Part 1: A Personal Polemology: Three Vignettes from a Decade-Long Holy War

You say that I showed you the light,
but all it did in the end
was make the dark feel darker than before.
— Lucy Dacus

How wonderful to be hidden,
how terrible not to be found.
— D.W. Winnicott

What follows are three vignettes from three different periods of time in my life, all of which provide insight and context into the conflict that was long waged within myself. I debated whether or not to separate them or keep them together, and opted for the former - so read them all at once if you wish, or read them separately.

The water sparkled with the midday sunlight on the backyard pool of my grandparent’s house.

It was Sunday afternoon, and we were in Australia.

My grandparents had been missionaries and church planters for the Independent Baptists for over 30 years, and we were on holiday visiting them in the country where my mother grew up as a missionary kid.

The air had that quality of immediacy and imminence that always seems to hang in the air in the moments just before a big event or special gathering.

We had just come home from church.

The menu had been planned: an authentic Aussie “barbie.”

The house had been cleaned.

The occasion was announced, and invitations extended.

Chairs had been set up around the pool for the church's congregants to watch and bear witness to the wet sacrament about to take place.

The occasion? My brothers’ and my baptism.

Baptism is a Christian ritual that symbolizes an individual’s spiritual regeneration, purification, and admission into the Christian church and community. 

Even while all forms of Christianity practice baptism, the beliefs concerning it, and thereby, the forms it takes, vary significantly within Christendom at large. Catholics and Lutherans, for instance, believe in infant baptism, which involves pouring or sprinkling water on the baby's head. Others, such as the Orthodox, practice immersion baptism, requiring the candidate to be immersed three times.

The tradition I come from believes in what is called “believer baptism,” which is the practice of only baptizing those who have explicitly made a personal profession of faith in Jesus. Thus, baptism only becomes necessary once the individual reaches the “age of accountability” which is the respective age at which a person is cognitively able to choose for themselves whether or not they will place their faith in Jesus Christ. Rather than pouring or sprinkling water, the mode of believer baptism is the full immersion of the candidate into and out of water. 

A paramount expression of Christian faith and obedience to Christ, immersion baptism and one’s submersion in and out of water symbolizes the candidate’s identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Often described as “an outward expression of an inward change,” it publicly signifies the beginning of the candidate’s “new life with Christ” and is seen as a momentous occasion in the community worthy of special celebration. 

I was six years old.

Like any kid, I was just absorbing the world around me as voraciously as possible and learning what it required of me to be safe and loved—in other words, to belong.

I had been to Sunday school enough to know that the ultimate source of safety and love was found with God.

After all, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

I didn’t know much, but I knew that hell was a real place and a place I needed to, no matter the cost, avoid going to.

And I knew evil existed in the world, that the world around me was dangerous and bad and full of evil spiritual forces. If I wasn’t careful or cautious, then I could get misled and deceived, and I would suffer terribly as a result, possibly being sent to hell to be consciously tormented for all eternity, the epitome of being unsafe and unloved.

As all kids do, I accepted the world presented to me, and I assumed my experience to be normative.

Just like how I assumed that all my elementary peers also stayed up late at night terrified of the thought of hell. Worried that maybe, when they said the prayer of salvation, they didn't say it exactly right, that somehow it hadn't “worked.”

How could you be sure?

What if I died in my sleep and woke up in hell because I said the prayer wrong?

Or how I also assumed all my childhood friends also had regular nightmares of being demon-possessed.

I had heard the stories of the many exorcisms that my grandparents had performed during their many years as missionaries. And I had heard the stories of people unknowingly buying “sinful items” that had demons “attached” to them, demons that would follow them home and cause them to sin and jeopardize their lives and the lives of others.

Or how I assumed all my friends, as a result, also slept with Bibles by their beds as a means to ward off demons seeking to possess them. It was “The Sword of the Spirit” after all, as I had learned in Sunday school, God’s Word — my greatest spiritual weapon. 

Little did I know just how weaponized it would become.

I remember on nights when I was afraid that demons were literally in my room, lurking to possess my body and lure me away from God, I would sit up in my bed in the pitch-black darkness of my bedroom and, with silent tears streaming down my face, I would frenziedly swing my bible in the air mimicking the movement of a sword whispering the name of Jesus over and over, unsure of what I was more desperate for - to fend off the perceived evil threat or to not disturb my sleeping family.

These moments, I would soon learn, would become a model for my life: fight your demons, but do it quietly.

So, even while I didn’t know much at six years old, I knew that evil existed in the world and was an ever-present threat.

