Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth
Jeffrey Satinover

Part 2. Straight Mores

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

— St. Paul

8. Wired to Be Free?

As we enter part two, the tenor of our discussion changes dramatically. For here we will look at choice and free will as they relate to homosexuality — and to other behavior as well. When speaking of choice and free will by necessity we enter into the domain of moral choice — not only for ourselves but for our society. As we will see, science — with its rigorous need to restrict itself to data, logic, mathematical precision, and probabilistic conclusions — can say nothing about morality. For morals have to do with how things should be, whereas science can at best only tell us how things are.

Furthermore, once we begin to consider how things should be, we find ourselves in the domain of religion. Notwithstanding the fuzzy modern impression that morality can be contrived apart from transcendent absolutes, religion is the originator of all morality. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov had his most reflective character observe, “Without God, all things are permissible.”

Thus as we move forward in our discussion we will also in a sense move back. The language and concepts we will be using in the second part may sound — by contrast to the first part — ancient; to some readers archaic. One goal is to retrieve certain older understandings that have largely been lost to the illusory conviction that scientific advance is the same as moral progress; another, secondary, goal is to demonstrate that some of these “archaic” sources are keen in their understandings about human nature.

Cultural Rebirth or “The Great Death”?

The modern scientific framework has slowly emerged in the West over the six or seven centuries since the beginning of the Renaissance, which means rebirth. This era is so-called because it was characterized by a rebirth of classicism — and because of the long-standing consensus that the preceding ages were “dark.”

But here “classicism” to a great extent means paganism. In fact, art historians have long focused on the reemergence of pagan motifs in the art of the Renaissance,[142] just as philosophers have studied the appearance of Neoplatonic philosophy at the same time. But few seem to reflect on how reintroducing a pagan outlook on life into the West might have caused negative long-term effects on morality — on the standards by which we live.

We should remember that until monotheistic Judaism emerged in the ancient Near East, all the world was pagan; people were subject to the determining influences of a multiplicity of gods. No single universal standard of morality was presumed to exist nor generally sought. Individuals were instead driven to worship that which they most craved. Not surprisingly, pagan worship was directed largely toward power, aggression, and sexual pleasure.

The Renaissance could have just as easily been called “The Great Death,” for it marked the beginning of a massive dying-off of the cultural synthesis first based on Judaism and subsequently on the Christian faith. In the previous two and a half millennia this Judeo-Christian synthesis had largely conquered paganism and thus dominated much of the civilized world.

Among the human accomplishments that emerged from the Renaissance transformation of human thought, science — and the technology that derives from it — is certainly one of the most powerful to which we are heir. And modern scientific psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry remain in keeping not only with the Renaissance spirit itself but with what amounts to the deification of that spirit at the time of the Enlightenment. Thus the primary goal of these disciplines as sciences has been to understand human subjectivity, motivation, choice, and behavior in terms of prior causes — including those areas that touch on morals, meaning, purpose, and value.

Free to Choose?

In the domain of psychology or psychoanalysis, this search for causes inevitably involves reductionism — as in the various hypothetical causes of homosexuality that we have been discussing. Scientists claim that what appears to be a freely acting or choosing agent — man — is actually a passive entity driven by prior, more elementary influences, such as psychological complexes, structures of the psyche, family influences, earlier experiences, social trends, and molecular biology, that is, genes. In the domain of biological psychiatry, this same reduction occurs at ever finer levels of purely physical detail. The primary cause of all things human may be found, it is said, at the organic foundations of the brain and in the genes that form the brain’s blueprint.

From within this truly analytic framework (“analysis” consisting of the lysis or breaking down of a whole into its constituent parts), all areas of seeming autonomy within human experience are illusory. They are seen as the residue of our ignorance of the true influences that lie beneath our experience and cause our behavior, which only for the time being remain obscure to us.

Unwittingly, the scientific study of man thus aims ultimately at his abolition[143] as man — as free agent — and his reconstruction as biomolecular machine. In this view, the mystery of being human is nothing more than sheer complexity.

The psychotherapist who is heir to a scientific psychology is apt to object to this characterization. He would admit that he explains his patients’ behavior in terms of the conflict among various forces at work in their psyches. But he would also insist that whatever “mechanisms” may be invisibly at work guiding a man in one direction or the other, there is always a free “sector” of the mind or the personality that is not subject to such influence.

But on closer examination this notion of free — indeed creatively free — choice that remains somewhere outside the scope of analytic reduction is merely a comforting illusion, at least from the point of view of rigorous science. What actually occurs is that at some point we merely stop the process of analyzing our behavior and decide to examine what remains no further. From a therapeutic perspective this makes practical sense: The surgeon cuts away the diseased tissue and allows the healthy tissue to remain, better functioning after the operation than before.

But the analogy quickly breaks down, for the “surgery” of self-knowledge does not consist in physically eliminating a section of the psyche. Rather we “see through” our behaviors and motivations and dissolve them into their origins — in which state we readily no longer take them seriously. Once we believe we have mechanically explained the parts of our selves we have trouble with — say, our homosexuality or our workaholism — we tend to explain everything else similarly — for example, our moral choices.

The scientific method applied to people thus sets the explanatory ball rolling in one inevitable direction, and it cannot be easily stopped. If our choices prior to scientific analysis and explanation were thought to be free, but actually resulted from family influences or unconscious conflict or biochemistry or genetics or mass opinion, then why should our current choices be anything more than the result of yet other still-invisible influences? And thus why should we be held responsible for them?

Put in statistical language, as the number of studies of any aspect of human behavior increases, ever stronger correlations will be found with an increasing number of factors external to “free will.” The behavior, sexual or other, that remains unaccounted for by known factors will thus shrink to an ever smaller proportion, leaving less and less attributable to choice.

As more and more factors account for various behaviors, the plausible suggestion will inevitably arise that with sufficient effort and advances in technique, all remaining behaviors will be accounted for with nothing left to choice. This is the end point implied by such broad statements as “Studies Find Homosexuality Genetic,” or as Time put it, “Born Gay.” And even if this theoretical end point is never achieved, what is left unexplained is apt to be so small that it can be easily dismissed. The analytic, scientific method in its very essence is reductive without limit. Applied to man, it is the universal solvent.

The alchemists, who first conceived such a thing, of course never found it, and were fortunate not to. For they never considered what would happen if ever they laid hands on it: Nothing could contain it; it would eat its way through everything, devouring even its creators. The scientific study of man thus often inspires not just resistance but dread and even revulsion, for its end point is appalling: the destruction of the very idea that there is choice, meaning, and purpose in human existence. From the scientific perspective, “meaning” and “purpose,”[144] like “free will,” cannot but be illusions of human subjectivity that are ultimately reducible to other, prior causes. This not only wounds man’s pride but demonstrates that the object of his deepest longings is utterly illusory, and therefore that his longings are utterly unfulfillable.

And yet, the example of homosexuality has one stunning feature that sets it apart from much of this discussion: Most of the gay activists in the United States do not want to find any freedom and choice involved in their way of life, and they are fiercely determined to prove that there is no way out of it either. Thus the debate is lined up in the reverse way of most debates over the medical bases of human behavior. People usually resist the idea that their behavior is driven by unchangeable, biological factors, as in feminist arguments over innate differences between men and women, or in the firestorm over the genetics of IQ and a potential correlation to racial groupings.[145] But in the case of homosexuality, many people rush to embrace scientific research, however flimsy, that seems to reduce this particular behavior not only to prior causes, but even to the end point that no choice is involved at all.

We should see the fallacy in the claim that homosexuality is not immoral because it is (supposedly) genetic. The claim that “homosexuality is genetic” is certainly false as a scientific statement, as we have seen. But whether it is true or false is also irrelevant. Science cannot distinguish between moral and immoral behaviors on the basis of the predetermination of these conditions, because from the scientific point of view all behaviors are treated as though predetermined. If they are not predetermined by our genes then they are predetermined by our families, and if not by our families then by our education, and if not by our education then by some other factor, and so on.

In truth, from a scientific perspective, there is never a place for freely acting agents because complete reductionism is the very premise on which science proceeds. At most, a given analysis only leaves us with remaining areas for which we have not yet discovered the true, prior causes. To the extent that the analysis of any agent’s behavior is successful, science demonstrates that the agent’s behavior is no longer free, but determined. To the extent that an agent’s behavior appears free, science considers its understanding incomplete.

Once we recognize this fact, we realize that science cannot contribute to any moral question, because moral questions always presume an agent capable of freely choosing good or evil. Science does not — and should not — say anything about good or evil because it must presume that such apparent choice is an illusion.

Filling a Triangle

Picture the field of individual human action — or more precisely, of the motivation to action — as a triangle resting on its base. At a certain stage of our understanding this triangle is empty, signifying our working assumption that all human action is determined by choice and free will. Put in statistical language: We know of no factors whatever that account for any differences in actions from one person or group of people to another. Note the subtle corollary that, with respect to cause, an utterly 100 percent unpredictable (or “random”) event cannot be distinguished from one that is freely willed. Were it not free, the action would be predicted by correlation to some other factor.

Now draw a line across the triangle about a quarter of the way up from the base and fill it in with a certain color. Let us say that the area below this line represents genetic influences — the biological differences among individuals that account for a significant proportion of their variability in action. The remaining area, still blank, represents what is left to choice and free will.

Next draw a second line, perhaps another quarter of the way up, and fill that space in with a different color. This second area will represent, say, family influences. Again, the remaining, even smaller area that is blank presumptively constitutes what remains of free will and choice.

Now draw a third line yet further up and fill in this space with a third color, representing nongenetic biological factors: intrauterine influences, diet, the effect of pollutants, viruses and bacteria, and so on. Then draw a fourth line to demarcate the area of social influences, and so on. Each successive space accounts for less and less of the remaining variability because the analyses grow increasingly complex and costly to perform and contribute less and less to our explanatory model. Slowly and relentlessly the area remaining to “free will and choice” grows smaller. Will it perhaps disappear altogether?

It may disappear; but even if not, it will grow less and less significant, approaching ever closer to invisibility as our scientific analysis grows ever more precise. Perhaps it will never quite get to zero. But when it comes to actions that matter most to us, no matter how small this space becomes — this tiny remnant of free will — even if it shrinks to a mere point, we all — including the most rigorous, rational, insistent scientist — will live our lives just as though that tiny point were dense as a neutron star, weightier by magnitudes than the weight of all the rest of the triangle.

And when that tiny point at the very peak of the triangle finds itself in a struggle against the pressing impact of all the other factors, and the odds seem hopeless and the struggle ordained to fail, we will continue to wrestle. Our fellows will cheer us on as well, sometimes with tears barely choked back at this quintessential manifestation of the human spirit. Under what circumstances do we experience this sense of higher triumph? Do we really deeply cheer, say, the man who gets rich? Do we applaud in our deepest heart the man who in spite of his physical unattractiveness, succeeds as a Don Juan? Hardly. Rather we cheer — from the depths of our being — the triumph of good over evil, over the evil that lies outside ourselves and also the evil that lies within.

Perhaps this insistence on free choice is mere sentimentality. Maybe we only kid ourselves into thinking that free will is at work, when actually everything is predetermined. This is one possibility. But we also must realize that although the various influences on our actions may be combined in an equation that shows the relative importance of each, no such weighting is even theoretically possible with respect to free will. Either will is truly free in each individual case or it is not. If free, it outweighs all the combined effects of prior causes, producing an utterly unpredictable outcome; if not free, then it is utterly subject to these prior causes and the “agent” is therefore predictable. In brief, either there is such a thing as free will, in which case anything less than 100 percent predictability leaves the agent totally free; or else there is no such thing as free will, in which case we are not free agents.

The Still Point of the Turning World

The scientific study of behavior thus subtly but inevitably tends to support not only a view of man that sets him outside the realm of free will and choice, but outside the realm of morality as well. Some scientists have had the courage — or at least the intellectual consistency — to claim that if the scientific view of man is not only true and complete then it indeed leads necessarily to the abolition of “man” as embodied in such moral categories as “freedom” and “goodness” (and therefore also of “dignity” and “nobility of character”). Scientific maturity — liberation from illusion — therefore demands that we should do away with such concepts entirely, as the famous American psychologist B. F. Skinner, the dean of behaviorism, has proposed. (Behaviorism asserts that all human behavior can be understood in terms of stimulus-response mechanisms.)

Nonetheless, Skinner too tries to pull himself up by his bootstraps to an Archimedean point of personal leverage above and outside his own assertions about being.[146] When asked who will lead us into this brave new world, he chooses himself. And when asked to what end will he save humanity, he replies that it will make a better world. Note how the moral concept of “goodness” has smuggled itself back in again — as also has “vanity.”

This tiny, empty point at the apex of causality is indeed, to use T. S. Eliot’s well-suited phrase, “the still point of the turning world.”[147] And toward this infinitesimal point of ultimate weight an inverted, invisible, triangle emanates downward. Unlike its counterpart below, this triangle has no topmost dimension; it is an illimitable world of spirit that is utterly irreducible to the material world of causation below.

The essential feature of this view of reality, which actually is the traditional Jewish and Christian view, is that all of reality turns on the question of good and evil. This view claims that the overarching principle of existence — and therefore especially of all dimensions of man’s existence, sexuality included — is the revealed moral law. From this upper triangle, the invisible realm of the moral dimension of life, is poured out the only living water to slake our thirst for meaning.

Invisible and intangible, this dimension nonetheless exerts the greatest possible impact on our lives. Not only does it affect the myriad of tiny decisions that make up our everyday existence, but it also influences the rarer moments of genius that define a culture, regardless of prior causes.

From a rigorous point of view concerning morality, therefore, one that maintains a clear-eyed perspective on the centrality of choice and freedom in human action, scientific evidence concerning the roots of behavior is irrelevant. It is clear that although individuals differ in the strength of their impulses because of many variables — some genetic, most not — do not fully account for activity, homosexual activity included.

Writing from a very different perspective, John DeCecco, editor of the Journal of Homosexuality, thus observes “… the sexual act shapes erotic desire as much as desire precedes it.”[148] This leads us into the next chapter on choice, habit, compulsion, and addiction.

9. The Devil’s Bargain

In earlier chapters we observed how gay activists and the media have reduced the question of a genetic contribution to homosexual behavior to such meaningless oversimplifications as “the gay gene” or “I am 99.5 percent convinced that homosexuality is genetic.” But the oversimplification on the traditionalist side is also wrong — not only scientifically, but morally, because it leads to the harsh condemnation of homosexuals. For it is equally untrue to claim that people “choose to be homosexual” in the simple and simplistic sense that such a phrase inevitably evokes. Clearly no one sits down before a smorgasbord of sexual lifestyle choices and simply decides to be gay. The following fable illustrates not only the journey by which people become ensnared in the gay lifestyle, but indeed the process by which we are all prone to compulsive behavior.

One day long ago, over the hot sands of a middle-Eastern country, a white skylark flew in joyous loops about the sky. As she swooped near the earth, she heard a merchant cry out, “Worms! Worms! Worms for feathers! Delicious worms!”

The skylark circled about the merchant, hungry at the mention of worms, but puzzled as to what the merchant meant. Little did the skylark know that the merchant was the devil. And seeing that the skylark was interested, the devil motioned her nearer. “Come here, my little friend. Come! See the lovely worms I have!”

Cautiously, the skylark landed and cocked her head at the merchant. “Come! Taste the juicy worms!” The skylark became aware that she was, indeed, quite hungry. And these worms looked bigger and tastier than any she had ever dug for herself out of the hardscrabble ground of the desert. The skylark hopped closer and put her beak up close to the worm. “Two worms for a feather, my friend. Two worms for one!”

The skylark was unable to resist. And she had, after all, so many feathers. So, with a swift motion, she pulled out a feather — just a small one — from beneath her wing and gave it to the merchant. “Take your pick, my little friend … any two, your heart’s desire!” And so the skylark quickly snatched up two of the plumpest worms and swallowed her meal with delight. Never before had she tasted such wonderful worms. With a loud chirp, she leapt into the air and resumed her joyful flight.

Day after day the skylark returned. And always the merchant had wonderful worms to offer: black ones and blue ones, red ones and green ones, all fat and shiny and iridescent. But one day, after eating her fill, the skylark leapt again into the air — and to her horror, she fell to the ground with a thud. She was unable to fly!

All at once, with a shock, she realized what had happened. From the delicious worms she had grown fatter and fatter; and as she plucked her feathers one by one, first her body, then her tail, and finally her very wings had grown balder and balder. Horrified, she remembered how, slowly, imperceptibly, day by day, it had been getting harder and harder to fly; and how she had told herself it was no matter; she could always stop before it was too late. Now, suddenly, here she was, trapped on the ground. She looked up and saw the merchant looking at her. Was that a small, sly grin spreading across his face?

In terror, the skylark ran off into the desert. She ran and ran and ran and ran. It took her hours and hours. Never in her entire life had she walked nor run so far. Finally, she came to the softer ground near the desert springs where, before she met the merchant, she daily had come to dig for herself the small, dusty brown desert worms that could be found around the springs.

The skylark dug and dug in a frenzy. She piled up worm after worm until it was nearly dark. Then, wrapping her catch in a small fallen palm frond, she dragged it off back across the sand to where she saw the merchant, closing up his stall for the night.

The skin around her beak had grown bruised and tender; her small feet were bleeding from the great distances she had been forced to walk. “Oh, merchant! Oh, merchant! Please help me! Please help me! I cannot fly anymore! Oh, dear what shall I do? Please, please, take these worms from me and give me back my feathers!”

The merchant bent down and peered at the terrified skylark. He threw back his head and roared with laughter, a gold tooth glinting in the red and setting sunlight. “Oh, I’ll take those worms all right, my friend. A few weeks in this good soil and they, too, will be fat and green and glistening.” He unwrapped the worms and tossed them into a jar of black and humid soil. “But feathers?” He laughed again. “What will you do with feathers? Glue them on with spit?” He wheezed and cackled at his little joke.

“Besides my friend,” the merchant reached down and grabbed the already plucked and fattened skylark, “that’s not my business — ‘feathers for worms.’ Oh no …” He threw the skylark into a cage, “… my business is ‘WORMS FOR FEATHERS!’” The merchant slammed the little cage door shut, smiled hungrily at his victim, and with a loud SNAP! of his fingers, he vanished into the desert air.

As our fable tells us, each time we behave in a certain way — each time the skylark exchanges a feather for worms — there is an important sense in which we choose to do so. And each time we do, we tell ourselves the truth that we are free to choose not to. Yet it is also true that with each successive step we progressively lose the ability to turn around, and yet are unaware of this worsening, insidious moral incapacitation. This is the devil’s bargain we make with each successive step we take. At the end, it seems we are completely trapped, and can no more undo the changes in ourselves we have thereby allowed to develop — indeed, changes in the very brain — than can the leopard change his spots or the skylark buy back her feathers. From this trap there may eventually become no escape — none, that is, without the help of God.

The story of the skylark, which is based on a Jewish and Christian view of reality, tells us something quite specific and important about who we are: We were not meant to spend our lives pursuing shiny worms, however glistening or brilliant; we were meant to fly. Thus, there is a special poignancy to the fate of so many homosexuals trapped in the “gay lifestyle,” and a special wonder in the stories of those who have become free.[149]

Those people who have successfully left the gay lifestyle have done so with difficulty — not because homosexuality is inborn, but because typical gay behavior is very compelling and, more precisely, compulsive. All compulsive behaviors are very difficult, at times seemingly impossible, to change; they will also lead people to do things over and over, irrationally, that have an extremely high cost associated with them — even death.[150]

Another element of confusion has thus been introduced into the general debate between science and free will, and into the political debate over homosexuality, by the imprecise use of the term “choice” as applied to habitual behavior. For another important influence on will is habit. And habit, as outlined in this chapter, also has an explicit biological basis in the brain that is different from the biological basis arising from genetics or prenatal influences. Once we understand the biology of habit, we will also have a better understanding of why habits, compulsions, and addictions are so resistant to change, yet not impossibly so.

The Highly Complex Brain

Perhaps the most common analogy used to understand the relationship between the brain and the mind is that between computer hardware and its software. In both the lay and scientific literature references abound to innate, brain-based phenomena as “hardwired.”[151] The analogy is quite useful to convey how some mental states may be related to such phenomena as a loss of neurons or a chemical insufficiency — Alzheimer’s disease and (some kinds of) depression, for example, are both “hardware” problems. Other states, in contrast, represent responses of normally functioning “hardware” to “software” events such as confusion caused by lack of information or grief in response to loss.

But the brain, as a kind of computer, operates very differently than the desktop computers we are familiar with. Conventional computers have a fixed hardware configuration into which any number of software programs may be swapped electronically. The hardware merely implements the rules preprogrammed into the software. In contrast, the “hardware” in biological computers — our brains — is not fixed. The “software” is simply the sum of the changes that occur over time in the hardware — that is, in the nerve cells and in the connections (“synapses”) between nerve cells. There is actually little preprogramming; what may loosely be called “programming” occurs over time through tacit learning from experience. In brief, repetition alters the brain itself.

