Amazing Love: Determined and chosen

In the fourth in a series of blogs Andrew Davison continues to explore sexuality in the context of being human …

For many people thinking ethically about homosexuality, it matters whether sexual attraction is hard-wired. The facts on that score do not settle anything – we still need to think about how those sorts of observations play out in ethical thinking – but we can hardly ignore them: not responsibly anyway. Two issues seem to be particularly at stake: whether or not someone’s sexuality can change, and to what extent someone’s sexuality is a choice.

Those questions relate to the evidence for genetic factors, but more is involved than that. Genetic factors aren’t the only reason why someone might have a disposition that can’t be changed. Any number of influences may result in something that is hard to change about who we are, and that may indeed be unchangeable. Those influences include the particular environment of the mother’s womb and all sorts of things that come our way later on.

However, whatever the causes, we know that for the vast majority of people who are attracted to people of the same sex, that attraction cannot be changed: not by them, and not by anyone else. We know this, not least, because of a terrible legacy of experiments on gay men in the twentieth century. For decades, especially after World War II, all sorts of techniques were tried, including chemical castration, and horrific aversion techniques involving electric shocks and nausea- inducing drugs. Many methods were tried, but they didn’t change their ‘patient’s’ sexual orientation. If we want to see why there is such sympathy towards gay people today, we need look no further than this. The most famous example of treating someone this way is the code-breaking mathematical hero of the Second World War, Alan Turing (1912-1954). It is widely regarded as having pushed him to suicide, although not before he had played his role in shaping the outcome of the War.

None of these terrible interventions – attempting to be a ‘cure’ – make sense outside of a scheme in which homosexuality is seen as an illness. For decades, in an era when that assumption prevailed, these experiments produced no evidence of ‘successful’ treatment, and often left people deeply damaged. Happily, in Western society today, gay, lesbian, and bisexual people no longer live in fear of medical experimentation of this sort, and homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organization list of mental disorders in 1990.

Today, indeed, even the use of counselling techniques in an attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation is widely discredited, and receives no support from the relevant professional bodies. Those few individuals who still support such interventions only report ‘success’ in a small minority of cases. Meanwhile, these ‘treatments’ continue to cause harm, and the climate of non-acceptance to which they belong has done great damage.

Some conservative religious groups continue to hold the view that unwanted same-sex attraction can be changed through ‘conversion therapy’ (and that such attraction should be unwanted): through prayer and various forms of counselling. However, even that conviction is changing. One of the most prominent ‘ex-gay’ Christian organizations, Exodus International, demonstrated significant courage and humility in publicly renouncing this position, and they apologised for the hurt it had caused. Their experience was that attempts to change people’s sexual orientation very often simply did not produce the outcome they wanted, and that these attempts were frequently harmful.

This brings us back to the question of choice. The evidence from psychology and the biological sciences is that someone’s sexual attraction – his or her orientation – is in-built, not chosen (and, as we saw, that it can rarely be changed). All the same, an unchosen disposition does not prevent us from choosing in another sense: however strongly influenced we are by our predispositions, or by other factors, we all have a choice about how to act. Powerful feelings of attraction may be inevitable, but how they translate into behaviour remains a matter of choice. Strong biological influences do not remove the moral responsibility of the individual. Nor, on the other hand, can we simply dismiss what we know about the human constitution, as if that were irrelevant to our ethical thinking, nor ignore the ways in which sexual desire, and possibilities for committed sexual relationships, exist for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.

Amazing Love is about some ethical questions, and an important part of ethics is to guide us in this realm of choice. The heterosexual Christian starts off from a particular position. She is a sexual being, and that’s an important part of who she is: of who God has made her to be. This touches on all sorts of aspects of her life. As part of that she has certain hopes and desires: for companionship, for intimacy, for support, for a relationship where she learns to live beyond her own sometimes selfish ego, for nurturing children, for belonging to a family unit that contributes to the wider community. She might, perhaps, discern a vocation to celibacy, but most likely not: that sense of calling seems only to apply to a small minority of people. Most likely, she thinks that those hopes and desires will be fulfilled in a sexual relationship. Being a Christian, she wants her choices to be informed by what the Christian tradition says about these matters: about companionship, intimacy, support, overcoming selfishness, forming a family and being active in the community, and so on. She wants to find someone to whom she can make a life- long commitment, before God and the Church.

The homosexual Christian finds herself in the same position. Her sexuality, too, touches upon the whole of her life; she too has certain hopes and desires. The findings of contemporary biology and psychology show us that the attractions she feels are part of who she is, as they would be for her heterosexual sister, and that the hopes and desires that belong alongside it are also the same: they are for companionship, intimacy and support, for a relationship where she learns to live beyond her ego, forming a family, and being active in the community. The homosexual Christian might discern a vocation to celibacy, but if it is a true vocation it will be one that makes sense of who she is – and not a matter of running away from it – and we have no reason in advance to suppose that the gay Christian will be able to say that celibacy is what she was made for, any more than the average straight Christian will say that. She has choices to make. Just as with her straight sister, they are genuine choices. She is not compelled by her sexuality. But again, just as with a heterosexual Christian, those choices are made in relation to who she is and what her hopes and desires might reasonably be. Most likely, she wants to find someone to whom she can make a life- long commitment, before God and the Church.

This is an extract from Amazing Love: Theology for Understanding Discipleship, Sexuality and Mission edited by Andrew Davison, available now in paperback for £8.99.