And I knew that love and safety hinged on my capacity to war against evil and to maintain a relationship of good standing with God.

And so there I stood, the water coming up to my small waist on the second step of my grandparent’s saltwater swimming pool.

The water felt especially cool in contrast to the hot Australian summer sun bearing down on my small body.

I was standing there because, just as any kid is, I was willing to do whatever it took to belong.

Down into that water I went, with a contrite and sincere heart to obey God, and I emerged to the grins of my three older brothers awaiting their turn, the distinct smell of a smoking barbecue grill, and the many eyes of the church community, here to bear witness to my proclamation of faith and the life-long war I was committing to wage against all that was evil.

Looking back now, I’m not sure if it is more comical or tragic when I recall that, in my early days of puberty, I had interpreted my “lack of sexual attraction” to females as a sign of "spiritual maturity.” My naive, immature, and underdeveloped teenage ego thought, “Clearly, I don’t struggle with lusting after women because I am just more spiritually mature than my peers.”

This self-righteousness was short-lived, however, as to my horror, I quickly realized my “lust problem” was of a different variety than the majority of my peers.

And it was a horror.

I had long feared the perceived evil in the external world around me and had learned to wage war against it, sometimes literally weaponizing my bible by swinging it at the sinister forces perceived in the darkness of my bedroom — but what’s a boy to do when the evil he fears is not external but internal?

What’s he to do when he comes to see that the evil is, in fact, himself?

This was when the real conflict began.

Evidenced best (and most tragically) by a private journal entry I wrote in 2010 at just thirteen years old.

Like an official declaration of holy war, in it, I begged God with a rather violent undertone to have him help me find the source of my “gross gay thoughts” and to “kill it.”

Shrouded in secrecy and shame, I proceeded to curate a dire and drastic list of pros and cons.

(Included again below for legibility)

Ah, yes - this is where my war against evil took a turn.

In the tormented inner world of a 13-year-old kid who was convinced that if he was gay, he would incur God’s wrathful judgment, disappoint everyone he knew, never know the simple joy of a birthday party or family vacation again, never have a chance at any kind of personal fulfillment or fun or happiness, and likely die a tragic AIDS-related death all alone with no friends or family.

What’s a kid to do when he learns that his budding self poses such a threat to his safety and his capacity to belong?

What kind of cruel and fraught existence is he doomed to when the body he cannot escape from with its unwanted sexual impulses, is chronically unsafe to him as it threatens everything he holds dear?

What’s a kid to do when he inherits a future he doesn’t want?

Is it really any wonder that LGBT youth opt for suicide more frequently than their straight peers?

And what’s a kid to do when he cannot tell anyone about this conflict, this secret of his?

For if he was to utter it, it would be to validate its existence.

For him to tell someone was to potentially realize his greatest fear: being rejected and abandoned.

He had heard the stories.

He had heard what had happened to others like him.

And so, like a lot of queer kids, I got really good at hiding.

I worked hard on stiffening my wrist (literally), tried to be like my older brothers and act interested in football and girls, unsuccessfully tried to drop my voice an octave, and worked tirelessly to keep up appearances that I was fine despite having cried myself to sleep again last night or spent the morning locked in my room begging God to do what any of us do when we encounter something broken: to repair it or replace it.

In the years that followed, the stronger my sexual awareness grew, the more zealous I became in my faith.

This reached its peak in high school.

Volunteering at church for upwards of 20+ hours a week near the end of high school, not unlike the 6-year-old version of myself, I was never more willing to do whatever was necessary to have a future of belonging.

The water sparkled again, this time not with sunlight but with the strobe lights that filled the auditorium and the spotlight that illuminated the place of public pledge.

“Smoke” dramatically hung in the air from the fog machine on stage, and the worship band sang a seemingly endless loop of emotionally powerful worship songs, all of which created a powerful, persuasive, and affecting atmosphere.

It reflected exactly what I felt inside:

A bold, resolute, and impassioned sentiment - a sense of complete rededication and commitment.

The occasion? My (second) baptism.

“This time is different,” I told myself.

This time I was 18 years old, I was an “adult.”

This time, I knew what it meant, what it required of me.

I remember about a year prior my church had announced they would be having a mid-week “Family Dinner-Table Talk,” in which they would be inviting an “expert” to come and speak openly about sexuality. The church held this special mid-week service where the congregation could come together as a “family” and candidly discuss this important topic. 

As a deeply closeted high schooler riddled with fear and anxiety about my sexuality, I hoped this would give me the answers I was searching for.

