same-sex parent growing up. By rejecting the child, you are doing more of the same, often expected and even masochistically desired, process of rejection, which promotes more self-rejection, fear and self-loathing on the part of the child. Homosexuals are more than 80 times more likely to be clinically depressed, and over 30 times more likely to commit suicide. Homosexuals are not depressed and anxious because of their sexuality, although some are definitely struggling with poor life choices, but the depression and anxiety of self-rejection and a lack of true intimacy creates homosexual orientations. 

I would recommend that, instead of reacting and rejecting, that your family band together, re-affirm this child’s worth in God’s eyes, tell her that she is valuable and loved, and repent of anything you’ve done to hurt her in the past. Then, based on this love and concern, share with her why lesbianism is not a positive option and why you would seek positive counseling for her. She has probably already embraced the world’s definition of sexuality as the core of personal identity and doesn’t have a vibrant faith, but if she does have faith, this could be a very good basis through which to work her through the issue. All people are sinners, and all people are broken, in need of the therapeutic work of the Holy Spirit to overcome areas of habitual sin and failure. Homosexuality is no different than any other sin. If she has rejected God because of bad relationships in the family, all you can do is show God’s love to her through your kindness and compassion. It does not help to reject and alienate, trying to “teach them a lesson” through withholding intimacy. It is the withheld intimacy that is at the root of this vicious cycle of negative self-image and substitute relationships to begin with. 

In Christ, Our Lord,

Bp. Joseph Boyd

(Ancient Church of the West)