A good example of this kind of learning is the way that a child spontaneously learns to articulate words, starting out with crude approximations and “zeroing in” with ever greater precision on the correct pronunciation. The changes in the connections between neurons that mediate the learning of language have been modeled — that is, simulated — on conventional computers running special “neural network” programs. These duplicate the neurons of the brain and their interconnections. When these models are run, we can actually listen to a computer “learn” to articulate simply by repetitive experience. The researchers at Princeton who first developed one such model started the program running at say 4:00 p.m. At 5:00 p.m. the computer sounded like an infant babbling, by 1:00 a.m. like a toddler, by 8:00 a.m. like a first grader, and by noon the next day it was speaking adult English.[152]

This description of the brain as a computer is, of course, an oversimplification. In fact the brain literally from bottom up is more like a hierarchy of types of computers. The lower nervous system functions quite like an archaic, standard, one-program hardware chip while the higher nerve cells function almost purely as a neural network-type computer, as described above.

This hierarchy parallels the stages of complexity of the nervous system in animals as we move up the various levels of the animal kingdom. Thus invertebrates, such as worms, have spinal cords and little else; simple vertebrates, such as eels, have spinal cords and brain stems; higher vertebrates, such as frogs and reptiles, have spinal cords, brain stems, and paleocortexes (somewhat more primitive cortical tissue that supports rather complex functioning, but not planning, reasoning, or language); higher vertebrates, such as dogs, human beings, and dolphins, have spinal cords, brain stems, paleocortexes, and neocortexes (cortical tissue that supports planning, and in the case of humans, reasoning and language).

The neocortex is the part of brain that we might consider as the seat of the will. Through its neurons this part of the brain mediates (this is not to say “determines”) the act of selectively choosing among various options, acceding to specific impulses and resisting others. The cortex is arranged in large clusters of densely interconnected neurons. Each cell establishes connections, sometimes at great distances, to as many as a hundred thousand other cells.

It is also the part of the brain whose connections between neurons will be slowly modified over time, strengthening some connections, weakening others, and eliminating some entirely — all based on how experience shapes us. This ongoing process embeds the emerging pattern of our choices ever more firmly in actual tissue changes. These changes make it that much more likely for us to make the same choice with less direct effort the next time — and that much more difficult to make a different choice.

The neocortex of the young child allows him to reach out his hand to touch a hot, glowing object. No inhibitions are yet embedded in the neural network of his brain to counter the natural fascination with light and sparkle. But after sufficient experience — in this instance once may be enough — he will grow less and less likely to do so. There is thus a specific physical basis to learning that sheds light not only on the nature of habit, compulsion, and addiction but also on the relationship of each of these to choice.

In response to inputs to the cortex from the external world (such as touch and sight), as well as from internal stimuli (such as fear or hunger), nerve impulses travel from cell to cell over these connections. At first they travel in a random pattern, “activating” each cell to various, likewise random, levels of electrochemical excitation. The output — the thoughts and behaviors — generated by these excited cells is therefore also initially random. We easily see this kind of random output in the relatively disorganized and uncoordinated movements and sounds a newborn infant makes in response to being handled or hungry.

By contrast, behaviors that arise from lower, more primitive levels of the nervous system are quite well-organized. Such behaviors include breathing, crying, swallowing, the “startle reflex” (the way an infant suddenly extends its arms and legs in response to a sudden stimulus), or the “snout reflex” (the way an infant turns its head toward an object that touches its cheek — to orient its mouth toward the nipple). These behaviors are usually the most basic and life-sustaining and are therefore also common to lower animals as well. By comparison to behaviors organized at the neocortical, or higher, level, they are the most rigid and stereotyped, are fairly simple, and are also the least “plastic” — that is, the least subject to modification by learning and repetition.

Eventually, most of these innate behaviors become subject to selective suppression by learned, intentional behaviors mediated by the neocortex. Put differently, innate, primitive, preprogrammed, “hardwired,” lower-level impulses are modified by the higher, plastic, learned configurations of the brain. One example is when youngsters learn to hold their breath under water. An infant is incapable of this act of voluntary suppression of the breathing mechanism. In similar fashion, some of these primitive mechanisms will be lost entirely.

When the neocortex is damaged, innate patterns reemerge in their primitive, unmodified form because they are truly “hard-wired.” Thus we see the painfully sad reemergence of primitive responses in people with Alzheimer’s disease, which slowly destroys cortical neurons to cause both a psychological “second childhood” and the reemergence of primitive neurological reflexes such as the “startle” and “snout.” Of course, if the neocortex is not taught properly to begin with, the innate behaviors will remain in relatively primitive, unmodified form.

As certain connections gain in strength and others lose strength, the pattern of the nerve cells being activated in response to stimuli becomes progressively less random and more well-organized. In this way learned behaviors start out quite chaotic and ineffective and become progressively more targeted, precise, and efficient. Anyone who has mastered a difficult sport or learned to play the piano has experienced this process. Indeed, we all have in most areas of life, so central is this process to human learning and action.

It is important to emphasize that the strengthening of connections between nerve cells involves an actual increase in tissue. This occurs as more and more neurotransmitter (the chemicals that signal from one neuron to another) is stored at the point of connection and more and more protein receptors for these neurotransmitters are synthesized. The weakening of connections between cells likewise involves a loss of tissue. This occurs both in the diminishment of neurotransmitter and receptors and eventually also in the actual dissolving of those parts of the cells involved in connections that are rarely used and reinforced. This dissolving is known as “pruning.”

Furthermore, throughout development many new cellular connections are established for the first time. These new connections are stimulated by and come to embody physically learned behaviors. Beyond that, a selective loss of whole neurons relating to behaviors not being used takes place. These processes not only extend into adolescence, but are especially heightened then, probably under the influence of dramatically altered hormones.

Our Second Nature

The above section explains why it becomes ever more difficult — though not impossible — to teach a dog new tricks as the dog grows older. Unlike our modern computers, the brain’s hardware and software are one. Therefore an old program cannot simply be swapped for a new one to be run on the same hardware. Complex patterns of behavior become progressively more “embedded” in actual physical changes in the brain itself.

This also illustrates one of the reasons why anatomical differences in adult brains are of limited significance with respect to genetics: The differences can be acquired; they need not be innate. This point is easily missed — even by presumably well-educated writers. Regarding homosexuality, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal wrote dismissively that, “Some religious fundamentalists even suggested that homosexual activity somehow could have caused the structural differences [in the hypothalamus, according to LeVay].”[153]

But recall that the editor of Nature (the English counterpart to Science) himself remarked that, “Plainly, the neural correlates of genetically determined gender are plastic at a sufficiently early stage…. Plastic structures in the hypothalamus [might] allow … the consequences of early sexual arousal to be made permanent.”[154] It is worth noting that the hypothalamus is a relatively primitive part of the brain. Even such primitive parts, where most “hardwiring” is located, are subject to significant modification.

Clearly, new patterns of behavior can be learned “on top of” old ones, but the old ones will not be eliminated. Furthermore, the new ones will be acquired with much greater difficulty than the old; they are not being learned off of a random, only slightly configured base, but off of a base already converged into a physically, biologically shaped form.

Behaviors become increasingly strengthened through repetition. This strengthening physically alters the brain in a way that cannot be entirely undone, if at all; it is modified with great difficulty. Such modification requires a greater effort of will, additional repetition of the new behavior, and more time the more deeply embedded in the brain the old behavior has become. Experiences of religious conversion also generate new patterns of behavior, sometimes quite abruptly. But even here, in this widely recognized but more mysterious process, it is well-known that the old patterns, and the potential for falling back into old behaviors, do not simply disappear.

Complex, multidimensional series of actions that have become habitual start out as single, individually considered, and selected choices. Later they develop into the automatic actions we call habits. Our responses, in other words, become “second nature,” which is indeed an apt term. Nonetheless, we all wish to retain within the realm of choice final authority over these habitual responses, choosing to restrain and release them as best serves our interests, or more importantly, as we consider right.

Pleasure Centers

The difference between a simple habit and a compulsion is partly a matter of degree. But more pertinently, compulsions are also linked to innate, primitive impulses. We have no natural biological urge to drive a car (although we do have a biological thrust to locomotion); we do indeed to eat, fight, and to have sex.

Of all the biological drives, the sexual drive is the one linked most strongly to pleasure. Even hunger maintains its force primarily through regulatory systems in the brain that are less strongly linked to pleasure centers than is sex. In the “eating disorders” or in certain forms of depression mediated by the neurotransmitter serotonin, however, eating can become so strongly linked to pleasure that the pleasure of eating overrides the discomfort of satiety.

But indeed, in light of the goal-directness of all biological systems, hunger need not be so strongly linked to pleasure as is sex. Whereas food is absolutely necessary for the survival of every individual, sex is not. Food is thus truly a need of the individual while sex is not, strange as that may sound in our society. Sex, whose biological purpose is to preserve the species, is actually a need of the race, not really the individual. (A person can survive without sex; a species cannot.) Its pursuit therefore needs to be strongly reinforced through mechanisms beyond immediate survival.

The incredible power of pleasure-related mechanisms in the brain is fearfully illustrated in a recent experiment with rats. They were given a lever to press that fed them simple water and cocaine — whose effects in the brain involve many neurotransmitter systems. The rats pressed the lever to the point of starvation, physical exhaustion, and death, ignoring hunger entirely. This controlled experiment with lower animals illustrates an outcome not that different from the life- and relationship-destroying effects of many compulsive pursuits to which men are prey — chemical, sexual, and otherwise.[155]

The brain has certain areas whose primary function is to create a feeling of “pleasure” only under specific circumstances. Thus, as a prime example, the pleasure areas of the brain are most intensely activated at the moment of sexual orgasm. The mechanism whereby this occurs is chemical: Among the many physiological events associated with orgasm, one is the generation of a signal sent to certain nerves that travel to the pleasure areas of the brain. When the signal arrives, it causes little sealed packets at the nerve endings to open up and release their contents onto other cells. The surface of these other cells have specially designed receptors that match the shape of the released chemicals in lock-and-key fashion. When the chemical binds to the receptor, the receptor sends a signal to the pleasure areas to generate the feeling “intense pleasure.” (Incidentally, although we know that this mechanism triggers pleasure responses, it does not explain our subjective consciousness of pleasure.)

In the case of pleasure, the chemical released from the nerve endings is a special type called an “opioid,” meaning “opium-like.” Of all behaviors, none would appear to be accompanied by so intense a burst of internal opioids as sex. Therefore, apart from the repetitive ingestion of such external opiates as heroin — the classic example of addiction — no experience is more intensely pleasurable. This fact sheds light on the ease with which repeated sexual behaviors are especially strongly reinforced.

The subjective experience of heroin addicts provides a rather startling confirmation of this chemical connection between addiction and sexuality: addicts invariably describe the pleasure of a heroin “rush” as, precisely, “orgasmic.” Not surprisingly, heroin or cocaine addicts also quickly lose interest in actual sex.

The experience of pleasure creates powerful, behavior-shaping incentives. For this reason when biological impulses — especially the sexual ones — are not at least partially resisted, trained, and brought under the civilizing influence of culture and will, the pressure to seek their immediate fulfillment becomes deeply embedded in the neural network of the brain. Furthermore, the particular, individualized patterns by which we seek this fulfillment will also become deeply implanted.

Once embedded, sexual fantasy life in particular cannot be erased. New fantasies may be learned “on top of,” so to speak, the earlier ones; we may become highly motivated not to act on our fantasies; we may learn new behaviors that prove as gratifying or even more gratifying than the old ones; the old ones will weaken and wither, yet they will always be there — the “old self” and the “natural man” does not die entirely in this life, even though we may die (though not all at once) to self. Few are so strong that, given sufficient duress, the old patterns of fantasy and behavior could not be provoked once again into near-overwhelmingly seductive strength.

With effort and sufficient motivation, the unaided will may master other, nondrive-related habits. But habits linked to drive-related pleasures often overpower the will. In short order, therefore, unregulated sexual tendencies become habits, then compulsions, and finally something barely distinguishable from addictions.

Another important but subtler point needs to be made. The brain-based mechanisms that mediate pleasure are closely linked to those that mediate pain. Often, a pleasurable experience — or at least one that arouses some aspects of our physiology to a state in which we are supposed to feel pleasure — may become linked to a painful stimulus. This occurs commonly, for example, when children are sexually abused, causing them to link sexual arousal to the “taking-in” of pain. People who have suffered in this way when young often find themselves as adults confused and anguished over what seems to be an irrational compulsion to “seek out” hurtful sexual experiences and relationships. Mechanisms such as these lie behind the high percentage of homosexuals who were molested as children.

The Road to Addiction

As has been observed by psychoanalysts, the so-called “perverse” forms of sexual expression (including those associated with pain) are especially likely to become compulsive: “The concept of addictive sexuality or neoneeds is … introduced in reference to the compulsivity that invariably accompanies perverse sexuality.”[156] This observation is consistent with the enormously greater promiscuity that is typical of the gay lifestyle, documented previously.[157]

These extreme variants of compulsive sexual behavior as well as the repetitive use of pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, extramarital affairs, or even erotic fantasy have caused considerable distress to many in our society. From a quite mundane perspective, therefore, and without an understanding of the brain processes underlying these behaviors, groups have sprung up to help people free themselves from these behaviors. Within these groups these behaviors are wisely, if from a medical perspective somewhat imprecisely, referred to as “addictions.” The term might better be limited to the body’s physiological response to the absence of an externally supplied chemical on which it has become dependent.

Dependence in this context means that a normal state of physiological repose (as measured by normal vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, and temperature) will be disrupted, sometimes to the point of death, unless that chemical is reintroduced. (This is what a “hangover” is and why “the hair of the dog” provides temporary relief.) Dependence occurs when an external substance is regularly ingested that closely mimics the critical regulatory function of an internal chemical — as opiates mimic opioids. In time, the body is fooled by the external compound into shutting down its own natural production.

But the compulsive behavior caused by an addiction is actually little different in its power or in its effects on character than are the compulsive behaviors related to the way we fulfill our biological drives. As discussed above, because the reinforcement mechanism (cessation of pain, pleasure) for the biological drives is mediated by naturally occurring opioids in the brain, to rename as addictions those compulsions that fall within any of the biological drives — hunger, aggression, sex — is not far off the mark. It is especially accurate in the domain of sex. Most importantly, from a practical point of view, the methods that have proven by far the most effective in breaking true chemical addictions also prove effective in modifying compulsive behaviors.

Many people appeal to education as an element in the long-term prevention of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Education can be effective in preventing people from ever beginning the behaviors that lead down the slippery slope to habit, then compulsion, and finally addiction. But with those for whom the behavior is already a habit or worse, the educational approach is notoriously ineffective because rational ideas and recommendations carry little weight against an addict’s drive for drugs or sex. Formal drug treatment programs have long abandoned exhortation and education as being useless except in a supplementary role. Addicts simply will not abandon their behavior except under unusual and specific constraints. Arguments that homosexuals should simply “choose” a different way of life are equally futile.

Summary

Let us summarize the picture we are left with of the human will in the light of science. The naive, prescientific view might picture men as essentially free in their choices, constrained only by obvious external physical circumstances. But the plasticity of brain structure and function confounds this simple picture. Over time, the choices we make fall into ever more predictable patterns because the pattern of choices tends to be self-reinforcing. As we practice certain behaviors, they become easier and easier and we become “better and better” at them. As they become easier, we also tend to choose them. The more we choose them, the more deeply embedded they become, and so on. What starts out relatively free becomes less so as time goes on.

The lower, more general physiological mechanisms for sexual arousal are primitive, hardwired, and very similar in animals and men; sexual preferences, however, linked closely to higher level mental activities such as fantasizing, are subject to tremendous variability and modification, especially at the level of the cortex. Because animals have only rudimentary neocortexes — if any at all — sexual variability among animals is limited. Because men have such extensive neocortexes, sexual variability among men is extraordinary.

In order to explain why some people behave one way and others differently, the scientific approach is to examine why we begin to do certain things in the first place. In order to do that, we turn not only to our genes and hormones but to our childhoods, the influence of parents, and the influence of society. And in order to understand fully why parents act the way they do and why society acts the way it does, thereby influencing us in a predictable way, we need to keep reaching for more and more distant and more and more complex chains of causality.

Because of practical considerations, we cannot actually perform such an analysis in much detail with respect to complex behaviors. In theory, however, that is how science examines the problem — squeezing down the tiny residual area of unaccounted-for action to a smaller and smaller point until free will can be thrown out altogether. As we have said before, in this view will is nothing more than a gloss for our temporary ignorance of causes.

Sufficiently keen observers might be able to guess how most of us might act in certain situations. In so doing, they would be suggesting that our actions are not free, but determined. And yet the reality is that we are free, and we hold others accountable for their actions as though they really were, too. This freedom is not demonstrable by science[158] but is an act of faith as much for the hyperrationalist as for the fundamentalist.

And yet, free will is only part of the problem. For once we have become convinced that — in spite of all the obstacles we place in our own way through habit, compulsion, and addiction — we are still, at bottom, free to choose, there immediately arises the question, “what shall we choose?” and “on what basis?” “Are there right choices? And wrong ones? How do I tell?” Thus we enter the domain of religion.

10. The Unnatural Natural

One sure lesson of the current discussion is this: Science cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong; it can only tell us what is and, with respect to human behavior, elucidate for us the influences that will nudge us in this direction or that if we let them. Understanding these forces will not tell us whether we are being nudged rightly or wrongly, although that understanding may help us go in the direction we choose.

It should not seem strange then to proceed from a science-based discussion of what is to an ethics-based discussion of what should be; in other words to move from a description of the neurophysiological basis of habit, compulsion, and addiction to a discussion of the Bible and its view of sin. The entire debate about homosexuality is inextricably rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept of sin because the idea that homosexuality is wrong has entered our culture from the Jewish and Christian faiths. In many other cultures not rooted in the worship of the God of Israel — such as the many pagan cultures of the world — homosexuality is perfectly acceptable and normative behavior.

The Bible, of course, is unapologetically ethical. It does not pretend to be scientific in the sense of explaining how things work; it mostly explains how things should be. It begins with the startling premise that the entire world is not as it should be — nature itself is broken, right from the beginning. Nature itself has become, if you will, unnatural, human nature included.

In today’s secular culture, the biblical word “sin” is simply understood to refer to actions that are in some sense “wrong.” It carries with it the musty overtones of a moralism that is both quaint and cruel. But the full biblical description of sin is far more radical and illuminating than this. The Bible describes most sins as pleasurable, natural, and self-reinforcing to the point of compulsion. They are, in effect, the addictions.

This view of sin contrasts sharply with modern, individualistic morality that more or less asserts that nothing is sinful that does not immediately harm someone else. The Bible certainly agrees that harm to others is bad, but it also has a distinctive view on self-harm that derives directly from the first and greatest commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Addiction specialists emphasize how any addiction slowly, insidiously, and relentlessly removes addicts from real relationships with other people, reorienting them exclusively to the object of their addiction. The Bible views the same process as characteristic of sin, but with an important added dimension: Sinners are not only progressively removed from relationships with other people as they increasingly focus on the sin and the pleasure it affords, but also from a relationship with God.

The Bible thus sees a vital dimension to sin: It is not only increasingly addictive but a form of idolatry. The object of the sinful compulsion slowly erodes and replaces all other desires, eventually even displacing God himself, the one who should be the object of our deepest yearning. In this way we literally worship and fall into the grip of a part of creation instead of the Creator. Thus the primary criticism of human nature found in the Bible is that, for example, of the apostle Paul, describing all fallen men in their violation of the first commandment:

What is true of men, the Bible claims, is equally true of whole civilizations. Thus in its repeated — compulsive — falls into the snare of idolatry, the spiritual history of Israel tells much the same story as that of all nations. And the idolatry warned against in both Hebrew and Christian Scripture is not some vague intellectual nodding to a wood or stone model, but rather the repeated attraction to an ecstatic, pagan, orgiastic form of nature-worship — involving both male and female ritual prostitution in an unlimited variety of sexual forms. The overwhelming power of sexual gratification is what makes it so susceptible to becoming a true compulsion. The Bible therefore most often condemns ritualized sexual compulsion as a quintessential act of idolatry. God’s great patience in deferring judgment on Israel reflects his understanding that sin is more like an addiction than a simple choice — people cannot conquer it through mere moral suasion.

In Old Testament times in the Near East this idolatry took the form of the worship of Baal and Ashtoreth; in New Testament times in the Mediterranean basin it became the worship of other female deities, for instance Aphrodite.[159] A biblically informed perspective on our own era would consider it to be similarly idolatrous: dominated by materialistic sexual hedonism undergirded by a secularized, skeptical, or pop-spiritual, quasi-occult theology.

In the Christian continuation of the Hebrew Bible’s presentation of sin, a unique and specific role is outlined for a savior: His atoning sacrifice is capable of effecting not only forgiveness, but genuine liberation from the compulsive grip of sin. This story makes even more explicit sin’s power and the impossibility of mere willful change, first described in the eighth century B.C. by the prophet Jeremiah:

I but Not I

Many passages and stories in both the Old and New Testaments illustrate how sin is self-reinforcing, leading to an ever deeper entanglement. It is often referred to as a “snare,” suggesting that, as with all habits that develop into compulsions, sinful pleasures present themselves first as options, only later revealing their true power over the will. Sinners deny the potential for entrapment, inadvertently ensuring that the snare will pull tight about them before they know they are trapped. The sin itself prevents resistance to it:

In like vein, the prophet Isaiah had warned:

The Talmud explains these passages as follows:

Rabbi Isaac stated, “The [Evil] Inclination of a man grows stronger within him from day to day, as it is said, ‘Only evil all the day.’” Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish stated, “The Evil Inclination of a man grows in strength from day to day and seeks to kill him, as it is said, ‘The wicked watcheth the righteous and seeketh to slay him….’”