Ricky Chelette of Living Hope Ministries (a well-known conversion therapy ministry), a man hailed to be a credentialed “expert” on sexuality, was the invited guest speaker. I loved and trusted my church and my pastors, so if they had invited him to speak, surely he was trustworthy, too. In hindsight, however, a man well-learned in political theory and propagating religious dogma (Ricky holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science/Pre-Law and a Master of Arts in Religious Education) hardly seems credentialed to credibly speak about the nature of human sexuality, let alone make any life-altering recommendations concerning it - but that is beside the point.

Nevertheless, afraid, isolated, and desperate for answers, Ricky’s talk was enlivening and convincing to my answer-wanting ears, not only with his charisma and his pastoral tone - but also with the confidence with which he spoke about the matter. He even had a whiteboard and, over the course of his talk, he delineated lucidly and comprehensively, complete with charts and arrows and diagrams, the exact reasons “why people are gay” and, as a result, the exact ways to “resolve it.”

It was textbook reparative theory.

“It’s simple,” I thought.

I learned that males are homosexual purely as a result of “poor parenting” - the mother is “overbearing” and the father is “distant,” and in the instance of males, the father is especially to blame for homosexual orientations. 

A solution is simple: all you have to do is “compensate” for the “parenting deficiencies” from your childhood, and in no time, you’ll be heterosexual again.

“Finally,” I thought, “some answers.”

I walked away that evening not only with someone to share the blame of my condition (somehow, I bought into the idea that, as a male, it was especially my father’s fault for “failing me” in his parenting) but also with an invigorated hope that there were answers and a “solution” for me.

Indeed, I walked away with confirmation that my queer human condition was unequivocally bad and broken and with a renewed sense that warring against it was not only a productive endeavor in that such efforts could, in fact, “fix” me - but also a sense that doing so was ultimately God’s will for me, the price of his blessing.

A year later, my feet stepped down into that spotlight-illuminated water in front of my mega-church.

The eyes of the church community were upon me, my family in the midst of them in the stadium seating.

This time was different; this time, I knew what it meant, what it required of me.

This time I knew the evil I was warring against was not just external but internal.

Although being baptized twice is irregular, uncommon, and even considered taboo by some, I felt I was called to an uncommon task.  So to me, it seemed necessary—if I had any chance of staying faithful to that task’s fulfillment, I believed I needed to recommit myself fully.

Down into that water I went, an external expression of inward war; I was raised up with a newfound fervor for the task before me: to obliterate myself so as to belong.

There is something especially delightful or refreshing about the feeling of finally taking off your shoes and socks after a long day.

The way your toes feel as the fresh air seems to slip in between them. It almost tickles the way they awaken, like somehow you forgot you had them, your feet and your toes and your ankles and your body. I always seem to feel it most in my upper neck, just at the base of my head. My spine kind of shivers as my lungs open a bit wider and my breath deepens.

I felt it that day we arrived.

My mother and I had driven 12 hours to California.

Our bodies ached and lagged in the way only a road-weary body can.

Instead of driving to the AirBnB directly, however, we decided to drive directly to the coast and put our feet in the ocean and our noses in the salty ocean air.

There I stood, my shoes to the side, my feet smiling in the cold Pacific surf, stimulated by the sensation of wetness and sand, on the threshold of a vast unknown.

Water, sky, and horizon were the only things that seemed to offer any structure to the mysterious expanse before us, the expanse kissing our feet with salty foam.

It’s unclear whether our coastal detour was due to some romanticized notion of “driving west” as far as we physically could before we couldn’t any longer or if we just wanted to avoid the inevitable a little bit longer.

The inevitable being a nearing goodbye as I started a “new chapter in my life.”

Tomorrow my mother would help me move into my college dorm room at Biola and a new phase in my personal holy war would begin.

By my senior year of high school, I was determined that I had been called into a life of “vocational Christian ministry.” Not only did I sincerely want to help others find God, but I think a part of me believed deep down that if I devoted my life to God’s kingdom and God’s service, he might have the grace to finally hear my prayer, to heal my sexuality, to let me get married to a woman, and to have a chance at some kind of “normal life” with some modicum of happiness.

It was with this vigor that I found myself as a transfer student at Biola University majoring in “Christian Ministries.”

Equipped with reparative theory, I was determined to use my time at Biola to correct my “parenting deficiencies,” with the vision that I would graduate from bible college not only equipped for a life of vocational ministry in service to God’s kingdom but also as straight as an arrow.

Constructing a kind of DIY-Conversion-Therapy for myself, my reparative efforts at Biola consisted of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual interventions.

Intellectually, I devoured as much as I possibly could about the matter.