And St. Peter notes:

We know from the modern psychology of compulsions that when a man is “mastered” by his desires, “denial” takes over as a specific mechanism, subverting any residual suspicion that escape is even desirable. What is actually a frightening vice (and a vise) is disguised as a virtue. Jeremiah describes this state of blindness in a famous passage:

If and when a man awakens fully to his true state, it is usually far later than he had realized, for his psyche has already become configured by his behavior, “burned into” the synaptic connections of the brain:

Those sinners who at last awaken to the truth — like addicts who have broken through their denial — describe their state with brutal realism. For nearly two thousand years Paul’s anguished description of human bondage to appetite has remained among the most eloquent ever penned:

Paul, himself a Talmudic pupil of Rabbi Gamaliel, answers his own query: He will be rescued only by “Jesus Christ our Lord,” echoing in Christian form the Talmud’s similar response to the intractable problem of the Evil inclination, in a continuation of the passage cited above:

Keep in mind our own street phrase “a monkey on my back,” which refers to addiction. In the context of a discussion of sin, compulsion, and addiction, Paul’s figure of speech — “this body of death” — is especially apt. It refers to the way a death sentence was often carried out under Imperial Rome. A dead body was strapped to the back of the condemned man from which he could not free himself, however he struggled. In time, the putrefaction of the corpse spread and ate away his own tissues as well, slowly killing him.

All Too Natural

Unless we are careful, this line of thinking leads us heedless to a trap — viewing sin as “unnatural.” As we all know, one of the most common epithets hurled at homosexuals and other people who practice sexual behavior other than heterosexual intercourse is that their practices are “unnatural.” Paul’s letter to the Romans makes a similar accusation:

But Paul’s use of unnatural here is only half the story. As implied in his references to “my sinful nature” and to “another law at work in the members of my body,” the more basic issue in assessing the concept of sin from a scientific and biological perspective is the fact that all forms of sin are natural. Sin is even theologically natural in a fallen world — it is unnatural only in contrast to the nature of the world as it was intended to be — the ideal world whose perfection our minds but dimly perceive, our hearts desperately long for, and our actions but rarely attain.

The term sin points toward a standard outside of nature and thus outside the domain of science. Stealing is merely the natural extension of hoarding (widespread in animals who naturally steal each other’s food whenever they can), murder the natural extension of self-protection and dominance, adultery the natural expression of the biological drive to propagate one’s own DNA as widely as possible in preference to others (“It’s in Our Genes!” trumpeted yet another meaningless headline — this time about adultery — in a major newsweekly), and so on.

Paul’s use of the term “natural” in the passage above has a different meaning — one he takes for granted — namely that the “natural use” of sexuality is primarily for reproduction and that the sexual organs are physically designed for one specific type of sexual use.

Whether it filtered into the culture directly from this single New Testament passage or is spontaneously repeated because of its surface obviousness, the condemnation of homosexuality as “unnatural” and therefore “shocking” is widespread. But this simplistic condemnation carries two dangers: It easily leads to judgmentalism and it sets up a straw man that is readily knocked down by commonplace misunderstandings of the genetic bases of behavior. If homosexuality is genetically determined then it must be natural; if the Bible objects to it on the basis of its being “unnatural” then the Bible is clearly mistaken.

But the Bible is filled with many references that point not to the unnaturalness of sin (including homosexuality among many others), but to its naturalness. The Pentateuch’s 613 commandments, the requirement of daily animal sacrifice for atonement, the terrible punishments meted out against certain sins — all these point to the ubiquity and deep-rootedness in human nature of what God calls sin.

The revelation at Sinai in particular, but earlier covenants as well, illustrate that God’s ongoing involvement in the life of humanity represents a disruption of the fallen natural order. Sin is defined by God, not by nature. Sin is therefore not against nature but against God:

So natural is sin, and so unnatural are God’s requirements, that almost the entirety of the Bible tells the story of man’s inability to obey these requirements through his own natural effort. The Bible shows the desperate human need for supernatural assistance in even approximating a godly existence:

Some passages directly suggest an understanding of what we now recognize as a genetic predisposition toward sinful impulse and behavior:

We, like the ancient Jews, therefore anticipate that the conquering of sin ultimately requires someone whose origins and nature are not entirely natural:

Even in Judaism, in which the promised redeemer is human, albeit extraordinary, tradition holds that he has existed with God since creation. And furthermore, it is the suffering of the righteous — not just of the sinners — which keeps the world from destruction. In the Christian faith, redemption is understood as possible because of supernatural intervention:

Because God knows how unnatural it is for us not to sin, he refrains from swift, talon-like judgment and tempers his response with patience and mercy:

The problem lies in the fact that after the Fall nature itself — including human nature — is sinful:

The Suffering One

In the biblical view, God sent his Word — the Torah — into the corrupted natural world. From this perspective the entire question of right and wrong cannot be addressed without an understanding of and dependence on this Word. Absent this, with a viewpoint that sees only nature, “right” and “natural” will soon collapse into one another. Man resists the sin that is natural to him only with the greatest of effort. He requires the guidance of this Word in order to achieve even limited success:

But even this was not enough; the Israelites repeatedly lapsed back into the orgiastic worship of idols and ritual killing. Eventually, in the Christian continuation of this great drama, in order to save his children from the overwhelming power of what, through the Fall, their own natures were, God made this supernatural Word literally flesh (John 1:14). He thereby began the process of transforming the flesh into his Word.

The redeemer’s life thus tells the story of the One who completely refrained from that which is merely natural to do that which is right. Not only did he thereby lose his own life, he appeased the anger of a just God at all humanity’s sins, an anger that was poured out on him during his death. In mercy God withheld his wrath from his all-too-human children:

The idea that atoning sacrifice of an innocent, morally perfect individual is required to avert the just punishment of men in their natural state is central, of course, to the Christian worldview. It was present as well in the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. And although it seems not to play a major part in normative American Judaism today, something quite close to it remains an important tradition within Orthodox Judaism, linked to Messianic hopes and speculations:

The natural desires of the flesh are not only nor even primarily sexual desires but all the selfish cravings to which we are natively inclined. The power to overcome these finally cannot and does not arise from nature, nor from men themselves as a matter of simple choice, nor of complex technique. But rather:

Because:

In fact, the very ability to know the saving truth, to be convinced that God’s Word is what he says it is, also does not arise from nature nor solely from human will, but is itself a gift from God:

The Battle between Flesh and Spirit

Sin is so natural to us, and we are so utterly helpless and unable to resist it by our own power, that we inevitably either deny that we sin or must depend upon God even to know what we need to know to begin to resist it. If God chooses not to help us, we are lost:

Indeed, to be allowed to do as we wish is God’s punishment. It is precisely because men exchanged God for idols of their own devising that:

This mind is deeply rooted in nature itself (it is “our” nature) and thus has a sinful disposition which finally is unconquerable by natural means:

Understanding the molecular mechanisms that undergird the impulses of the flesh will not illuminate the standards of the Spirit. Nor will it release us to operate in accord with those standards:

In other words, the natural is sufficient neither to point us toward what is right in God’s eyes, nor to carry us there. This is not to deny the evidence for divine will both in nature and in human nature, but knowledge of the laws of nature is not enough for us to live a godly life, merely a natural one.

And, more to the point, the fact that our nature drives us toward certain activities does not mean that these activities must therefore not be sinful. In Christ’s own words:

Moral Standards Are Unnatural

The morality that God demands of man stands in contrast to the standards of behavior that come to him naturally. Precisely because these standards go against our nature, we need to be reminded of God’ s law every day of our lives; and every generation must recall this law and claim it anew for itself. Thus the ancient Israelites were commanded at Sinai always to wear specially woven tzitzit or “tassels.” (Observant Jews wear them to this day; they are the “fringe of his garment” through which in the gospel accounts Jesus heals a woman ill for twelve years.) The LORD tells Moses why:

Maintaining that morality is determined by nature is a specifically pagan error that we fall into when we argue either that homosexuality is right because it is genetic or that it is wrong because it is not. Ultimately, any rootedness of homosexuality in nature does not remove it one whit from the domain of moral choice. In its genetic, familial, or psychological influences, homosexual impulses and behavior are no different than the many other natural behaviors that God, in spite of their naturalness, calls sin.

The natural self, far from being worshiped because of being natural, is to be destroyed:

Modern man reflexively revolts against the assertion that God’s morality stands in opposition to his own natural self, and he gladly abandons such conceptions as archaic. But ancient man did likewise, as Paul observed around him:

The modern mind sees the demand that we live to some extent against our own natures as merely foolish, or misinterprets it as implying a radical asceticism that rejects all forms of pleasure. But it sees as truly cruel the judgment that supposedly falls on us for not being willing to resist our genetic influences. To the modern mind, as to ancient pagans, our bodies are ours to do with as we please so long as we feel we harm no one else. This is not the biblical view at all:

Of those who deny God altogether, in order to do as they wish, the Psalmist cries out:

And they are fools because of what their denial leads to:

Free, Yet Slaves

Circumcision is the seal of the primary agreement between Israel as carrier of God’s standard and God himself. By its very nature it points to the unnaturalness of his law, showing how the law stands as a modification of, and even in opposition to, the purely natural impulses (perhaps especially so with regard to the sexual impulses):

With the establishment of this covenant — a covenant that is contrary to nature — humanity is put on notice of just what God’s standards are:

And yet the mere fact of this standard does not bring people into compliance with it. Thus the unfolding history of Israel over the fifteen hundred years following the establishment of the covenant is one of almost unremitting failure. Only divine intercession could reverse this failure:

From a certain perspective it might seem strange that God would establish a standard of behavior impossible for us to meet. This is the perspective of those who claim that a genetic component to homosexuality — or to any other impulse — contradicts its sinfulness. But from the Judeo-Christian point of view, when we honestly confront what our natures, left to their own devices, really are — and what in the way of suffering they produce — we can only be grateful that we have been granted a vision of genuine goodness, however beyond our grasp. In this state of sorrow at our inadequacy, we can turn from prideful dependence on ourselves to voluntary dependence on God. But of course, against this surrender our pride has always urged us, and continues to urge us, to rebel.

And indeed, from the very beginning, it is as we consider what is good and what is evil that our pride insinuates its own, independent, and natural standards:

The chief result of the Fall is that we now determine for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. But in this self-determination we are far less free and independent than the serpent’s lie convinces us we are. In fact, to our natural, impulse-driven compulsions we are slaves and do not know it, comfortable in a state of bewitchment. In modern language, we are in denial.

Into this cold, Luciferian illusion of freedom from sin, freedom from the consequences of choice, and darkness masquerading as illumination, God shone on ancient Israel the true searchlight of a law above, outside of and prior to fallen nature.

But except insofar as God, knowing our fallen nature, had already planned how the intrusion of his law would unfold in history, this law has not accomplished what it seemed intended to. Rather than bringing about a transformation of character from the natural to the spiritual, it accomplished just the reverse, stimulating, it seems, an even worse rebellion. Thus, foretelling the destruction of Judah and the forced exile of the people by the Babylonians, God states through Jeremiah:

The light of God’s law not only has made the darkness of human nature stand forth for what it truly is, but by contrast seems to darken it further. As Paul put it:

Biblical history reveals that the attempt to establish by prescription alone a moral standard outside of nature is futile — even when the prescription comes from God. Within a few generations at most, the habit of obedience to such a prescribed standard will degenerate into little more than hypocritical conventions that hide the greatest degree of instinctive gratification possible. The God who prescribes those moral standards must be our redeemer as well. If not, argues the Bible, we are lost.

The Modern Basis for Morality

As it was in ancient Israel, so it is in the modern world. Today the most widely accepted philosophy of morals, which is more commonly implicit than explicit, comes from psychoanalysis as rooted in Freud. This view holds that conscience and guilt are culturally relative and derive from nothing more substantial or absolute than learned restrictions. Because these restrictions oppose the natural impulses they therefore engender emotional conflict, such as “internalized homophobia.” Sometimes these emotional conflicts are accepted as a necessary price for social orderliness; increasingly often, as the quest for pleasure and immediate gratification spreads widely, they are held to be unnecessary. In this view, these internal conflicts are passed on from one generation to the next, foolishly and uselessly, with no absolute basis whatever in either biology or spirit,[162] until enlightened would-be liberators arise to free us from them: “Overpopulation has made [the Levitical injunction against homosexuality] as irrelevant as refrigeration has made the injunction against eating pork,” states one pastor.[163]

Although many people claim to hold overtly to a Judeo-Christian philosophy, the psychoanalytic view has deeply reinforced a widespread, modern version of pre-Christian, pre-Judaic, pagan morals in our society. Some people recognize modern moral standards as pagan and even advocate them as such, considering the replacement of God’s law by paganism as not at all going “backward,” but “forward.”[164] Many churches and synagogues now widely welcome paganism, too, sometimes naming it as such. Alternatively they welcome certain aspects of paganism but call them something else, such as nature or goddess worship, diversity, and so on.

Modern people thus deal with the problem of guilt on the one hand by loosening most restrictions as archaic, arbitrary, and unnecessary. On the other hand they reinforce only those restrictions socially and legally that the shifting tide of fashion — both lay and expert — deems minimally necessary to sustain social order. If morality, and therefore also conscience, has no absolute basis, then there is no just cause to restrict the private or, when more than one person is involved, mutually agreed upon gratification of impulse.

But this wholesale casting off of moral restraint and therefore of the reality of a gracious, forgiving God, has the inevitable, if on the surface, somewhat surprising psychological consequence of increasing deep-seated feelings of condemnation and guilt. This occurs for the simple reason that man does, indeed, have a conscience that is not reducible to merely natural functions. It is genuine, and it reflects in some measure, if imperfectly, the divine standard that is its source and prototype.

When we transgress this conscience, as we are more and more apt to do in the absence of belief in its transcendent source and reality, we suffer its pangs. To escape these pangs, we drive ourselves with increasing mercilessness to further deny its reality in the vain hope that we may thereby escape it. Like Euripides pursued by the Furies, the harder we run, the deeper into our souls are sunk the pursuing talons. And yet we will suffer almost anything, even death it seems, to avoid accepting the yoke of heaven. With the loss of a deeply held belief in a just God, and in his saving grace, God’s standards thus become not only meaningless but actually tend to reinforce sin. The rebellious spirit is nowhere more powerfully stimulated than in the presence of authority, especially authority perceived as both arbitrary and vulnerable.

The fierce campaign to normalize homosexuality represents therefore not merely the weakened moral authority of church and synagogue, but more importantly a widespread loss of faith in a just but gracious and truly transcendent God. This is true however loudly it may be denied by those who claim as a sanctified way of life any form of mere hedonistic individualism:

And without God and his grace — without a genuine way to transcend all aspects of our merely mortal and inevitably doomed existence, not just our sexual appetites — the judgment of homosexuality as immoral will indeed appear as but a hypocritical cruelty to individual homosexuals. It can only appear unjust to deprive individuals of such instinctive pleasures as life can offer and replace this loss with nothing. In the face of this kind of condemnation, most sinners will only be driven more deeply into their sin — ragefully, self-righteously, and understandably.

Psychologically, the keenest solution to the problem of guilt — and to the problem of how the guilt and condemnation of self or others drives us ever more deeply into doing the very things that make us guilty — does not lie in the biological, social, or psychoanalytic direction of “analyzing.” We cannot eliminate guilt by merely seeing through it to its supposed origins, convinced that we have thereby dissolved it into nothingness. That way leads inevitably to personal and social decay. Rather the solution lies in maintaining conviction of our sin, and yet, in a seeming paradox, understanding that the judgment can be lifted. Paul describes this state as follows:

11. To Treat or Not to Treat

In May 1994, the day was typically hot and muggy in Washington, D.C. As delegates from local chapters nationwide of the American Psychiatric Association made their way indoors, they were startled. All about them stood rows of protesters holding placards, chanting their objections to what would take place inside.

Protests themselves are not startling; nowadays they are routine. What was extraordinary this time was the nature of the protest. For here were large numbers of men and women who identified themselves as ex-gays furious at the attempt by the gay lobby in the APA to prevent psychiatrists from helping homosexuals change. It is perhaps a sad comment that, in the wake of the corruption of scientific objectivity first initiated by this same gay lobby twenty years before, these protesting former homosexuals would indeed significantly influence the vote that was about to take place, helping to defer for at least one more year the cruel attempt to quash all who help homosexuals leave the “lifestyle” behind.

If homosexuality was once a taboo, what is taboo now is the notion that homosexuals can be healed, if they want to. Few articles in the popular press ever mention programs that aim to reverse homosexuality; those that do are derisive and uncritically repeat activists’ claims that the programs are rarely successful. And almost no articles in the professional literature discuss the treatment of homosexuality as homosexuality. Rather, they discuss the treatment of homosexuals as a class of individuals who require a special approach, in the manner of cross-cultural psychiatry or “feminist” psychotherapy.[165] Treatment, if there is any, simply helps people adjust to their homosexuality and cope with the suffering caused by their “internalized homophobia.”

Is this an exaggeration? For the years 1992, 1993, and 1994 (well after the APA decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders) the Medline database refers to 1,581 articles on homosexuality. Only two discuss the treatment of homosexuality. One, published in the Journal of Homosexuality, is a historical review of Freud’s attitudes toward the treatment of homosexuality;[166] the other — from France — is the only one to discuss the treatment of undesired homosexuality.[167]

For the years 1975 through 1979 (the early years immediately after the APA decision) there were forty-two articles on the treatment of homosexuality, including articles that followed up on significant long-term success (61 percent) in sexual reorientation.[168] This is true even though during these years there were fewer than half the total number of journals published than from 1992 to 1994.

Earlier still, between 1966 and 1974, prior to the APA decision, there was an even smaller pool of journals, yet Medline lists 1,021 articles on the treatment of homosexuality. By 1976, the changing mores had so affected objective scientific research and treatment that one expert published a critical evaluation of the nature and meaning of the radical changes in sexual customs and behavior and their clinical consequences: “[M]any of the[se] revolutionary changes demonstrate a complete and disastrous disregard of knowledge gained through painstaking psychodynamic and psychoanalytic investigations over the past 75 years.”[169]

Since the professional normalization of homosexuality, we no longer hear of the many successful programs that continue to “cure” homosexuality nor of the deeply moving stories of those who have successfully negotiated this difficult passage. We are all much the poorer for this censorship, for the inner journeys of these people are revealing for us all, regardless of our own particular form of distress.

In fact, many groups of substantial size across the country do “treat” homosexuality with remarkable success. As they are not formal research institutions, however, there is little “hard” data — only first-hand experience and reports. This fact helps hostile skeptics remain determinedly ignorant of their successes. Many, though not all, such programs are ministries, and their approach is unabashedly based on faith. In the light of our preceding discussion, we should not be surprised at the benefits of faith in helping to achieve success in any area that touches on the “snare” of compulsive behavior and addiction.

The Secret of AA’s Success

For a long time, a similar divide of ignorance was true of attitudes to alcoholism. Mainstream mental-health professionals treated alcoholics with the same method they used for almost all other conditions: insight-oriented psychotherapy. The twelve-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a lay organization, had been around for nearly sixty years but was ignored. Professionals commonly derided it as a quasi-religious cult.[170]

But two forces converged to cause a dramatic shift in the attitude of professionals, who now routinely consider Alcoholics Anonymous an essential component in “recovery.” First was the eventual acknowledgment that limitless individual psychotherapy rarely helped alcoholics stop drinking; they merely became psychotherapized alcoholics. Second was the fact that insurance companies began to examine results to determine whether to reimburse. Although far from perfect, Alcoholics Anonymous was the only approach that could claim a meaningful success rate — 30 percent,[171] compared to around 1 percent for psychotherapy.[172] Nonetheless, professional literature rarely examines why AA is so successful.[173] The program is simply accepted because it works — and because insurance companies insist.

A central feature of AA is that three of its twelve “steps” encourage people to acknowledge their own personal powerlessness and therefore dependency on a “Higher Power”: “God as we understand him” in AA’s original formulation. Most people with experience of AA insist that “religious surrender” — whatever it may be called — is the key element to recovery in AA.

Though no formal studies have been performed to confirm it, the same is true of ministries that successfully treat homosexuality. But then, only now, sixty years after the founding of AA, have such studies been performed with respect to alcoholism:

The results of this study suggested that agreement with AA’s first three steps can be measured, … correlates with number of sober days posttreatment, … and provides support for AA’s contention that total surrender to one’s powerlessness over alcohol is part of the process of achieving abstinence.[174]

The first three steps in AA are:

1. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Replace the word “alcohol” above with the word “sin” and we have the essence of the Judeo-Christian view of man.

Adam’s Curse

Note, too, that the various twelve-step groups speak of “recovery” rather than “cure.” This distinction points to an issue we have been skirting so far — namely, what does “treatment” mean?

Early on we accepted one aspect of the APA decision to consider homosexuality no longer a form of “mental illness.” The reason was simple: Without the demonstration of some kind of brain abnormality, the term “illness” means nothing more than “undesirable.”

Later we discussed the possibility that homosexuality is a kind of illness, perhaps genetic or at least intrauterine in nature. But we dismissed that possibility too, because the evidence of the innateness of homosexuality is too weak. There are simply too many other factors for us to make such an assertion. In any event, if homosexuality were predominantly innate and biological and we also considered it an illness, its “treatment” would likewise be biological, if one could be found.

We have also emphasized that, viewed from the perspective of the world as it is now, homosexual impulses are not unnatural. Quite the opposite. The biblical standard of morality is unnatural. How then can we speak of “treatment” at all? But if we don’t, do we not come perilously close to the gay activist argument that homosexuality is not an illness, but is normal, and therefore to try to “treat” it — as though it were abnormal and an illness — is unethical?

The truth is that the mislabeling of homosexuality as “an illness,” like the similar mislabeling of other features of human character, has introduced confusion into our thinking. For, like many other aspects of human character, homosexuality is not an illness except insofar as “illness” is meant metaphorically, referring to the spiritual condition of our human nature after the Fall. As T. S. Eliot expressed it in his Four Quartets:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.[175]

Psychology has misused this metaphor of the illness of a human body to capture an essential quality of spiritual decay and death — spiritual “illness.” It sought to cast out “spirit” altogether from its secularized conception of reality, yet was forced to give a name to the suffering it was attempting to “cure.”

But what we can see today is that the psychology and psychoanalysis of the past hundred years set for themselves an impossible task: to cure a condition, using medical methods, that is not a medical illness but a spiritual state. As a spiritual condition, homosexuality may be considered an “illness” only because we speak of spiritual matters by using material “things” as metaphors. Indeed, we must, for the spirit is no “thing” at all.

Further, the mistake mental health professions have made with respect to homosexuality is the same mistake they have made with many other conditions of human character that are spiritual rather than medical illnesses. There are several lessons to learn.

First, homosexuality points to the reality of our spiritual life in the same way that all sin, once acknowledged as such, points to our spiritual life. We recognize that although they are not really “illnesses,” many of the conditions so labeled by the mental-health professions are nonetheless sources of profound suffering. This is true even though there is no strictly scientific rationale for this suffering. Thus we become aware of a dimension of life that transcends the material, that “man does not live on bread alone.” The mislabeling of homosexuality and other spiritual conditions as “illness,” like the mislabeling of “health,” obscures the reality of the immaterial spirit and subtly misdirects our longing for God into various aspects of the material creation.

Second, homosexuality should not be treated as unique among the varieties of human spiritual illness. “Homosexuals” are simply people; in what truly matters they are no different from anyone else, especially in their healing, the current rhetoric notwithstanding. Put differently, people should not be grouped according to the varieties of their sinfulness, neither by those who indulge nor those who criticize them. After all, sin is but our lowest common denominator: All sinners share sin, and all men are sinners. In acknowledging our own compulsions — we each have our own particular habits and flaws; these are the shadow-side of our God-given individuality — we recognize ourselves in others. Then we can begin the process of humbling our prideful isolation, avoiding the extremes of both judgmentalism and of communal indulgence.

Third, homosexuality underscores in its own sphere what is clear from many others: There is always an element of compulsion in what the Bible terms “sin.” In learning that such a thing as spiritual suffering exists, in carefully distinguishing it from other forms of suffering, especially those caused by physical illnesses, and in recognizing that all spiritual suffering hovers around what God has taught us to call “sin,” we have identified another factor common to all spiritual suffering: compulsion. Sin truly is compulsion.

Thus in the act of breaking loose from psychology’s literalized application of the word “illness,” we identify a whole class of nonillnesses that nonetheless make people sick at heart. This is what the Bible calls “idolatry,” the central sin that wrought the destruction of ancient Israel — as it does of all people and nations — and requires for its “healing” a saving God.

True Compassion

Nonetheless, the term “illness” is used widely in the twelve-step movement to apparent good effect. There alcoholics (and other “holics”) learn to step away from the moral condemnation that is characteristic of many nonalcoholics’ attitudes toward alcoholics — and of their own attitude toward themselves. For no one is so disgusted with an alcoholic as he is with himself, especially as he emerges from his drunken stupor. This phenomenon parallels the shame many homosexuals feel upon emerging from a sexual binge — even those who claim no ambivalence over the fact of their homosexuality.

Rooted as Alcoholics Anonymous is in the psychological principles that derive from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, it is not surprising that AA should be keenly sensitive to people’s most typical initial reaction to awareness of their sinfulness: They sin all the more. This is why AA has picked up on the “disease” model — to minimize guilt and therefore reduce relapse.

Until 1973, that was the common approach to homosexuality as well. This strategy fosters two typical responses to the problem raised above — the way guilt leads to a worsening of the very condition that produces it — one in the alcoholic himself, the second in others around him.

The alcoholic’s response goes like this: “I am suffering from an illness, rather than a morally defective choice, so I needn’t feel guilty. And because I am now not guilt-ridden, I needn’t rebel against that guilt by insisting on my right to continue as I was. I am now free to acknowledge that I have a problem because I have redefined the problem in such a way as to make it morally neutral.” Nonetheless, this redefinition is not quite right: because unlike true illnesses, there is an important element of volition present every time an alcoholic decides to pick up a drink or not to.

The response of others goes like this: “If what he suffers from is an illness rather than the result of a morally defective choice, then I will find it much easier to feel compassion for him — since I have such a hard time feeling compassion for people who make defective moral choices. He will therefore not feel judged and condemned by me. Incidentally, this will also make it easier for him not to rebel.”

We need to examine the logic of this second response too. Why will thinking of someone’s problem as an illness make it easier for us to feel compassion? We see the answer immediately if we come at it the other way around: Why is it so difficult to feel compassion for somebody who gets into trouble through the choices he makes? The answer lies in our conviction that we are superior to him in this. This is the prevalent form of denial from time immemorial: the denial of our own moral depravity. In other words, when we label someone as suffering from an illness, we actually make it easier for us to avoid examining ourselves. By turning so intense a spotlight on it, gay activists have turned to their (political) advantage the element of condescension that so easily creeps into an illness model of homosexuality.

But we must never forget that addictions and deeply embedded compulsive behavior patterns differ from true illnesses in that their progressive alteration of the brain is directed by choices, especially initial choices. They are therefore reinforced by the progressive erosion of the ability to choose differently. The capacity for moral choice is slowly undermined as the compulsion tightens its grip.

The difficulty of altering long-standing compulsions, and the fact that they become deeply rooted in the tissue structure of the brain, do seem to give these conditions a quality that is “medical” or “illness-like.” (And indeed, some compulsions may be weakened, even if not entirely broken, by certain medications.) AA sometimes also loosely refers to alcoholism as an “allergy,” thereby suggesting (imprecisely) that some people have an innate predisposition to it.

Another problem with characterizing compulsions as illnesses is that the term obscures the sinful, idolatrous character of these conditions. Of course, this is in keeping with our secularized culture. We have lost a clear conception of idolatry because we have lost that which opposes idolatry and gives it its significance: our relationship to God. But in ridding ourselves of God, we are not more free but less. For now as we fall into one idolatry or another, we lack even an idea as to what is happening to us, and why we are therefore so unhappy.

Thus the compulsions are neither simple choices nor true illnesses. They are a category unto themselves that includes elements of both choice and disease. They are a process, a way or path by which a life — a free, moral life — is progressively, not all at once, undone. It is this erosion of moral capacity that makes these preeminently spiritual conditions. For if there were no morality to consider, what difference would it make what a man did?

And this of course is the great modern “solution” to guilt: Define it away. “Homosexuality is not a problem,” gay activism proclaims, “the problem is the defining of homosexuality as a problem.” Gratefully we assent, not noticing that we do so because we thereby relieve ourselves of the unacknowledged burdens of our own sins. Of course, this “solution” will not work with alcoholism; its destructive effects are simply too widely known. When used as a defense by individual alcoholics (as it commonly is) it is rightly called “denial.”

The Apostle Paul explains the way out of the impasse — the necessity of being at once aware of one’s sinful nature and of being forgiven for it. This seeming paradox, Paul further tells us, is only possible through an atoning Messiah.

This, of course, is orthodox Christian belief. But in part, at least, it was also once believed by Jews. Prior to the destruction of the second Temple in 70 A.D., complete atonement was accomplished through the repeated, sacrificial death of pure, unblemished animals. And Jews, too, looked (and still look) forward to an era of salvation when the power of sin in the world would be definitively conquered by a Messiah. The earliest Jewish Christians, however, believed that the two — atoning sacrifice and salvation — come together in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Often if a man becomes clearly aware of his true state — whatever his particular idolatry — and then turns, resolved to escape the grip of the compulsion, he finds that he cannot do so without enormous personal effort. It requires far more pain and time and suffering than he ever could have anticipated, as well as a humbling dependence on the love and assistance of others — and of God. Many never find their way to such humility and thus remain trapped forever. This is the cruel truth of sin and its tragedy. It is not simply “wrong”; it is that it seems benign at the start but turns out in the end to be Faust’s bargain with the devil.

What is it then, that stands most firmly in the way of healing? Is it the “leopard’s spots” that cannot be changed? In fact not. For were that the case then we would all best abandon hope of moral betterment in any domain and turn our mechanical selves over to the unconstrained pursuit of pleasure. No the greatest obstacle to healing is pride. On the other hand, “a broken and contrite heart,” the God who heals will not despise.

And what then is the ground of true compassion? It is not the attempt to redefine sin out of existence. This is not compassion but guilty sentimentality. In fact, it is even worse than that, for in the name of being nice we hinder another’s true self-understanding and thus his hope for healing as well. True compassion for another requires acknowledgment of what his sin consists in, but coupled to an unwillingness to condemn the person. To do this, we must unflinchingly acknowledge our own sinfulness. Anything less is hypocrisy — seeing the speck in the eye of the other when our own vision is blinded by a beam.

We understand ourselves best, and gain a true understanding of human nature, when we fully acknowledge our own nature — our own unique configuration not just of gifts but of sins. More importantly, we also obtain a realistic and more truly humane understanding of how difficult it is to refrain from sinning — each from his own.

12. Secular Treatments

One might not think so because of the powerful conspiracy of silence, but many methods for healing homosexuality exist and they all demonstrate varying degrees of success. The purpose of this chapter and the two that follow is not to present a detailed description and critique of these various approaches. It is rather to demonstrate that different kinds of assistance can be found. This chapter examines secular methods of healing homosexuality; chapter 13 examines spiritual approaches and chapter 14 the relationship between homosexuality and Judaism.

For many people who are themselves secular, only secular approaches will be acceptable. The record of purely secular “treatments” for homosexuality is far better than activists and the popular press would lead us to believe. But, in a parallel to AA, it is perhaps not as good as the record of those who approach the problem by attending to its spiritual roots as well. The fact that not all methods are successful, and that no method is successful for everyone, has been distorted by activists into the claim that no method is helpful for anyone. It is a tragedy that so many professionals have accepted this distortion. The simple truth is that, like most methods in psychiatry and psychotherapy, the treatment of homosexuality has evolved out of eighty years of clinical experience, demonstrating approximately the same degree of success as, for example, the psychotherapy of depression.

Psychoanalysis

As discussed earlier, formal psychoanalysis as a whole has had an at best modest track record in treating homosexuality. As homosexual activists point out, Freud himself did not believe that homosexuality was “analyzable.” But neither did he consider it an illness. What he did think was that the “homosexual solution,” as he saw it, had certain disadvantages as a solution to the conflicts of the Oedipal phase of development. He also believed that some homosexuals could be changed — but not by classical psychoanalysis alone. As one gay-activist researcher recently noted,

Although [Freud] did not believe homoeroticism to be an inherent impediment to human accomplishment and fulfillment neither did he see it as having the full value of heteroeroticism. For these reasons he did not altogether rule out the desirability or possibility of conversion therapy for some individuals even if he did not believe that it could be psychoanalysis alone that could redirect sexual orientation.[176]

To the dismay of activists, many classically trained Freudian psychoanalysts quietly continue to treat homosexuals today, modifying their approach as Freud suggested. Richard Isay, M.D., a homosexual activist and psychoanalyst, has chaired two APA committees and has used his influence to link their activities: the Committee on Abuse and Misuse of Psychiatry in the U.S. and the Committee on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Issues. In frequent letters to the APA Psychiatric News, Isay has accused psychoanalysts of never succeeding in changing homosexuals but invariably trying to force such change on them.

In an attempt to refute Isay’s contention, Houston MacIntosh, M.D., a Washington, D.C., analyst, sent out a survey to 422 colleagues asking whether they had successfully helped homosexuals change and also asking them to respond to the statement, “A homosexual patient in psychoanalysis for whatever reason can and should be changed to heterosexuality — agree or disagree.” Two hundred eighty-five analysts responded (a very high response rate for such a survey) concerning a total of 1215 homosexual patients. Of these, 23 percent changed to heterosexuality and 84 percent benefited “significantly.” But only two analysts agreed that homosexuals “should be changed” regardless of their wishes.[177]

Thus it is likely that many analysts continue to treat homosexuality, but do not wish to become embroiled, even indirectly, in the politicized public debate. They are possibly intimidated as well by Isay’s position on the Committee on Abuse and Misuse of Psychiatry and his dangerous histrionics: “Efforts to change homosexuals to heterosexuals, I believe, represent one of the most flagrant and frequent abuses of psychiatry in America today.”[178]

But some analysts and analytically oriented psychotherapists have openly opposed the activists’ assertions. In response to an ongoing attempt by gay activists within the APA to make it a violation of professional ethics to treat homosexuality (even when the patient wishes it), a number of professionals formed an organization called NARTH — the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality. Since its recent founding NARTH has rapidly grown to nearly four hundred members nationwide. Its purpose is to promote collegial interchange and honest public education in an increasingly hostile, closed-minded and thought-controlled environment.[179]

One of its founders is the most prominent medical psychoanalyst active in treating homosexuality: Charles Socarides, M.D., a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Recently, Socarides has been involved in a heated exchange of letters with Isay in the APA press on the subject of homosexual change. Isay has openly asserted that although perhaps some psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who claim to have helped homosexuals change are naively deluded, most are bigoted, dishonest, and abusive. He has asserted that all claims of homosexual change are spurious; the literature on such change he dismisses as lies. In an attempt to turn the tables on medical concern over the lack of aggressive measures to contain AIDS through behavioral change (male homosexual behavior being the single largest risk factor for HIV infection), Isay wrote in a letter to the New York Times that “homophobia … is a psychological abnormality. Those afflicted should be quarantined and denied employment.”[180]

The Official Actions section of the major professional publication of the APA, the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association, recently published the following from Dr. Isay’s Abuse and Misuse of Psychiatry committee:

Drs. Socarides and Benjamin Kaufmann, officers of NARTH, responded:

The contrast between APA politics and clinical experience could not be sharper. Edward Glover, a prominent British psychoanalyst, recently took part in a Portman Clinic survey on short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic approaches to homosexual change. The surveyors concluded:

Psychotherapy [of homosexuality] appears to be unsuccessful in only a small number of patients of any age in whom a long habit is combined with psychopathic traits, heavy drinking, or lack of desire to change.[183]

Psychotherapy

Another founder of NARTH is Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D. He is the author of a recent, comprehensive text on the treatment of homosexuality called Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach.[184] Nicolosi has worked individually with over two hundred homosexual patients. He reports:

Today, 70 percent of my caseload is men with unwanted homosexual feelings. I’ve developed a therapeutic technique which, unlike traditional psychoanalytic therapy, is pro-active and more involving of the therapist…. [M]ore than an identity problem, homosexuality is a disordered way of being-in-the-world. Gay is a false place, a place of hiding.[185]

It is worth highlighting that Nicolosi’s approach, which synthesizes and advances much prior research, departs from strict psychoanalytic technique. This is consistent with what Freud himself predicted would be necessary, and with what many other therapists have found who treat homosexuality. It is consistent, too, with what clinical experience has generally shown to be necessary when treating other problems that are likewise related to deep and early childhood wounds.

In the same way that modern therapists will help their patients work closely with AA in the treatment of alcoholism, so too is Nicolosi’s approach one that acknowledges the benefits of ministries in assisting those struggling to emerge from homosexuality. His theoretical framework for treatment in the psychotherapeutic setting remains strictly secular, however (except to the extent that the selective integration of certain Jungian ideas could perhaps be considered “spiritual”).

In terms of origins, Nicolosi’s overarching explanation for many (but not all) instances of homosexuality is that it is stimulated by severe problems in relating to the same-sex parent. Speaking of homosexuality in men, he describes it as often:

More Impressive than Realized

As the following tables illustrate, homosexuality has long been recognized as treatable. The tables include a selection of reports dating from 1930 to 1986 that discuss a variety of treatment methods.[187] These tables are but a representative cross section of the entire sixty-year literature that activists condemn as wholesale “lies.” Recall that in the eight years between 1966 and 1974 alone, just the Medline database — which excludes many psychotherapy journals — listed over a thousand articles on the treatment of homosexuality.

Note that the composite of these results gives an overall success rate of over 50 percent — where success is defined as “considerable” to “complete” change. These reports clearly contradict claims that change is flatly impossible. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that all the existing evidence suggests strongly that homosexuality is quite changeable. Most psychotherapists will allow that in the treatment of any condition, a 30 percent success rate may be anticipated. An implicit precondition of all such change, not just with regard to homosexuality, is commitment to that change on the part of both patient and therapist.

One of the last articles on homosexual change in a major journal was published in 1976 (before the chill effected by the APA) and is not included in the above sample. The researcher examined carefully not only the immediate results of combined behavioral and psychotherapeutic interventions, but long-term follow up. The author found:

Of 49 patients … 31 (63 percent) were contracted for follow-up. The average period since the end of treatment was 4 years. Nineteen subjects (61 percent) have remained exclusively heterosexual, whereas nine (29 percent) have had homosexual intercourse. Heterosexual intercourse was reported in 28 (90 percent), including the previous nine subjects. Three (10 percent) subjects have had neither homo nor heterosexual intercourse.[188]

In 1984, the Masters and Johnson program similarly reported a five-year follow-up success rate of 65 percent (included above).[189]

Medication

Of all potential therapeutic approaches to homosexuality, a pharmacological approach would be the most politically sensitive. One reason is that pharmacological treatment — especially successful treatment — seems to imply that homosexuality is a true illness. This implication does not necessarily follow but it would not be an unreasonable conclusion to draw.

A second reason is that pharmacological intervention has long been used to treat the so-called paraphilias, the technical name for perversions. Not only do activists take offense at the term, they do not like being lumped together with pedophiles, exhibitionists, fetishists, and so on, even though “paraphilia” is the diagnostic category into which homosexuality was last placed by the APA.

A third reason is that the use of medication to treat the paraphilias — mainly pedophilia — has long been confined to the use of anti-androgen compounds, which suppress testicular function and thus sexual drive itself. It has thus been “tainted” by a long-standing ethical wrangle over the appropriateness of using such drugs under any circumstances. (These compounds are most commonly used when perverse sexual activities have created legal problems.) Recall that although the largest number of pedophiles are heterosexual, by far the largest proportion are homosexual, as was noted before. Furthermore, as the DSM-IV itself notes:

The recidivism [relapse] rate for individuals with pedophilia involving a preference for males is roughly twice that for those who prefer females…. The course is usually chronic, especially in those attracted to males.[190]

A diagnosis in which medication would be prescribed is generally one that meets the standards set forth in the DSM. As there is now no diagnosis for homosexuality, there tends to be no formal research on it, let alone research involving the administration of medication. To do so would invite the accusation that one is knowingly administering medications to normal individuals.

Timing has played an ironic role in forestalling the application of such research to homosexuality. The removal of homosexuality from the DSM roughly coincided with the development of new classes of drugs that have proven remarkably effective for many disorders, for example depression. These agents have been so effective, in fact, that the new school of “biological psychiatry” has almost entirely thrown over the dominance that psychoanalysis enjoyed for decades in academic departments of psychiatry.

In the past five years these same new drugs have also proved effective in treating or at least mitigating the perversions, and they lack the controversial effects of the drugs that suppress the male sex hormone. Indeed, because they are mostly anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications, they are prompting a reevaluation of the perversions themselves. These are now sometimes thought to be not primary sexual disorders, as they were long considered, but the result of a lifelong pattern of relieving anxiety and depression through various forms of sexual expression (consistent with older psychoanalytic ideas.)

This formulation could be — and has been — applied equally to homosexuality. Thus Glover (the British psychoanalyst cited above) noted the significance of social anxiety in treating homosexuals.[191]

Although research on the use of medications to change homosexuality would be quite difficult to accomplish in the current environment, there are nonetheless some indications that such an approach might help. One consists of a small number of instances of unplanned, unanticipated, and (at first) unwanted change in homosexuality after medication was prescribed for another condition altogether; the other follows as an implication from using certain drugs to treat those perversions that are still accepted as such and routinely treated.

Thus in January of 1993 two authors reported a case of “Adventitious Change in Homosexual Behavior During Treatment of Social Phobia with Phenelzine.”[192] The man who sought treatment was a painfully shy, awkward individual who was extremely anxious about the impression he made on others. He avoided speaking in groups and was prone to extreme blushing and anxiety, which he often controlled with alcohol. The authors describe him as:

a homosexual man whose severe social phobia … responded … to … phenelzine. During treatment, however, there was an unexpected change in his sexual orientation.

Upon seeking treatment at age twenty-three, the patient himself

stated that he was “gay,” that he was content with this, and that he did not want his sexual orientation to be a treatment issue. He had been aware of his homosexuality since his mid-teens and was sexually active exclusively with homosexual males. He was not aroused by females, and had never experienced heterosexual intercourse, as his erotic fantasies involved males only.

The patient was placed on 75 milligrams per day of phenelzine. Four weeks later he reported being:

more outgoing, talkative and comfortable in social situations. He spoke spontaneously in groups without blushing.

But he also:

reported a positive, pleasurable experience of meeting and dating a woman. During the next two months, he began dating females exclusively, reportedly enjoying heterosexual intercourse and having no sexual interest in males. He expressed a desire for a wife and family, and his sexual fantasies became entirely heterosexual.

We may well wonder what has happened here. The fact that a medication caused this change, especially when there was no desire to change, might suggest that at least in this instance homosexuality was caused by a biochemical abnormality similar to that in depression or the anxiety disorders. The authors conclude that:

Social phobia may be a hidden contributing factor in some instances of homosexual behavior and that phenelzine … might facilitate heterosexual activity.

The author’s speculations about the relationship between homosexuality and social anxiety are widely supported by clinicians who routinely treat homosexuality. And the young man’s own assessment as to what had happened to him is especially instructive:

In retrospect Mr. A decided that the combination of his anxiety when approaching and meeting people, the teasing rejection by heterosexual males [which he had reported in childhood] and the comfortable acceptance by homosexual males who pursued and courted him had helped convince him of his homosexuality. Passive homosexual behavior allowed him to avoid the severe anxiety experienced when initiating courtship.

Note that he allowed himself these introspective reflections about the role of his childhood only after he had been convinced that his homosexuality was indeed not permanent. In line with this man’s conclusions, Nicolosi observes:

Troublesome fears seem more common to homosexual than heterosexual men. One young man reported … a fear … about not going fast enough for the driver he saw behind him…. Another said, “I’ve got this fear of tall bridges or tall freeway overpasses. I get worried I might pass out….” Another client said, “I have this phobia with the phone….” One frequently found fear … is what gay men call “pee shy,” that is, having difficulty urinating in public restrooms…. Of seven men I’ve seen who reported this problem, six were homosexual.[193]

A related event was noted in the earlier literature:

A case report is presented where homosexuality apparently “spontaneously remitted” … while the patient underwent treatment for stuttering. The change in sexual orientation [was] … possibly … induced through generalization effects from treatment of the relevant phobic aspects of the stuttering problem to the associated social aspects of the sexual problem.[194]

When viewed from a purely psychological standpoint, these symptoms (in men) are thought to derive from inner conflicts that developed in the context of a poor relationship with an absent or bullying father. From a biological perspective, an innately heightened anxiety response would make these individuals more likely to respond badly to such a father and therefore to develop anxiety disorders later in life — whether or not homosexual. Such an explanation including biology and environment is more sound than a model that points to only biology or only the environment.

It is important not to overvalue individual case studies. Although they open up a line of speculation consistent with other observations about homosexuality, the vast majority of homosexual men who use antidepressants for depression or anxiety disorders do not change their sexual behavior. Instances such as these also suggest — as noted earlier — that there may be many different “homosexualities.” The underlying causes of some may be more responsive to treatment involving medication than others. These findings should not be taken to mean that men and women who want to leave homosexuality should immediately begin taking medication. But it should be taken as a plea to the disinterested research community to begin adequately controlled investigations in the hopes of helping those who struggle.

Anxiety, Antidepressants, and “Addictions”

Many men and women — including those who are predominantly heterosexual — report that homosexual experiences lack the anxiety usually associated with heterosexual courtship and intimacy. (Psychotherapy of this “opposite-sex ambivalence” forms the basis of many treatment programs.[195]) This lack of anxiety contributes to the ease and disinhibition that is characteristic of same-sex practices, including promiscuity. Furthermore, when sex takes place exclusively among males in particular, both (or all) partners share the typically polymorphous and interpersonally detached style of male sexuality in its unconstrained native form. If the normal anxiety associated with opposite-sex relations is heightened by other factors — whether environmental or innate or both — same-sex relations will become that much more attractive.

Findings in the treatment of paraphilias likewise suggest that a mood disturbance with significant anxiety might figure prominently in an early turn toward homosexuality. Thus numerous studies have demonstrated that antidepressants can diminish or even eliminate long-standing perversions.[196] Furthermore, these same drugs have also been found to be effective in treating those sexual compulsions or obsessions not categorized as perversions.[197] (The distinction here is between, for example, a compulsive need for exposing oneself, which is a perversion, by contrast to a man’s compulsive but heterosexual need for prostitutes or an obsessional fantasy about them.)

Some of the specific conditions that have responded to treatment through medication include pedophilia, transvestic fetishism, persistent paraphilic rape fantasies, compulsive paraphilic masturbation, cross-dressing, and exhibitionism. All the conditions share the following two features: First is that the content, although individualized, is not particularly important (from a pharmacologic standpoint). What is important, rather, is the obsessive, compulsive, or addictive form of sexual life. Second is that the condition lies outside of generally accepted norms of sexual behavior.

These two features, in fact, are most commonly found together: that is, paraphilic behaviors tend also to be compulsive. The perversions, sexual addictions, compulsions, and obsessions thus end up being categorized and treated as illnesses rather than simply as alternative lifestyles.[198] This is especially because they interfere with the capacity to form relationships, especially with members of the opposite sex, or are directly harmful to others, as in the case of pedophilia.

A broad understanding is beginning to emerge from the current research on the treatment of the paraphilias and sexual addictions through medication. This is that paraphilic, addictive, and compulsive sexual fantasies or behaviors are all means of temporarily reducing anxiety and associated depression. They are, in other words, self-soothing responses to internal distress.[199]

These responses, being oriented toward the self, automatically create distance from others even when another person is involved. (The other person is not being related to; he or she is being used.) And because of the power of the sexual impulse, initial attempts at self-soothing quickly become self-reinforcing and self-generating — and therefore obsessive, compulsive, or addictive. Thus the beneficial effects on all these behaviors of treatment with certain medications may be closely related to the generally inhibiting effect of these agents on the compulsive nature of gratification-seeking. That is, perverse behavior may be engaged in less frequently because the overall level of anxiety, hence of need for sexual relief, is dampened.

This addictive quality is yet further enhanced by the fact that although the depression is initially alleviated by the sexual quest and the anxiety by reaching the goal of the quest — orgasm — the orgasm itself actually causes a postorgasmic increase in depression.[200] This vicious cycle is no different, in essence, than the reinforcement of cocaine addiction caused by the post-high crash or alcoholism by post-binge self-loathing.

Individuals who are prone to greater depression or heightened anxiety, or both, are thus at greater risk to develop a sexual perversion, compulsion, obsession, or addiction as a method of alleviating their distress than are those who are not. When we consider that there is no objective distinction between homosexuality and the other perversions, we can easily see how the development of a homosexual “habit” fits into this framework. In fact, some paraphilias are being successfully treated with fluoxetine (Prozac). Here, too, sexual reorientation is reported to have occurred incidentally.[201]

Indeed, we have come across this interconnection of predisposition, anxiety, and behavioral problem before: It is the same model that accounts for the potential genetic component to alcoholism. In fact, if we use a wide-angle lens to survey the whole of the mental-health landscape, we can see a large-scale pattern emerging. Namely, that all of the behaviors on the compulsive/addictive spectrum represent mere variants of a response pathway for the self-soothing of inner distress. A predisposition to depression and/or anxiety will not insure but will increase the risk that individuals will find their way into one or more such self-soothing habits, some sexual, many not.

Consistent with this hypothesis is the phenomenon that many such individuals — perhaps most — adopt multiple methods of self-soothing. Thus, for example, alcoholism, drug abuse, promiscuous sex, and binge-eating are commonly found together in women diagnosed as “bulimic.” All these behaviors improve in response to treatment with antidepressants.

This use of multiple methods of self-soothing is likewise the case among homosexuals. As a group they are characterized not only by a strikingly disproportionate incidence of promiscuity, but also by a much greater incidence than among heterosexuals of alcohol or drug problems as well as of paraphilias.[202] According to the National Gay-Lesbian Health Foundation, drug and alcohol problems are three times greater among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.[203]

Real progress in the treatment of such individuals — regardless of the addictions or compulsions in question — only begins when all routes of self-soothing are effectively closed off. Relapses will, of course, occur. Put slightly differently: Change in all these behaviors can only begin to happen when all routes of soothing that depend on actions of the self turning to itself are closed off — and the turn is made instead to others and to God.

13. Christian Treatments

Secular psychology is far more effective in helping homosexuals to change than most people think and many professionals would like us to know — or know themselves. Nonetheless, even among those professionals who understand that homosexual change is possible, there is too little appreciation for either the spiritual dimension of homosexuality or for the spiritual dimension of its “cure.”

This shortsightedness is not surprising given the secular orientation of most mental health professionals. A review of over two thousand research articles in four major psychiatric journals between the years 1978 and 1982 revealed only fifty-nine that included a religious variable of any sort. This variable was usually single and one-dimensional — such as “On a scale of 1 to 10, how religious would you say you are?” Other available religious research was seldom referred to. The authors conclude dryly that, “The academic knowledge and skills needed to evaluate religion have not been absorbed into the psychiatric domain.”[204]

With this in mind, we are not surprised to find that the secular literature on homosexual change tends to ignore the dramatic effects of religious faith and belief. Consider the following findings from an article — of a type all too rare — in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

The authors evaluated 11 white men who claimed to have changed sexual orientation from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality through participation in a Pentecostal church fellowship. Religious ideology and a religious community offered the subjects a “folk therapy” experience that was paramount in producing their change. On the average their self-identification as homosexual occurred at age 11, their change to heterosexual identification occurred at age 23, and their period of heterosexual identification at the time of this study was 4 years. The authors report 8 men became emotionally detached from homosexual identity in both behavior and intrapsychic process; 3 men were functionally heterosexual with some evidence of neurotic conflict. On the Kinsey 7-point sexual orientation scale all subjects manifested major before-after changes. Corollary evidence suggests that the phenomenon of substantiated change in sexual orientation without explicit treatment and/or long-term psychotherapy may be more common than previously thought.[205]

It is this phenomenon that we will explore in this chapter.

The Twelve-Step Approach

Across the country numerous Homosexuals Anonymous (HA) groups have sprung up spontaneously from the grass roots. Although HA is not the main approach to the spiritual healing of homosexuality (as AA is for alcoholism), it is worth discussing in some detail. It provides a “transitional” model that falls between secular psychotherapy and more fully faith-based approaches.

That a twelve (actually fourteen)-step model has arisen to help people deal with homosexuality reflects the important role in homosexuality of compulsive/addictive and self-soothing behaviors. As of yet there are no solid statistics to indicate overall efficacy rates for HA as there are for AA, although a major study is currently underway. But HA seems to be approximately where AA was twenty or thirty years ago. The major testament to its current efficacy is its continued existence and growth, which is impressive in the teeth of the public campaign to normalize homosexuality, a campaign never waged on behalf of alcoholism.

HA welcomes individuals who actively live the homosexual life as well as those who have committed themselves to abstinence as a precondition to conversion. As in AA, individuals who are uncertain that they even have a problem suffer a much higher rate of relapse than do those who are convinced of their need for change. Nonetheless, it is understood that, as with alcohol and all other addictions, abstinence is not the cure, but merely its precondition.

The principle that abstinence is a precondition for successful change is also one of the basic principles of psychodynamic psychotherapy. So clearly was this principle understood and adhered to in the early days of psychoanalysis that, until their treatment was completed, patients were required to agree not to move nor change jobs nor alter their marital status. The treatment was expected to release anxieties that could provoke patients to impulsive, self-destructive acts if they tried to react in any other way than with words.

So long as people allow themselves the habitual, compulsive, self-soothing behavior for which they seek treatment, they will have an escape from the underlying emotional distress that prompts the repeated acting-out in the first place. When they give up the behavior — if need be forcibly — the distress remains. Indeed, if anything, it is now heightened because the usual routes of escape have been sealed. (“To be healed, our sickness must grow worse.”) Only under these somewhat artificial and deliberately more difficult conditions can they now acquire alternative means of dealing with the distress. They learn to turn to others or to God instead of alleviating the distress with alcohol, orgasm, or indeed any form of solipsistic, self-centered soothing.

Within the AA community, alcoholics who have not had a drink for many years still wisely refer to themselves as “recovering,” not as “recovered.” This admirably modest way of describing one’s progress embodies two pieces of folk wisdom.

First is the well-known fact that, unlike many purely medical illnesses, an alcoholic’s problem with alcohol is permanent: He may always be tempted to replace his spouse or his God with a bottle. This is not because it is impossible to change alcoholism, but because we are human. We can erase neither the knowledge that a quick fix is available nor, under sufficient duress, the craving for it.

Second, and more importantly, is the fact that the “problem” with alcoholism is subtler than simply the drinking itself. Properly understood, the act of imbibing alcohol is the outcome of alcoholism, not its cause. The cause of alcoholism lies in a certain attitude: the individual’s heightened temptation and willingness to use alcohol as a solution to the stresses of being human. In Samuel Johnson’s words, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Put differently, alcoholism is an idolatrous solution to the spiritual suffering that is the essence of the human condition.

This is why not drinking is not the solution to alcoholism, but merely the precondition for seeking the solution. One reason is that if the drinking continues, the distress to which it is the response is lessened and even eliminated, at least temporarily. With the distress “solved” (dissolved, really), there is no motivation to seek other solutions except abstractly or while briefly in the grip of post-binge depressive guilt when such motivation is often fruitless. Another reason is that only when alcoholics are not drinking, and keenly aware of the now-free-to-emerge spiritual distress, can they work toward an alternative solution.

HA models itself on AA, substituting homosexual behavior in the place of alcohol. Again, two features are central to its method. One is an acknowledgment of powerlessness over homosexuality — the profound truth of which is, as we have discussed, supported by what we know of how the brain changes in response to experience. The other is the needed dependence on a “Higher Power.” The sense of “cure” within HA is likewise appropriately tempered because no such term is ever used. Rather one is perpetually in “recovery.” This description not only comports with the neurological fact that old habits are never entirely erased — just overwritten with new ones — it also expresses humility in the face of weaknesses, which is a precondition to any spiritual healing.

As with AA, the roots of the HA approach lie deep within the Bible, tapping its view of our common humanity, of our sinful nature, and of our utter dependence on God. Unlike most current AA groups, however, HA still uses recognizably Judeo-Christian language. To the extent that HA embodies a tacit understanding that compulsion is central to homosexuality, HA can be said to be “good psychology.” But likewise, to the extent that it manages this compulsion through “fourteen steps,” it is a useful — if somewhat condensed and simplified — version of traditional Western salvation, and in particular of Christian surrender.

The strength of HA lies in its emphasis on building up self-discipline and mutual accountability among group members. These are indeed important components in the management and treatment of all forms of compulsive and addictive behavior. Nonetheless, they are often insufficient by themselves. As we know from extensive experience in substance-abuse programs, when rigid discipline and accountability are uncoupled from hope, compassion, and love, they often collapse into abrupt episodes of relapse and rebellion. This is especially true with regard to homosexuality. A compulsion whose roots lie deep within the need to be loved and affirmed may be anticipated to maintain an especially firm and subtle grip on the soul.

Exodus International

Exodus International is the name of an umbrella organization representing over two hundred separate ministries nationwide that comprise a wide spectrum of openly religious approaches to the healing of homosexuality. At one end of the spectrum are those that, like HA, tend to emphasize accountability and self-discipline and downplay or are even hostile to direct supernatural intervention. These ministries tend, in general, to have an authoritarian cast to them and, for doctrinal reasons, usually reject psychology or psychotherapy as an adjunct to healing. Activists and the press frequently highlight some of these groups as representative of all ministries to the sexually broken, which they are not.

A particular problem arises with those ministries that lack a clear understanding of the healing process. No matter what the setting, there will always be people who seek to change but are not successful, even after many years of effort. Understandably perhaps, some of these relapse into a vocally gay-activist posture and become hostile toward the ministries they perceive as having failed, or even deluded, them. Mel White, the former evangelical ghost-writer and author of Stranger at the Gate, is a prominent example. The ministries without a solid grasp of healing can only assert that sufferers need to remain chaste, live holy lives, and submit to God’s will. Although there is no gainsaying the truth of this as far as it goes (from a traditional Jewish or Christian perspective), it is also true that without a realistic hope of regeneration and change, many people will fall into hopelessness and despair or into rebellion.

In general the new Catholic catechism happens to fit in well with such groups because it comes close to accepting the claim that homosexuality is not changeable and is therefore a “cross to be borne.” Without mentioning healing, it offers this counsel:

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.[206]

“Courage,” however, the major Catholic ministry to homosexuals, acts within the bounds of the catechism but has reached out both to interdenominational healing ministries and to the charismatic renewal movement within the Roman Catholic church. Both offer the possibility of successful change as well.

At the other end of the spectrum are those ministries that do emphasize healing. Most have arisen out of the charismatic renewal movement and depend on direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. Although these ministries certainly accept the importance of responsible choice, self-discipline, and accountability, they also believe in the possibility of profound and lasting change — regeneration. Most have integrated the insights of depth-psychology (psychology of the unconscious) into their approach, some with great sophistication and discernment. Alien as such a formulation may appear to secularists and others outside the charismatic tradition, this belief in the potential transformation of even extremely intractable problems is repeatedly borne out by experience.

Desert Stream/Living Waters

One of the most successful of the healing ministries operating under the umbrella of Exodus International is Desert Stream, headquartered in Los Angeles and led by Andrew Comiskey, himself a former homosexual. Comiskey also trains leaders to establish and run similar ministries in churches around the country through his Living Waters program.

Comiskey’s book Pursuing Sexual Wholeness[207] provides an overview of a biblical approach to the healing of male and female homosexuality. It offers a compelling and realistic personal testimony to his own difficult journey out of the gay lifestyle into committed marriage and fatherhood.

Comiskey’s insights and principles can be directly applied beyond homosexuality:

… does that healing extend only to those who come out of homosexual backgrounds? Gratefully, no! The struggler begins to recognize in his quest for intimacy and identity the struggle familiar to all…. Some face heterosexual brokenness, others the sterile temptation to isolation. Whatever the specifics, the struggle to emerge as a whole person upheld by whole relationships applies to every man and woman…. “The healing of the homosexual is the healing of all men….” No one is exempt from sexual brokenness — no one is altogether whole in his capacity to love and to be loved. Therefore, no one is exempt from the ever-deepening work of healing that Jesus wants to establish in the sexuality of His people.[208]

A motif that is repeated continually in ministries such as Comiskey’s is that the healing and regeneration process, although perhaps particularly striking in the lives of homosexuals (who become visibly and dramatically different), is applicable in anyone’s life. Those with an open heart and mind who spend time around these ministries learn an important and moving truth: “Homosexuals” are just “us.” The particular nature of each person’s brokenness, while needing to be taken into account in the details of healing, is, in the end, of little significance. Rather the whole person we may be led to become — out of whatever brokenness — is the great and significant matter.

People who come to Desert Stream/Living Waters for help undergo a screening interview prior to participation. Those accepted must be strongly committed to change and in most cases may not give evidence of severe psychopathology. Their personal testimony to the depth of their involvement in the gay lifestyle and their struggles to overcome their homosexuality show that they are not merely preselected heterosexuals who have mistakenly identified themselves as homosexual. The program is expressly designed for people who have committed their lives to Christ and actively desire the healing of their sexuality through the power of the Holy Spirit, but Comiskey reports that an increasing number of those who are not Christians now apply for admission to the program.

On average, about seventy-five to eighty individuals seek admission to each cycle. Of these, twenty or so are refused, primarily because of the nature of their motivation, such as shame in the eyes of others rather than their own clear, inner determination to change. These are frequently highly “religious” individuals who have stifled their homosexual impulses not so much out of inner conviction as in response to the internalized shame-based strictures of the authoritarian churches in which they were raised. Perhaps three or four others decide on their own not to participate. Thus fifty-five people participate in small groups in each thirty-week cycle. Of these, two-thirds are homosexuals and one-third have other sexual addictions. Of the fifty-five who begin, it is rare for more than three to drop out, and often none do.

Comiskey reports that 50 percent of those who start the program complete it with substantial progress out of homosexuality and into heterosexuality; about 33 percent clearly make little or no progress, frequently regressing back into active homosexual behavior upon leaving the program. The outcome for the remainder is uncertain. His long-term experience reveals that approximately 25 percent of the homosexuals in the program marry within eight years and have marriages that last at least as long or longer than the current national average. Many individuals who began the program in the early eighties are getting married only now — a testament to the often slow nature of the healing process. Case studies in his Pursuing Sexual Wholeness movingly illustrate the many twists and turns that this process takes before it can reach a successful conclusion.

Redeemed Life Ministries

Redeemed Life is a ministry to people with all forms of sexual brokenness founded by Mario Bergner, a former homosexual who had been deeply involved in the East Coast gay life. His story, as well as an explication of the combined psychoanalytic and religious principles that guide his ministry, can be found in his moving book, Setting Love in Order.[209]

Bergner notes that as a teenager he made two serious attempts at living a Christian life and foregoing his homosexuality. But because the churches he attended only preached sermons either on the condemnation of homosexuality or on its outright acceptance, he remained unaware of the possibility of sexual redemption. In his words, “For years, I had been caught in the homosexuality-versus-Christianity vice-grip.”[210]

The dominant approach to the treatment of homosexuality today focuses on the critical role of the same-sex parent, as noted above. Bergner’s work, while taking this into account, is more sharply focused on the complementary role played by ambivalence toward the opposite-sex parent in generating homosexuality.

The therapeutic approach in Redeemed Life combines depth-psychology in a primarily group setting with healing prayer. Participants make an eight-month minimum commitment to a small group, which is focused on sexual redemption in Christ. For individuals who continue on and remain committed to the process for the long haul, Bergner reports success rates of over 80 percent.

Pastoral Care Ministries

Pastoral Care Ministries is a healing ministry founded by Leanne Payne, centered in Wheaton, Illinois. Her work has deeply influenced many in the field, including Comiskey and Bergner. Although Payne’s ministry reaches out well beyond “sexual brokenness,” much of it deals specifically with homosexuality and other forms of compulsive sexual behavior.

Healing of Memories

An important influence on Payne’s work is the Healing of Memories movement. Spiritual healing of the body has been associated with Anglicanism and Pentecostalism since the beginning of the charismatic movement early this century; “healing of memories” extends healing to the domain of the mind. Not since the first few centuries of its history has this kind of healing been a clear and distinct objective of the church. (A similar reawakening of a healing movement within Judaism occurred at the time of the Hasidic revival of the 1700s.) Its reappearance in the twentieth century parallels — but did not arise from — the discovery of the unconscious. Because of this congruence, and because depth-psychology seemed to offer a more scientific-seeming and morally neutral approach than traditional religion, the work of Jung in particular came to be a dominant influence in the healing movement, mostly not to good effect.

Thus, although the Healing of Memories movement did not explicitly join forces with depth-psychology, it tacitly shared the understanding that one may consciously hold one set of ideas, emotions, values, attitudes, beliefs, memories, and so on while unconsciously holding an entirely different set. Our deepest wounds — and our sinful and most guilt-inducing responses to these wounds — may therefore lie unrecognized and out of sight. Insofar as from a faith perspective confession is the first step in healing, such parts of the psyche — memories of trauma, memories of responses to this trauma, feelings of subsequent guilt — may all remain unconscious impediments to the ongoing work of healing and growth in the life of a believer.

Healing of memories can be thought of as a modern formulation of the ancient process of in-depth confession, the necessary first step toward wholeness before God. Twelve-step programs also recognize the need for the retrieval of such memories in requiring a thoroughgoing, honest inventory of sins (although not called that) and a subsequent confession of those sins both before God and to those who have been wronged. In a Christian framework, one of the primary functions of the Holy Spirit is to bring to the mind of the believer all those sins that need to be confessed: both those committed repeatedly as well as those forgotten.

From the perspective of depth-psychology, parts of the self are routinely split off from our conscious awareness primarily in response to early emotional wounds. This splitting is one of the most common ways in which we protect ourselves from the painful memory of the wounding itself and therefore from recognizing our sinful responses to that wounding.[211]

When the memories are healed, these wounds and our sinful responses to them are remembered, acknowledged, understood for what they are, and then presented to God for forgiveness and healing. Thus the retrieval of our wounds and sins by using a depth-psychological approach is a way to deepen the process of confession. But these activities are not themselves curative; they are preparatory. Healing of the memories therefore departs from secular psychological theory in two critical ways: healing is, first, made far more likely because of openness to God; and, second, healing itself is effected by God. Both of these processes depend on something even more fundamental, which is necessarily lacking in a secular treatment setting — the conviction that conscience is genuine and absolute and not merely the internalization of parental and societal norms.

In spiritual healing, it is also presumed that God is genuinely present and that he defines a certain standard of sinfulness. If we sin, we experience guilt. If we deny the absolute reality of conscience we have little choice but to repress that guilt. If we repress the guilt, we cannot confess the sin — indeed, we deny that it is sin altogether. But if we do not confess, then we cannot receive forgiveness, and without forgiveness, healing is impossible. The consequence, as noted before, is that we are likely to be driven that much deeper into the very thing we hate.

The progressive healing of the personality by the Holy Spirit can therefore be understood as dependence on the deliberate, ongoing presentation to God of the wounded parts of ourselves and thus the parts most vulnerable to the destructiveness of sin. Depth-psychological techniques can assist in the process of “retrieval,” but a secular worldview is opposed to the acknowledgment of sin (“conviction”).

Why are our wounds most vulnerable to sin? Because when we hurt, we try to assuage our pain, and almost every method that we use by ourselves conforms to what the Bible calls sin. For example, when struck by others, literally or symbolically, we either strike back — using revenge as a substitute for healing; or we strike back at our own hurting selves, soothing the pain with sex, drugs, or any form of heightened stimulation — substituting pleasure for genuine peace.

The secular psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic view of human nature comes close to this understanding. Yet curiously, by itself it is at once too optimistic and too pessimistic, limiting its effectiveness. Secular therapists, too, believe that many of our most harmful behaviors, whether toward ourselves or others, arise in response to wrongs we have suffered, especially as children. But they are too optimistic because they also believe that through sufficient inner examination all these wounds and all their consequences can be undone — by human effort alone. And from this view flows the conclusion that in time, with effort and along with sufficient community support and proper social programs, all men can return to a naturally good state.

The Judeo-Christian view of human nature disagrees with this naive optimism. It knows that, though irreducible good dwells in human nature, so too does irreducible evil. It also knows that this evil can never be removed through unaided human effort, however well-intentioned and however helpful for some people.

Payne’s work thus departs dramatically from a psychologically reductionist view of man and returns to the older, Judeo-Christian view, based upon the conviction that the key to healing is the forgiveness of sin. Her work pays careful attention to the specific origins of psychological brokenness but also to the necessity of genuine, healing prayer. Payne absorbs what is valuable in the modern, psychological point of view while discarding that which is not.

Healing Prayer

Pastoral Care Ministries’ central activity for the healing of homosexuality and other forms of brokenness is prayer. A feature of healing prayer as applied to psychological difficulties is that it requires a deep and careful articulation of the problem to be laid before God. Healing prayer thus incorporates the kind of psychological insight that is at the heart of the best secular psychotherapy. These formulations are consequently not empty ritual (although they could be misused that way by subtly introducing the mistaken notion of magical efficacy into the idea of prayer). Those praying put into words what they become aware of as they explore and express their deepest wounds, as well as their responses to those wounds.

The more psychotherapy helps us strip away the veils of self-deception, the more we become aware of our profound longing for ultimate truth. A life lived without such truth may be free of overt conflict, but it will also be free of genuine meaning. Thus many people “choose” to remain neurotic and self-deceived in order to maintain an illusory sense of meaning. For we all worship something, however great the cost. Thus at the heart of much psychic distress lies a complex mixture of mundane neurosis, such as the fear of intimacy, and spiritual self-deception, as is generated by the fear of meaninglessness.

Healing prayer as thus described is different from secular psychotherapy. Deep personal articulations are laid out before God, not simply another person. Secular psychotherapies, by contrast, depend solely on the compassionate presence of the therapist (an effect not to be underestimated, however) and on the therapist’s ability to help patients outline the complicated interweavings of self-deception, selfish desire, mental anguish, and noble if unfulfillable longings.

Why is secular therapy not as effective as healing prayer? As patients strip away layers of self-deception to arrive closer to the truth of their own situation, they experience a sense of relief. But such a method for uncovering truth cannot by itself answer the question, “How should we then live?”[212] That is to say, it cannot provide the ultimate truth that carries the healing power. But one way to describe the fly in the ointment of psychology is that it invariably tries to do just that. A pure product of modernism, it substitutes limited personal truths for ultimate ones because it is convinced that there is no absolute truth to be found.

From the perspective of healing prayer, however, the act of excising our self-protective lies is not the cure; it is merely the painful preparation for the cure. If at this crucial point when our deepest wounds are exposed we do not turn to God, we inevitably will take the step that follows so easily in a purely secular treatment. Namely, we invent a new lie for ourselves. Thus we turn the therapeutic quest into a quest for ultimate meaning and make psychology into a new religion. At the point of greatest vulnerability, healing prayer assists us to lay before the one true and miraculous Healer the otherwise unhealable wounds that make up the core of our ever-fallible human nature.

Of all the approaches to the healing of homosexuality, the approach of Pastoral Care Ministries, and other similar ministries (see resources), incorporates the best of the secular psychological approaches into its vital, spiritual, orthodox Christian healing. Payne’s focus on sexuality is especially appropriate for our age. No symptom of our modern spiritual disorder more clearly reveals the depth of our affliction than the spreading destruction of divinely ordered love and of the stable family relationships that are its fruit.[213]

14. Homosexuality and Judaism

The preceding discussion of sin and compulsion and of the spiritual approaches to the healing of homosexuality has been conducted from a primarily Christian perspective. But obviously not all homosexuals are Christians or sympathetic to the Christian perspective. Homosexuality is a phenomenon that cuts across religion, ethnicity, race, class, and culture. Viewing it from the point of view of Judaism can add valuable, complementary insights.

In the United States, Jewish individuals are as visible in the homosexual subculture as they are in many other subcultures. Because of the well-known, high levels of achievement of both Jews and of homosexuals, and because most non-Orthodox Jews hold attitudes that are considerably more liberal than non-Jewish society at large, Jewish gay activists are unfortunately disproportionately visible. This may leave the false impression that Judaism itself — by contrast to some Jews — accepts homosexuality fully. In the words of one Rabbi, a clinical psychologist, the truth is that:

There has been too much publicity about the Jewish approach to the issue that has been nothing short of a gross distortion of Judaism. Judaism is what Judaism is, however uncomfortable — not what some would like it to be.[214]

Orthodox Beliefs in Two Camps

When we speak of “Christianity” or “Judaism” in this context we are focusing on orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Judaism. Orthodox Christianity here means “traditional” or “conservative” and “biblical” as opposed to “modernist” or “liberal.” And Orthodox Judaism here also means traditional in the more general sense, but in this case also refers specifically to the Orthodox denomination of Judaism and not to its Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist branches.

Indeed in many respects Orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity today have much more in common with each other than each has with its modern, liberalized variants. Both Orthodox Jews and Christians often share the view — usually only voiced quietly among themselves — that the liberal forms of either faith are neither real Judaism nor real Christianity. They see these liberal variants as closer to each other in their liberalism than to their Orthodox counterparts; they also see them less as religious faiths than sociopolitical ideologies.

Equally, many liberals of both religions dismiss their Orthodox counterparts as “fundamentalists” who turn a blind eye to the fact — as they see it — that in the last hundred years science has effectively debunked their worldviews. Thus, liberal Christianity (mostly in the mainline churches) and liberal Judaism (Reconstructionist, Reform, and many Conservative synagogues) view themselves as having grown beyond theological positions supported by Scripture. They treat biblical injunctions (in Old or New Testaments) as but the culturally relative opinions of the men of the time.

In contrast, the orthodox Christian faith remains theologically dependent on both Old and New Testaments as received. And Orthodox Judaism remains theologically dependent on the Hebrew scriptures as received — especially the Pentateuch — and the Talmud. With respect to their shared dependence on the Hebrew Bible they therefore both maintain an unbroken chain of belief, going back thirty-five hundred years, that homosexuality is a sin — even if, like all sins, an “unnaturally natural” one. Neither would view homosexuality as an illness in the medical sense.

This is not the place to dispute the recent activist theological arguments that radically reinterpret the pertinent passages in both the Old Testament and New in an attempt to present the Bible as never actually treating homosexual acts as sinful. Among other glaring errors and distortions, those who treat the biblical text in this fashion are invariably unfamiliar with the Talmud. The Talmud presents a canonical expansion and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible that even according to skeptical critics dates back more than five hundred years prior to the New Testament. (In Jewish tradition, the essential contents of the Talmud were given orally at Sinai along with the written Torah as an explication of the latter.)

A major portion of the moral theology of the church derives directly from the Talmud, and some of the early church fathers routinely consulted the Rabbis of their time for clarification of scriptural principles. Recall that during the earliest years of the Church, “scripture” meant the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament had yet to be redacted and canonized. Paul, for one, was a Talmudic scholar, and with few exceptions, his comments about homosexuality directly reflect Talmudic discussions of sexuality. These discussions, in turn, constitute a detailed explication of the rather more terse commandments found in the Pentateuch.

On the basis of the Pentateuch, the Talmud treats all sexual activity outside of marital relations, including masturbation, unequivocally as sins, though it makes careful distinctions concerning their varying severity. Lesbianism, for example, is treated as a less severe sin than male homosexuality; the various Talmudic discussions concerning lesbianism view it as less of a threat to family formation and stability than the always potentially rogue male sexuality. As unmodern as this asymmetry may appear, it is indeed accurately reflected in the many families tragically being torn apart by the decision of (chiefly) husbands to leave their families and enter the “gay life.” It is also seen in the lower incidence of lesbianism than male homosexuality in America (1.4 percent versus 2.8 percent) and in the more severe medical consequences of male homosexuality, primarily related to anal intercourse and secondarily to the exchange of fluids in male to male sex.

Homosexuality and Orthodox Judaism

A casual observer may discern that the vast preponderance of Jewish homosexuals are liberal not only in their outlook on life but in their religious attitudes as well — if they have any. But although homosexuality does occur among Orthodox Jews, it is strikingly uncommon. Why this is so would take us far afield but is worth considering briefly.

Why is this? Most telling about Orthodox Judaism is that its marriages are among the most stable in the United States — in spite of the fact that divorce is not forbidden, only strongly discouraged. Further, Orthodox Jewish marriages are stable even though many marriages (especially in ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic communities) are arranged — a method that cuts directly across the “natural,” desire-based method of selecting partners. Beyond that, lengthy sections of the Talmud are devoted to the precise obligations, including sexual ones, that each partner in a marriage owes to his or her spouse. The failure to meet these obligations is laid out in the Talmud as some of the legitimate grounds for divorce. For example, unless extenuating circumstances prevent it, a man must satisfy his wife sexually at least once every week. Interestingly, the reverse obligation does not apply.

The homosexual impulses that naturally occur in any population of human beings are constrained among Orthodox Jews by their way of life. These impulses only rarely interfere with the biblical mandate to marry, to fulfill one’s spouse, and to raise many children. Given these mandates, it is inconceivable that large numbers of homosexuals could remain “closeted,” and it would be extraordinarily difficult to carry off mere “marriages of convenience.” What occurs instead is a self-reinforcing process: Stable family life reduces the incidence of the kinds of problems that increase homosexuality; reduced levels of homosexuality help stabilize family life.

America as a whole is now in the midst of an opposite, downward spiral. The widely decried destruction of families — especially of fatherhood — increases the likelihood of all forms of sexual pathology — father problems especially causing an increase in male homosexuality; the increase in homosexuality in turn contributes to the destruction of families in the next generation.

In contrast to Orthodox Jews, some relatively conservative Christians actively embrace homosexuality. A public example is Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, who openly describes himself as a conservative, gay Catholic. (In Virtually Normal, his otherwise reasonably argued defense of a moderate gay activist position, Sullivan remains determinedly ignorant of success rates in homosexual change. As always, this fact pulls the linchpin from the pro-gay argument.) An even larger number of traditionalist Christians struggle with their homosexual impulses: some secretly, and in great pain, in churches that condemn not just homosexuality but homosexual people; some, fortunately, in churches that embrace them and offer programs to help them change. But the Jewish population is even more sharply divided than the Christian, falling into two distinct camps: the majority being secularists and liberals among whom homosexuality is present and widely accepted; a large minority being Orthodox among whom homosexuality is uncommon.

For this reason, no active Orthodox groups or Jewish ministries have arisen to “treat” homosexuality, as do ministries in Christian churches and parachurch organizations. The rare Orthodox individual struggling with homosexuality will be referred instead to one of the psychiatrists or psychotherapists who continues to treat homosexuality as a resolvable mental-health problem. The non-Orthodox Jewish homosexual, on the other hand, commonly accepts the gay-activist positions. Jewish therapists from a secularized background also will likely adopt the activist position that the problem is not homosexuality itself, but the desire not to be homosexual.

As a result of these factors, and of a general wariness regarding the Gentile world, until recently Orthodox Judaism has refrained from speaking out in the current debate over homosexuality. To the extent that public discussion among the Orthodox exists, it has been aimed almost exclusively at fellow Orthodox Jews or those considering a return to the Orthodoxy of their ancestors.

The general “Jewish” position on homosexuality — if one even senses such a thing — is therefore likely to be identified as the monolithic voice of liberal Judaism. Yet the true, traditional, Jewish position on homosexuality, as handed down since the revelation at Sinai and abdicated by secularized Jews only in the last few years, is the very different, Orthodox one.

Recently, a change has occurred in the traditional posture of the Orthodox. They have become concerned that the rapid drift of the other branches of Judaism toward the secular left will pull an entire generation away from both Judaism and from God; and — like their Christian counterparts — they are extremely concerned about what they perceive as the dramatically degraded moral state of the nation. They have lost confidence that their Reform brethren can be counted on to maintain the ancient standards. In the words of Albert Vorspan, senior vice president emeritus of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations:

Orthodox Jewish leaders … charge that radical changes such as … support for gay/lesbian rabbis and congregations have cast Reform beyond the pale of Jewish authenticity.[215]

Recently, an Orthodox Rabbi wrote a book on homosexuality articulating the traditional Jewish position for both Jews and Gentiles.[216] Interestingly, it has been published by a Christian house whose titles appeal most to Evangelicals. The same Rabbi was coauthor of a formal Orthodox Jewish statement on homosexuality put forth by the Rabbinical Council of America. This council represents all Orthodox Jewish communities in America in their relationship to the society at large. Insofar as Orthodox Judaism continues to see itself — in a continuation of the ancient view — as having an ongoing spiritual purpose not only for Jews but also for Gentiles, its interest in the question of homosexuality extends beyond interpreting Jewish law only for Jews. The Rabbinical Council’s statement makes this clear:

Levels of Compassion

The Orthodox Jewish and orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality have differences between them. But these differences are mostly in emphasis and reflect certain differences in their approaches to spirituality in general.

The particular difference in question is based on the fact that Orthodox Jewish tradition consists largely of the more than three millennia of extraordinarily specific, finely tuned distinctions in the “Halakha,” or Jewish Law, which are meant to regulate human behavior in relationship to God and to other people. Some Christian critics of Judaism have superficially dismissed this twenty-plus-volume code and commentary as an obsessive legalism. Actually, however, the Talmud itself criticizes legalistic Pharisees in the same terms as does Jesus. In fact, one of the most interesting and easily missed dimensions of Talmud is its careful thought regarding the actual, observed specifics of human nature and its consequent realism and compassion in approaching moral obligations.

To make a broad generalization, both Jews and Christians believe that after death all people will be judged according to their deeds on earth and will be rewarded accordingly. Although this judgment serves as a moral spur to Christians, in large part Christian theology concentrates on the prior salvation by grace alone — that is, on one’s escape from condemnation through a savior, inasmuch as no one can enter heaven merely on merit.

Judaism, however, pays closer attention to one’s place in the “Olam Haba,” the world to come, which (as in Christianity) is determined by the balance of one’s good and evil deeds. Judaism’s specific focus here can partly be attributed to its conviction that the vast majority of people will be saved, and have at least some portion in the world to come. Only a small minority of particularly heinous individuals will be damned entirely — which is to say destroyed forever.

Much of Jewish Law has therefore evolved into an extremely discerning discourse on the standards of practical morality in the here and now. Those Talmudic disputes that discuss such ceremonial matters pertaining to Jews alone such as what constitutes “work” on the Sabbath (for example, closing an electrical circuit) will indeed strike the unsympathetic outsider as mere casuistry. But the discussions about degrees of morality — and of degrees of moral obligation under varying circumstances — can be immediately understood, giving extraordinary insight, once the Talmudic method of argument is grasped.

Among the many sad consequences that have followed from the historical enmity between Christians and Jews has been the loss to Christianity of the good of the Jewish Law. This is not to say the Old Testament itself, because that remains a part of the Christian faith anyway, but of knowledge of the Talmud, which was the largest part of the Law at the time of Jesus. When Christ insisted that though he came to fulfill “the Law,” not abolish it, and that not “one jot nor tittle” of it should pass away until the end of time, his Jewish hearers — pro and con — would have automatically understood him to be referring not to the Pentateuch alone (the “Written Law”) nor to the Pentateuch and other Old Testament writings (“The Law and the Prophets”), but to the Pentateuch (“The Written Law”) and certain parts of the Talmud (“the Oral Law”).

Thus Rabbinic discussions of homosexuality begin with the fact of its sinfulness and moral unacceptability but quickly make two important points. First, as in all matters pertaining to human failings, a strict distinction must be maintained between the sin and the person. Although homosexual behavior is to be condemned, homosexual persons are as beloved of God as everyone else; they are to be treated with no less dignity than we want for ourselves. This is, of course, no different than what the Christian position is ideally — hating the sin but loving the sinner.

Second, the Rabbinic discussions make a refined distinction as to the degree of culpability that individuals bear for their homosexual behavior, depending on the situation. For example, someone who has been raised to believe that homosexuality is not wrong commits less of a sin than does someone raised in the knowledge of its sinfulness and who then deliberately rejects the Torah’s standard of behavior. Similarly, someone for whom homosexuality has become a compulsion is now less culpable than someone in the early stages of developing homosexual behavior, for whom it retains greater willfulness.

Indeed this assessment of “degree of culpability” has a further implication:

In actuality, the person who wrestles with the homosexual demon within and overcomes it is considered much more praiseworthy [and will be granted a larger portion in the “Olam Haba”] than one who never had to wrestle with such feelings.[219]

Nor is this mere sentiment. Those who have worked closely with men and women who have successfully emerged out of homosexuality cannot but be struck by the depth of their compassion and wisdom, acquired at great cost, and by their strength of character. In the words of the Talmud, “The greater the man, the greater his Evil inclination” (Sukkah 52a).

Another component of the Jewish point of view, with its focus on finely assessed evaluation of behavior, is the importance of behavior in itself shaping character: “One is likely to become what one does…. [D]oing, whether for good or otherwise, is habit forming and personality building.”[220]

In Judaism, sexuality is recognized as an enormously powerful force. It needs therefore to be hedged about with many constraints — even arranged marriages. But it is therefore also understood as one that, when sanctified, is potentially holy to the highest possible degree. Indeed, the sanctified marital union (not sexuality in the state of nature) is poetically referred to in Judaism as the “Holy of Holies.” According to Rabbi Moses Nachmanides in the thirteenth century, one of the greatest Jewish sages, there is nothing more holy and pure.[221]

Judaism does not deal with the potential evil inherent in man by rejecting the natural altogether. It lacks entirely any ascetic tradition, so much so that a great sage who does not marry is criticized as in some measure having failed.[222] Its approach, rather, has always been to sanctify the merely natural and to make it holy. It is the guideline of the Torah, written and oral, that teaches man how to do this. Such sanctification invariably involves constraint.

Because of the natural power of sexuality, those who fall prey to it are seen as less morally culpable than those who fall prey to less compelling temptations, such as speaking ill of another person. In fact, this latter sin is considered so severe that persistent indulgence in it can place one’s portion of the “Olam Haba” altogether at risk; not so, however, for homosexual or other sexual sins. In this view therefore, he who condemns the homosexual person for his behavior, rather than the behavior itself, commits the far more grievous sin — a notion that strikes at the root of all judgmentalism.

Orthodox Judaism thus holds that, although homosexuality cannot be condoned, mitigating circumstances may exist that temper our condemnation of it. Put differently, on the finely differentiated scale of moral assessment, there are many different kinds of homosexuality; each single instance must be considered in the individual human context in which it appears.[223] And a great many other sins exist that are far worse than homosexuality.

Thus in spite of the apparent legalism of the Orthodox Jewish approach, it contains what we might view as a specific and precise scale of compassion from which we all could learn much. Although Orthodox Judaism unflinchingly calls homosexuality a sin, it does not condemn it with the at times cruel and self-righteous tone that some Christian groups exhibit. But we must also emphasize that this rigorous compassion bears little resemblance to what now passes for “tolerance” — its modern, liberal, standardless counterpart.

15. Putting the Pieces Together

It may be difficult to grasp how genes, environment, and other influences interrelate to one another, how a certain factor may “influence” an outcome but not cause it, and how faith enters in. The scenario below is condensed and hypothetical, but is drawn from the lives of actual people, illustrating how many different factors influence behavior. Because homosexuality is twice as common among men as among women and because its consequences are more dangerous for men, the book as a whole has emphasized male homosexuality; so too does this scenario.

But although the specifics are different for women, the general principles of how genes, environment, and choice can all work together are the same. And I should note that the following is just one of the many developmental pathways that can lead to homosexuality, though a common one. In reality, every person’s “road” to sexual expression is individual, however many common lengths it may share with those of others.

1. Our scenario starts with birth. The boy who one day may go on to struggle with homosexuality is born with certain features that are somewhat more common among homosexuals than in the population at large. Some of these traits might be inherited (genetic), while others might have been caused by the “intrauterine environment” (hormones). What this means is that a youngster without these traits will be somewhat less likely to become homosexual later than someone with them.

What are these traits? If we could identify them precisely, many of them might well turn out to be gifts rather than “problems,” for example a “sensitive” disposition, a strong creative drive, a keen aesthetic sense. Some of these, such as greater sensitivity, could be related to — or even the same as — physiological traits that also cause trouble, such as a greater-than-average anxiety response to any given stimulus.

No one knows with certainty just what these heritable characteristics are; at present we only have hints. Were we free to study homosexuality properly (uninfluenced by political agendas) we would certainly soon clarify these factors — just as we are doing in less contentious areas. In any case, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the behavior “homosexuality” is itself directly inherited.

2. From a very early age these potentially heritable characteristics mark the boy as “different.” He finds himself somewhat shy and uncomfortable with the typical “rough and tumble” of his peers. Perhaps he is more interested in art or in reading — simply because he’s smart. But when he later thinks about his early life, he will find it difficult to separate out what, in these early behavioral differences, came from an inherited temperament and what from the next factor, namely:

3. For whatever reason, he recalls a painful “mismatch” between what he needed and longed for and what his father offered him. Perhaps most people would agree that his father was distinctly distant and ineffective; maybe it was just that his own needs were unique enough that his father, a decent man, could never quite find the right way to relate to him. Or perhaps his father really disliked and rejected his son’s sensitivity. In any event, the absence of a happy, warm, and intimate closeness with his father led to the boy’s pulling away in disappointment, “defensively detaching” in order to protect himself.

But sadly, this pulling away from his father, and from the “masculine” role-model he needed, also left him even less able to relate to his male peers. We may contrast this to the boy whose loving father dies, for instance, but who is less vulnerable to later homosexuality. This is because the commonplace dynamic in the pre-homosexual boy is not merely the absence of a father — literally or psychologically — but the psychological defense of the boy against his repeatedly disappointing father. In fact, a youngster who does not form this defense (perhaps because of early enough therapy, or because there is another important male figure in his life, or due to temperament) is much less likely to become homosexual.

Complementary dynamics involving the boy’s mother are also likely to have played an important role. Because people tend to marry partners with “interlocking neuroses,” the boy probably found himself in a problematic relationship with both parents.

For all these reasons, when as an adult he looks back on his childhood, the now homosexual man recalls, “From the beginning I was always different. I never got along well with the boys my age and felt more comfortable around girls.” This accurate memory makes his later homosexuality feel convincingly to him as though it was “preprogrammed” from the start.

4. Although he has “defensively detached” from his father, the young boy still carries silently within him a terrible longing for the warmth, love, and encircling arms of the father he never did nor could have. Early on, he develops intense, nonsexual attachments to older boys he admires — but at a distance, repeating with them the same experience of longing and unavailability. When puberty sets in, sexual urges — which can attach themselves to any object, especially in males — rise to the surface and combine with his already intense need for masculine intimacy and warmth. He begins to develop homosexual crushes. Later he recalls, “My first sexual longings were directed not at girls but at boys. I was never interested in girls.”

Psychotherapeutic intervention at this point and earlier can be successful in preventing the development of later homosexuality. Such intervention is aimed in part at helping the boy change his developing effeminate patterns (which derive from a “refusal” to identify with the rejected father), but more critically, it is aimed at teaching his father — if only he will learn — how to become appropriately involved with and related to his son.

5. As he matures (especially in our culture where early, extramarital sexual experiences are sanctioned and even encouraged), the youngster, now a teen, begins to experiment with homosexual activity. Or alternatively his needs for same-sex closeness may already have been taken advantage of by an older boy or man, who preyed upon him sexually when he was still a child. (Recall the studies that demonstrate the high incidence of sexual abuse in the childhood histories of homosexual men). Or oppositely he may avoid such activities out of fear and shame in spite of his attraction to them. In any event, his now-sexualized longings cannot merely be denied, however much he may struggle against them. It would be cruel for us at this point to imply that these longings are a simple matter of “choice.”

Indeed, he remembers having spent agonizing months and years trying to deny their existence altogether or pushing them away, to no avail. One can easily imagine how justifiably angry he will later be when someone casually and thoughtlessly accuses him of “choosing” to be homosexual. When he seeks help, he hears one of two messages, and both terrify him: Either, “Homosexuals are bad people and you are a bad person for choosing to be homosexual. There is no place for you here and God is going to see to it that you suffer for being so bad,” or “Homosexuality is inborn and unchangeable. You were born that way. Forget about your fairytale picture of getting married and having children and living in a little house with a white picket fence. God made you who you are and he/she destined you for the gay life. Learn to enjoy it.”

6. At some point, he gives in to his deep longings for love and begins to have voluntary homosexual experiences. He finds — possibly to his horror — that these old, deep, painful longings are at least temporarily, and for the first time ever, assuaged. Although he may also therefore feel intense conflict, he cannot help but admit that the relief is immense. This temporary feeling of comfort is so profound — going well beyond the simple sexual pleasure that anyone feels in a less fraught situation — that the experience is powerfully reinforced. However much he may struggle, he finds himself powerfully driven to repeat the experience. And the more he does, the more it is reinforced and the more likely it is he will repeat it yet again, though often with a sense of diminishing returns.

7. He also discovers that, as for anyone, sexual orgasm is a powerful reliever of distress of all sorts. By engaging in homosexual activities he has already crossed one of the most critical and strongly enforced boundaries of sexual taboo. It is now easy for him to cross other taboo boundaries as well, especially the significantly less severe taboo pertaining to promiscuity. Soon homosexual activity becomes the central organizing factor in his life as he slowly acquires the habit of turning to it regularly — not just because of his original need for fatherly warmth and love, but to relieve anxiety of any sort.

8. In time, his life becomes even more distressing than for most. Some of this is in fact, as activists claim, because all-too-often he experiences from others a cold lack of sympathy or even open hostility. The only people who seem really to accept him are other gays, and so he forms an even stronger bond with them as a “community.” But it is not true, as activists claim, that these are the only or even the major stresses. Much distress is caused simply by his way of life — for example, the medical consequences, AIDS being just one of many (if also the worst). He also lives with the guilt and shame that he inevitably feels over his compulsive, promiscuous behavior; and too over the knowledge that he cannot relate effectively to the opposite sex and is less likely to have a family (a psychological loss for which political campaigns for homosexual marriage, adoption, and inheritance rights can never adequately compensate). However much activists try to normalize for him these patterns of behavior and the losses they cause, and however expedient it may be for political purposes to hide them from the public-at-large, unless he shuts down huge areas of his emotional life he simply cannot honestly look at himself in this situation and feel content.

And no one — not even a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, sexually insecure “homophobe” — is nearly so hard on him as he is on himself. Furthermore, the self-condemning messages that he struggles with on a daily basis are in fact only reinforced by the bitter self-derogating wit of the very gay culture he has embraced. The activists around him keep saying that it is all caused by the “internalized homophobia” of the surrounding culture, but he knows that it is not.[224]

The stresses of “being gay” lead to more, not less, homosexual behavior. This principle, perhaps surprising to the layman (at least to the layman who has not himself gotten caught up in some such pattern, of whatever type) is typical of the compulsive or addictive cycle of self-destructive behavior: Wracking guilt, shame, and self-condemnation only cause it to increase. It is not surprising that people therefore turn to denial to rid themselves of these feelings, and he does too. He tells himself, “It is not a problem; therefore there is no reason for me to feel so bad about it.”

9. After wrestling with such guilt and shame for so many years, the boy, now an adult, comes to believe, quite understandably — and because of his denial needs to believe — “I can’t change anyway because the condition is unchangeable.” If even for a moment he considers otherwise, immediately arises the painful query, “then why haven’t I … ?” and with it returns all the shame and guilt.

Thus, by the time the boy becomes a man, he has pieced together this point of view: “I was always different, always an outsider. I developed crushes on boys from as long as I can remember and the first time I fell in love it was with a boy not a girl. I had no real interest in members of the opposite sex. Oh I tried all right — desperately. But my sexual experiences with girls were nothing special. But the first time I had homosexual sex it just ‘felt right.’ So it makes perfect sense to me that homosexuality is genetic. I’ve tried to change — God knows how long I struggled — and I just can’t. That’s because it’s not changeable. Finally, I stopped struggling and just accepted myself the way I am.”

10. Social attitudes toward homosexuality will play a role in making it more or less likely that the man will adopt an “inborn and unchangeable” perspective, and at what point in his development. It is obvious that a widely shared and propagated worldview that normalizes homosexuality will increase the likelihood of his adopting such beliefs, and at an earlier age. But it is perhaps less obvious — it follows from what we have discussed above — that ridicule, rejection, and harshly punitive condemnation of him as a person will be just as likely (if not more likely) to drive him into the same position.

11. If he maintains his desire for a traditional family life, the man may continue to struggle against his “second nature.” Depending on whom he meets, he may remain trapped between straight condemnation and gay activism, both in secular institutions and in religious ones. The most important message he needs to hear is that “healing is possible.”

12. If he enters the path to healing, he will find that the road is long and difficult — but extraordinarily fulfilling. The course to full restoration of heterosexuality typically lasts longer than the average American marriage — which should be understood as an index of how broken all relationships are today.

From the secular therapies he will come to understand what the true nature of his longings are, that they are not really about sex, and that he is not defined by his sexual appetites. In such a setting he will very possibly learn how to turn aright to other men to gain from them a genuine, nonsexualized masculine comradeship and intimacy; and how to relate aright to woman, as friend, lover, life’s companion, and, God willing, mother of his children.

From communities of faith that turn to him in understanding, offering not only moral guidance but genuine healing, he will gain much in addition. Most importantly, the love he sought so vainly when young and finally turned away from he will find in the arms of a loving God. Those for whom this is no mere formula but a living reality are truly blessed, whatever their wounds. And he will find too that the presence of this love makes it possible to lay those old defenses down and face fearlessly the wounds that have inflicted so much pain and distorted so much of his life over so many years. For many, this is the only circumstance in which it is possible to lay their defenses down.

Of course the old wounds will not simply disappear, and later in times of great distress the old paths of escape will beckon. But the claim that this means he is therefore “really” a homosexual and unchanged is a lie. For as he lives a new life of ever-growing honesty, and cultivates genuine intimacy with the woman of his heart, the new patterns will grow ever stronger and the old ones engraved in the synapses of his brain ever weaker.

In time, knowing that they really have little to do with sex, he will even come to respect and put to good use what faint stirrings remain of the old urges. They will be for him a kind of storm-warning, a signal that something is out of order in his house, that some old pattern of longing and rejection and defense is being activated. And he will find that no sooner does he set his house in order than indeed the old urges once again abate. In his relations to others — as friend, husband, professional — he will now have a special gift. What was once a curse will have become a blessing, to himself and to others.

If he is fortunate enough to be able to place all this in the context of faith, then he will also find that he has traveled far along the ancient pathway toward sanctification. This is just as when the angel put Jacob’s hip out of joint and then blessed him, transforming him forevermore into Israel. On this road he will always have as his companion the Great Companion. And perhaps because of this he will find his footing a little more surely than those who are skeptical that such a companion walks invisibly at their side, too.

16. The Pagan Revolution

A major question has hovered unasked over the preceding discussion: How have we as a culture come so close to abandoning the long-held consensus on sexual mores that discourages homosexuality? Of course, this change in attitude toward homosexuality is merely a piece of a larger change pertaining to sexuality and family life as a whole, and this in turn is but a piece of an even more sweeping change in our general worldview. This massive change in attitude appears to have occurred within the space of a mere twenty or thirty years.

But this appearance of suddenness is an illusion. Profound changes have been germinating and growing within Western civilization for far longer than a mere three decades. The 1960s’ counterculture was only the first full populist flowering of these changes, among which changing attitudes toward sexuality are central. We cannot understand the dramatic transformation in sexual attitudes that is now upon us unless we grasp the large-scale perspective of history within which these changes fit. For these alterations are the consequences of a sea change in the domain of the human spirit, which has been underway for centuries. Put differently, the changes in our attitudes toward sexuality are only the indicator of far more important spiritual changes that affect every aspect of our lives.

More specifically, four hundred years of growing religious skepticism among our elites and of stupendous technological progress in which faith appears irrelevant has laid us open to alternative spiritualities. For a time, it seemed as if the materialistic worldview would triumph; that as we rested on the material comforts it secured for us, we could set aside our longings for spirit and meaning as the wistful fantasies of our collective childhood.

But in fact this spiritual desert did not produce a sense of mature comfort and spiritual abstinence; instead it generated an intense new thirst for the spiritual — any spirit that would slake our thirst. Thus the emerging, dominant spirit of our age is not the skeptical one that denigrates all religion, but rather a profoundly and perennially religious spirit that stands opposed to the ethical monotheism of the Christian faith and of Orthodox Judaism. The tenets of this newly emerging religion, whether articulated deliberately or merely at work tacitly in the background, are coming swiftly to dominate our public morality. But the religion itself is not really new, neither are its theological beliefs. It is simply the reemergence of paganism, and its beliefs are gnosticism. What these ancient terms mean today is the focus of this chapter.

Clearly this reemerging paganism is not merely a belittling of religion. Nor is it merely the religion of humanism, even though humanism is a visible and prominent aspect of it. For its followers the pagan spirit offers not only a meaningful answer but a better answer than Judaism or Christianity to the crisis of meaning that has followed the rise of the materialistic, scientific worldview. Part of paganism’s appeal stems from the fact that pagan spirituality makes few moral demands on the individual, and is thus more “tolerant” of human differences — that is of “diversity.” (In Joseph Campbell’s words, “Follow your bliss.”) But the reverse side is paganism’s deficient concept of evil. It therefore lacks a way to distinguish between will and compulsion, between conscious intentionality and unconscious instinctive drive.

By contrast, a cardinal tenet of the Judeo-Christian tradition for thousands of years has been that sin is the central explanation for human suffering. In this view, our absolute need for God seems equally apparent. But for us now to turn away from exclusively scientific and humanistic principles on the one hand and from a “new age” multiplicity of differing cultural standards on the other to the unitary ancient biblical ones would seem to most moderns as a kind of regression. This is so in spite of neither science nor humanism bringing us closer to that for which we most deeply yearn — meaningfulness, serenity, love.

The commonplace answer to the question “How did we get here?” is thus “progress.” This progress is at once scientific and yet has moral implications; the two are entangled in the modern worldview as detailed in previous chapters. Further, we see this confusion carried forward by the seemingly opposing, but in fact mutually reinforcing, claims of scientific analysis on the one hand and “new” spirituality on the other.

The Many versus the True One

What is called ethical, or radical, monotheism was introduced into the pagan culture of the ancient Near East by a single people, the Jews. The rather dry term “ethical monotheism” conveys two essential points concerning Judaism as a religion. First, that there is only one God, and because there is only one God, he is therefore the God of all men; second, that the central concern of this God, and therefore of his people, is morality and goodness. To the Hebrew mind the most distinctive feature of the character of God was not his philosophical attributes but his holiness. Thus, as we see in the Bible, the living God is so “utterly transcendent” that merely to glance directly at his glory and goodness is instant death.

But it was through Christians, not Jews, that ethical monotheism decisively influenced the pagan world. Or we might say, through the Christian faith as a variant of Judaism. As Franz Rosenzweig, an eminent Jewish man of letters, put it, “Christianity is Judaism for the Gentiles.” As this ethical monotheism spread, it toppled many pagan dominions with astonishing force and speed and established a moral order that reigned until the Renaissance. What are the essentials of the paganism that ethical monotheism replaced, and that is now, in turn, rivaling it?

1. Paganism is polytheistic. Each individual (or group) feels himself subject to his own god or goddess. At a practical level this means that the distinctive set of values, standards, goals, and laws of each deity governs the lives of that deity’s worshipers.

2. Pagan society is therefore polyvalent. No single moral standard governs the lives of men, and except by the power of force, no god, and no corresponding set of human values, is superior to any other.

3. Consequently, pagan societies tend to become inegalitarian. Different standards for different groups lead inevitably to factional competition, and in time the will to power becomes the only rule. Might makes right and soon displaces the rule of law; Zeus rules because he is strongest, and for no other reason. He is certainly not the wisest; neither has he even a conception of fairness.

4. Pagan society is pantheistic or animistic. Gods and goddesses inhabit the natural world and are one with it; nature itself is therefore worshiped as divine; there is no serious distinction between creature and Creator. Again, on a practical level, this means that men worship not only the nature “out there” but also their own nature “in here” — their instincts, including hunger, sex, and aggression, and more generally, pleasure. In short, they worship themselves.

5. In thus spiritualizing the instincts, pagan worship therefore tends naturally to the violent, the hedonistic, and the orgiastic. Pagan religious ritual arouses the instincts to the keenest possible pitch, especially sexuality and aggression. In gratifying these instincts, the greatest possible pleasure is achieved and therefore the highest level of religious ecstasy. Violent intoxication, temple prostitution, the ritual slaughter of enemies, self-mutilation, and even child sacrifice: All these can be understood from within this worldview not as pathological but as predictable results of the unfettering of human nature. Are such practices ancient and utterly alien? We need only look to television, or to the abuse literature of the present, or a few years back to the Holocaust, or to the swiftly rising incidence of violent crime, or to our comfort in disposing of unwanted children before they are born to understand how entirely unexceptional they are. The dark nightlife of the gay “walk on the wild side” (in the words of a popular song from a rock star celebrated for his “androgyny”) is celebrated in pop culture; it is but one piece of this pagan transformation of the modern West.

6. In all of this, paganism is idolatrous. The pagan takes what is found within his own human nature as the measure of what is good and makes of it a god: man as the measure of all things. Is this unfair to the humanist credo? We should remember that the worst human sacrifices in history were performed on explicitly humanistic soil: in France, Russia, Germany, and China.[225] The startling juxtaposition of modern humanism with ancient paganism becomes entirely unexceptional once we recall that humanism in its scientific mode — the understanding of man by science — ends by eliminating man qua man, and reducing him to mere mechanism.

Ethical monotheism stands opposed to all of these beliefs and practices. Unlike paganism, it is utterly unnatural. Its appearance over four thousand years ago, and its subsequent flowering in a uniformly pagan world, is beyond historical explanation. Frederick the Great of Prussia, a man tormented by his inability to sustain religious faith, once challenged his chaplain to point him toward God. The Bishop replied that he could do so with but a single word. “And what single word can possibly carry the burden of such illumination?” asked Frederick. His chaplain replied, “Israel.” To emphasize the contrasts:

1. Monotheism is monotheistic. There is one God and there is no God but God. Thus every individual and group, however different by nature, however differently inclined, gifted, or handicapped, is accountable to the one God.

2. A monotheistic society is therefore univalent. At a practical level this means that all men are accountable to one overarching set of values, goals, and laws. Before the God who establishes this uniform law all men are treated as equal, whether it is to their immediate gain, as they see it, or to their detriment.

3. Monotheistic societies therefore tend rather to be egalitarian, not in outcome, but in process. The monotheistic God is no respecter of persons or of offices and ranks.

4. Monotheism is theistic. It asserts a critical distinction between the Creator and the creation, and thus also between the Creator and his creatures, including man. Man, too, as man — not as biomolecular machine — is perceived to contain within himself an utterly unnatural capacity for spirit, and this spirit is not of the world, though in it. This means that man is a dual creature. He cannot be comprehended solely in terms of prior causes; and in some measure his moral choices stand opposed to his instinctive nature. Though monotheists recognize the value of every instinct, instinctive pleasure must be submitted to a single, overarching higher purpose — sanctified — and thereby modulated, restrained, and at times, eschewed altogether.

5. Monotheistic worship leads away from the violent, hedonistic, and orgiastic. Because instincts are creaturely and not divine, they must not be elevated as final arbiters of individual and social mores. In other words, instincts are not worshiped. The history of ancient Israel as laid out in the Old Testament is in large part the two-thousand-year struggle of the worship of the one LORD against all the various forms of pagan instinct worship that dominated the ancient Near East. Supremely, it is the story of the fight of God against Baal, the god of sacred sexuality — heterosexual, homosexual, and bestial; against his sacred consort Anath/Astarte/Ashtoreth, the virgin-whore who copulates and conceives, but does not give birth; and against Molech, the god to whom the unwanted offspring of these practices were sacrificed.

6. Finally, monotheism is anti-idolatrous and anti-humanistic. Out of faithfulness to the one, true God, it refrains from making idols — whether of the wood and stone or of the purely mental variety — of the elements of human nature.

Monotheism observes that although the satisfaction of instinctive drives gives pleasure, by itself it ultimately does not give joy. It knows, rather, that we are so constituted — because of our dual nature — as to require something that goes beyond mere pleasure; that the pursuit of pleasure apart from God leads inevitably to emptiness and despair; that to worship pleasure is ultimately to court despair and thus to seek death.

From this perspective, all our human longings for instinctive gratification point beyond themselves to something else, something that is neither found in nor reducible to mere humanity. This longing is so great that, when we are unable to attach it to its proper, eternal object and attach it instead to some form of instinctive gratification, the pursuit becomes compulsive, even addictive, and ultimately monstrous. In drugs the drug addict, in alcohol the alcoholic, in sex the philanderer, in winning the gambler, and in food the compulsive eater all seek the one God and know it not; all thus become idolaters.

The relentless opposition of the God of Israel and his prophets to idolatry and pagan worship must seem to the modern at best a strange archaic obsession, at worst an offensive manifestation of a nationalism and chauvinism that we are well off without. In the antiseptic conditions of modernism, it makes perfect sense to replace such monomania with the endlessly accommodating syncretism that now passes for “spirituality” in an ever-growing number of churches and synagogues.

Paganism’s Theology: Gnosticism

The conflict between monotheism and paganism is neither recent nor merely natural; it is a recurring, age-old battle for the soul of man that has never ceased. We can trace a historical line that connects the pagan religions of the ancient Near East (including Canaan) to pre- and early Christian gnosticism, to the Manicheaism of the late Roman and Aryan Empires, to certain schools of medieval Kabbalah and Alchemy, through the transforming matrix of Renaissance Neoplatonism with its combined emphases on magic, humanism, and science. From there, it is but a short step to the modern reduction of spirit to psyche that has allowed the present pagan resurgence.

C. G. Jung, unaware of his own role in it, nonetheless clearly saw what was coming in the pagan revolution. Surveying the decadent conditions following World War I, he wrote in 1918:

As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the “blonde beast” be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. When this happens in the individual it brings about a psychological revolution, but it can also take a social form.[226]

As apocalyptic as was Jung in this reading of the pagan transformation that was overtaking the German-speaking world, his prophetic power was less than that of the German-Jewish poet and convert to Christianity Heinrich Heine, who had warned in 1892:

It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should ever that taming talisman break — the Cross — then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors of whom our Nordic poets speak and sing, with all their insane Berserker rage. That talisman is now already crumbling, and the day is not far off when it shall break apart entirely. On that day the old stone gods will rise from long-forgotten wreckage, and rub from their eyes the dust of a thousand-year sleep. At long last leaping to life, Thor, with his giant hammer, will crush the Gothic cathedrals! … And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from our philosophers of Nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightning before thunder…. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.[227]

Gnosticism, as we have said, is paganism’s theology. To the gnostic, salvation is neither the undeserved gift of God (as it primarily is in Christianity) nor the fruit of consistent moral effort (as it primarily is Judaism). It is rather a Faustian prize achieved through “secret knowledge” (the definition of the Greek gnosis). The gnostic is granted this secret wisdom in relation to one of the many gods or demigods accessible, in an intellectualized version of pagan worship, through mind and imagination.

The temper of gnosticism is spiritual and ascetic and it appealed directly therefore mostly to the intellectual classes of the Roman Empire. But in time its implicit divinization of the instincts led it into a relativization of good and evil, and into a fierce opposition to the Jewish, monotheistic ethos being propagated by the Christian faith. There is therefore no irony in the asceticism of the early gnostic sects degenerating so quickly into license. In fact, the development was predictable, and has been followed by gnostics throughout history — down to our day.

Over the centuries gnosticism has continued to lead a clandestine existence as a kind of perpetual spiritual counterculture. Now and then erupting into the open, it has always provided a secretive, psychic, man-oriented, polytheistic, and morally relativistic counterpoint to the God-oriented ethical monotheism carried forward by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Despite its ever-shifting forms, gnostic thought has many common motifs. Chief among them are:

• The conviction that through gnosis — special knowledge available only to the initiated — the human mind becomes sufficient to solve its problems by itself, especially those of its suffering and of its own evil inclinations, and thereby to attain to the prerogatives of the gods.
• The conviction that the great events of the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Incarnation, have no significant material reality and are to be understood at most as spiritual (or symbolic, psychological, or psychic) events.
• From these motifs, therefore, has flowed the rejection of atoning sacrifice as necessary for “mental and spiritual health” — salvation. For if the gods are but manifestations of the mind, then there is no absolute basis for guilt or sin.
• Consistent with all this, therefore, is the conclusion that good and evil have either no significance, or — what is in practice the same thing — merely symbolic significance, unrelated to the ethical requirements and sacrifices of daily life; in either case they are balanced opposites.

There is a striking irony in this latter point, for gnostic thought is well-known for the attention it gives to the nature of evil. In its Manichean variant, gnosticism’s latent tendency to overrate and divinize evil became explicit in making Good and Evil the two eternal principles of reality. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s admonition: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”[228]

When Evil and Good are placed on the same plane, in the form of dualism, two things inevitably follow: First, on a theological level, we succumb to the dangerous fantasy that Good and Evil will be reunited in a higher oneness. Second, on a psychological and behavioral level, we tend to relativize good and evil and hence to increase our propensity to choose evil, considering it to be our good, since it often feels good.

At the sophisticated level modern gnostic philosophies such as Jung’s emphasize the first point while inadvertently facilitating the second. At a more popular level, occult philosophies make the second point concrete and explicit. Both provide a theology of moral relativism. Because of his great influence in propagating gnostic philosophy and morals in churches and synagogues, Jung deserves a closer look. The moral relativism that released on us the sexual revolution is rooted in an outlook of which he is the most brilliant contemporary expositor.

A Self-Proclaimed Prophet

Modern depth-psychology in both the Freudian and Jungian schools has played the same role in relation to modern, materialistic, instinct-driven culture as ancient gnosticism once played to pagan society. By collapsing nature and meaning into one they provide the philosophical underpinnings to an amoral view of life. It could even be argued that the real purpose of gnostic theologies — then as now, wittingly or otherwise — is to provide an aura of respectability for what is at heart unbridled sexual expression.

Jung, in particular, blended psychological reductionism with gnostic spirituality to produce a modern variant of mystical, pagan polytheism in which the multiple “images of the instincts” (his “archetypes”) are worshiped as gods. He presented his purportedly scientific theories as an updated and improved version of Christianity synthesized with the instincts. To an ever increasing extent, that is precisely how his theories have been accepted.

Jung perceived his own role in the development of this new, world-embracing religion as prophetic. Max Zeller, one of his followers and a Jungian analyst in Los Angeles, told Jung of a dream he had of people all over the world building a temple, himself included. Jung responded:

“That is the temple we all build on … all over the world. That is
the new religion. You know how long it will take until it is built?”
Zeller responded, “How should I know? Do you know?”
“I know…. About six hundred years.”
“Where do you know this from?” Zeller asked.
“From dreams. From other people’s dreams and from my own.
This new religion will come together as far as we can see.”[229]

Commenting on this exchange, Murray Stein, Jungian analyst and author of Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, notes:

From this report, it is unclear whether Jung foresaw this new religion as a transformed version of Christianity or as a completely new world religion embracing, or supplanting, all other religions. But insofar as Jung … regarded himself as a Parsifal … and a bringer of the Holy Grail back to Christendom, he would have hoped that the new religion would represent … partially Christianity’s “child” and partially something quite different from it, its own unique religious tradition.[230]

Jung’s direct and indirect impact on mainstream Christianity — and thus on Western culture — has been incalculable. It is no exaggeration to say that the theological positions of most mainstream denominations — in their approach to pastoral care as well as in their doctrines and liturgy — have become more or less identical with Jung’s psychological/symbolic theology.

To the end of his life Jung maintained that an accommodation between “matter” and “spirit” could be worked out; that the “dark side” of human nature needed to be “integrated” into a single, overarching “wholeness” in order to form a less strict and difficult definition of goodness; that true illumination was not shone by a holy God into a darkened world, but rather that it was clever, brilliant “Lucifer” who was himself the true source of wisdom, the font and origin of “gnosis,” or higher knowledge.

For Jung, Good and Evil evolved into two equal, balanced, cosmic principles that belong together in one overarching synthesis. This relativization of good and evil by their reconciliation is the heart of the ancient doctrines of gnosticism, which also located spirituality, hence morality, within man himself. Hence the “union of opposites.” What poet William Blake called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Jung called the “Self” — capital “S” to indicate its “divinity.”

Jung explicitly identified depth-psychology, especially his own, as heir to the gnostic tradition, especially in what he considered its superior handling of the problem of evil. He claimed: “In the ancient world the Gnostics, whose arguments were very much influenced by psychic experience, tackled the problem of evil on a much broader basis than the Church Fathers.”[231] But in fact, the gnostics fell quickly into the embrace of the very evil they thought themselves to be tackling, inevitably the consequence of an inclusivist position toward it:

There can be no doubt that the original Christian conception of the imago Dei embodied in Christ meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man. Nevertheless the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent.[232]

To embrace such a vision of God is to lay oneself open to moral blindness. Even though Jung believed that his form of depth-psychology would become the “new” gnostic child of Christianity, he was not entirely ignorant of the problems inherent in a gnostic worldview. Thus, on the one hand, Jung could say, “If anyone wants to know what are the ethical consequences of intellectualism pushed to the limit and carried out on a grand scale, let him study the history of Gnostic morals.”[233] Yet on the other, for all his brilliance and prophetic insight, Jung was unable to foresee the dire consequences of the pagan awakening that was fueling Nazism. He thus did not come to renounce the menace of Hitler until long after many of his less gifted contemporaries had done so; indeed, not until people were actually dying at Nazi hands.

It is not surprising that with this kind of theology as its foundation, within one generation Jungianism should have wholeheartedly embraced sexual revolutionaries of every stripe. In spite of Jung’s comment about gnostic morality, for example, Jung himself maintained an extramarital relationship with one of his patients for years. The primary aim of such ideas seems to be the removal of barriers to sexual expression of every type and to justify the consequent behavior in the language of the mystery religions. Such characterizations lend these ideas an aura of “spirituality” that effectively obscure their fundamental tendency toward hedonism and amorality.

What is bizarre is how many Christian thinkers and writers have been in the vanguard of popularizing Jungian ideas throughout the church — for example, Rev. Morton Kelsey has made a career of such compromise. Not surprisingly, Kelsey’s latest book, The Sacrament of Sexuality, specifically addresses homosexuality from the “pluralistic” perspective.[234] He approvingly cites the 1973 APA decision to normalize homosexuality and skirts the issue of homosexual change, instead saying that such change is “extremely rare.”[235]

But more importantly, Kelsey’s Jungianism, implicit in his title, directly relates to our discussion, not just with reference to homosexuality, but to all forms of sex outside of marriage. For from the Judeo-Christian perspective, sexuality — an aspect of nature — cannot itself be “sacramental.” It partakes of sacramental reality and is thereby elevated (sanctified) only in the context of the “sacrament of marriage.” Sacramental sexuality, on the other hand, is the very essence of pagan worship.

Thomas Moore, Episcopal Priest and Jungian analyst wildly popular with a new generation of soul-seekers, was recently interviewed by NetGuide, a popular magazine for Internet users. After having noted that, given his own personal definition of “soul,” William Blake was “its most eloquent spokesperson,” he was asked to comment on the fact that:

There’s lots of pornography on the Internet. There are bondage newsgroups, group for bestiality, you name it…. Is this good, bad, healthy, unhealthy?

Moore responded:

Can we stop categorizing sex, and moralizing about it … ? Can we ask, “is sex, any kind of sex, deeply satisfying? Is it soulfully enjoyable … ?” So forget right or wrong, they don’t pertain.[236]

Nowadays even explicitly pagan ideologies and theologies are everywhere. They are replacing orthodox theologies in divinity schools; television shows presenting them in visual form are wildly popular; churches are rewriting their liturgies to accommodate them; books espousing their point of view are regular best-sellers. As I began this book, two such, written by Jungian analysts, were on the New York Times best-seller list. Yet another is entitled The Sacrament of Abortion, dedicated to the goddess Artemis. The author and Jungian analyst Ginette Paris makes fully explicit the link between modern morality and ancient paganism:

It is time to call back the image of Artemis, the wild one, who despite her beauty refuses marriage and chooses to belong only to herself…. When we are constantly paying attention to another person, to a group, to relatives, colleagues and friends, how much time, energy and space are left … for being present to one’s self? … When the Artemis myth manifests itself in our lives, it can be recognized by a sense of no longer belonging to a group, a couple, or a family; it represents a movement away from … fusion with others, the most extreme example of fusion being the connection between a mother and her young children. Artemis … invites us to retreat from others, to become autonomous.

In a chapter entitled, “The Cure for Guilt,” the author continues:

These bizarre-sounding ideas are not as distant as they might seem. In deliberately regressing to archaic modes of thought, morality, and behavior, they lead us along the descent of nature: They describe the dark practices into which human beings inevitably sink if left to their own devices.

Which Spirit?

All who read the Bible will be well aware that other gods and other forms of spirituality exist. The Scriptures record Israel’s often losing battle against seduction by these other forms of spirituality, which have been with us for thousands of years. To people reacting to the dryness of secularism, it seems that all forms of spirituality are good, and that all offer a sense of meaning to fend off the fear of life as machine. But, in fact, the crucial question is not “whether spirit?” but “which spirit?”

You will recall the tiny, empty point at the apex of the triangle of causality, “the still point of the turning world” referred to in our earlier discussion of the will. And remember the second, inverted triangle above it. At the intersection of time and eternity turns the unnatural question of individual moral choice. With laser-like <intensity, at every moment of our existence, the question of “Which spirit?” is aimed at the invisible apex of our being.

In answering this question repeatedly over a lifetime, in thought, word, and action, people discover who they are — and in this sense alone are co-creators with God of themselves. The Bible says, in effect, that the spiritual dimension of reality has little to do with “magic,” altered states of consciousness, healthy ego-development, the goddess, n-dimensional parallel universes, the earth as God’s body, or archetypes or instincts that have been turned into gods. It claims rather that the overarching principle of existence is the character of God and his revealed moral law.

The spirituality that developed under gnostic influences in the ancient past and is being redeveloped in our own time is marked by an absence of belief in the primacy of the moral dimension as presented in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But once this moral dimension is removed, relativized, or transposed to a cosmic sphere, the intense spirituality of gnosticism shades easily into an overtly amoral materialism. As it does so, worship of its many gods devolves into the quest for its many pleasures, regardless of cost.

Thus the Apostle Paul cried out to all those in the Roman Empire who would listen, calling them away from the sexual worship of their many gods to the worship of the Holy One of Israel. These “gods” were but the multicultural variants of the same Baal and Astarte and Molech against whose worship the earlier Israelite prophets had similarly cried out to the Jewish people, making clear the link between idolatry and unconstrained sexuality.

Leviticus 18:22 and 19:13 describe homosexual relations as toevah, “detestable” (NIV) or as an “abomination” (KJV). This Hebrew word is mostly used, however, to condemn ritual prostitution, magic, divination, and idolatry, as well as violations of specifically Jewish requirements (such as desecration of the Sabbath). Paul, presenting the same unpopular message, makes the same connection:

Twelve Concluding Propositions

As we have seen, the subject of homosexuality is enormously complex, touching on many aspects of human existence: biological, psychological, and spiritual. Nonetheless, we can present our conclusions in the form of twelve propositions. These are:

1. The general condition “homosexuality” is a loosely defined aspect of the overall polymorphism of human sexuality.
2. Given the present state of human nature, sexual polymorphism is natural.
3. Each individual’s homosexuality is the likely result of a complex mixture of genetic, intrauterine, and extrauterine biological factors combined with familial and social factors as well as repeatedly reinforced choices. These create a particular blend of impulses. The role of genetic influence is small, and in any event means very little in terms of compelling an individual to become homosexual.
4. The godly standard of moral sexual behavior is much more narrowly defined than the great variety and natural polymorphism of human sexuality. Sexuality in the state of nature is therefore commonly sinful. Sanctified, it is one of God’s greatest gifts.
5. Homosexual behavior is difficult to modify because, like other forms of compulsive behavior, it involves innate impulses and reinforced choices by which sinful activities become embedded in the brain (“engraved on the heart”).
6. Ethical demands require homosexuals, like all people, to resist their natural sinful impulses.
7. Homosexuality is not a true illness, though it may be thought an illness in the spiritual sense of “soul sickness,” innate to fallen human nature. Its treatment thus opens directly into the domain of the “cure of souls.”
8. Because deeply engraved behaviors are so difficult to modify, homosexuals, like all people, have two choices: to capitulate to the behavior and its consequences or to depend on others, and on God, for help.
9. Secular programs that modify homosexual behavior are more numerous and more effective than popular opinion is led to believe.
10. Spiritual programs that lead people into dependency on God, and support them there, are even more effective. The best of these integrate into their spiritual approach the best that is offered by the secular approaches as well.
11. A pastoral understanding of the “cure” of a soul, which unfolds progressively over a lifetime, is more than the alleviation of particular symptoms; it consists of growing ever more closely toward the divinely ordained configuration that God intended for us from the beginning — and which is largely “unnatural,” not only in the area of sexuality. This process is without question a reality; it is a reality that occurs in secular settings as well as in religious ones. It is a reality no less pertinent — and lifegiving — to every person, whatever his particular brokenness, than to those struggling with homosexuality.
12. The modern change in opinion concerning homosexuality, though presented as a scientific advance, is contradicted rather than supported by science. It is a transformation in public morals consistent with widespread abandonment of the Judeo-Christian ethic upon which our civilization is based. Though hailed as “progress,” it is really a reversion to ancient pagan practices supported by a modern restatement of gnostic moral relativism.

For individual homosexuals, for each of us in our own circle of brokenness, as well as for our civilization as a whole, the choices today are as clear as they were for the Jewish nation living amidst their pagan neighbors centuries ago:

 

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