When I first arrived at Biola, I remember I would often sneak into the library, especially at times when I knew my friends were off campus or in class, and discreetly peruse the section on human sexuality. After cautiously retrieving various books from this section, I would then warily take them to a different part of the library and sit on the floor between the aisles of books in an effort to hide and avoid running into anyone I knew. 

Even there, I often wouldn’t stay long; I’d opt to take photos of the books and pages from within them on my smartphone so that I could read them privately later without the risk of being found out. And, obviously, I would never check any of the books out of the library, as you can imagine, I would never want such books associated with my name for any reason.

The ethics of this all is plainly ironic to me now: how my intense moralistic desire to “be good” forced me to live such a duplicitous life shrouded in secrecy and deception. How tenable is one’s ethics if its pursuit of the good necessitates an invoking of the bad?

Nevertheless, given that Biola is a conservative Christian university, its literature regarding sexuality was notably narrow in that it espoused a rather singular view that homosexuality was a sin (or a result of it), a problem ultimately to be solved whether in this life or the next. As you can imagine, this only reinforced the vigor with which I gave myself to my conversion therapy efforts.

Eventually, I realized I might need some help.

Much to my chagrin, the years of praying and bargaining with God to make me “not gay” and the ongoing inner monologue that droned on endlessly with self-contempt did not seem to be working. 

I still resented the way “Biola Boys” made my stomach flutter as I walked to my Bible and ministry classes on campus.

I felt that I had exhausted all my efforts in isolation. Considering what was at stake—namely, the possible risk of eternal damnation, social rejection, and a life of unhappiness—I decided to swallow my pride and admit that perhaps some “professional assistance” might be worth investigating.

So, I signed up for psychotherapy at the Biola Counseling Center.

It was here, in the presence of a paid professional, that I first disclosed to another human being what was then my secret and my shame. I was twenty years old.

I ardently reassured him that I was, in fact, straight, but I just had this “pesky problem” that wouldn’t leave me alone. I see now that it wasn’t him I was trying to convince. And I told him that my intention for therapy, for our time together, was to “fix” it once and for all.

Like any good Rogerian-trained therapist, he remained neutral - neither agreeing nor disagreeing with my hyper-spiritualized and hyper-combative understanding of my sexuality. He simply provided a non-judgmental open space for me to be with all of it for the first time ever - all the inner turmoil and distress and fear and shame.

This frustrated and disturbed me, despite it being more helpful than I could possibly know at the time.

I wasn’t there to “be nonjudgemental” or “accept” or “befriend” or “associate” with this part of me; I was there to discover its roots and to exterminate and eradicate them as thoroughly and comprehensively as possible. Evidently, the violent sentiment I felt towards myself hadn’t changed much from the 13-year-old version of me.

While I had been somewhat hopeful my intellectual and psychological efforts would aid in my healing, I nevertheless believed earnestly that, of all interventions, my spirituality offered the greatest hope of change.

Reparative theory taught that homosexual men need to find a new “father figure” who can compensate for some kind of “malnourished relationship” they had as a child with their primary male caregiver. Somehow, some kind of being “re-fathered” had the power to correct what went awry developmentally and, in turn, make them straight.

And so during this period I got involved, yet again, in a local evangelical church with the intention of finding a re-fathering figure. I soon found what I was looking for, and I entered into a formal discipleship relationship with one of the church elders. Being around the age of my biological father, he fit the “re-fathering figure” more than well. He had been a pastor for decades and we both committed to meeting together regularly and did so for over a year.

I disclosed to him right at the start my “struggle” and my intentions — and he was committed to discipleing me and walking alongside me and my sexuality. We prayed together, we read scripture, and he held me accountable to my commitment to sexual purity and celibacy. We even spoke and prayed optimistically about the future, a future even with the possibility of a wife and kids. I remember I felt hopeful, like I had found exactly what I had been told would heal me.

And, as if entering into a formal discipleship relationship within a local church setting explicitly centered on addressing my sexuality wasn’t enough — I also signed up for spiritual direction at Biola. Once a month, I would meet with a professionally trained spiritual director to discern God’s presence and voice amid my felt turmoil and anguish concerning my sexuality.

Over the three years I was at Biola, I laboriously and diligently divulged myself and my inner world to my psychotherapist, my discipler, and my spiritual director - absolutely determined to realize my vision of graduating from Biola on the straight and narrow path. (pun intended)

Not unlike the violent manner in which I swung my bible in the darkness of my bedroom to ward off evil as a child, I again weaponized the bible but this time in the darkness of my soul, violently attempting to subdue and sever any part of me perceived to be a threat to the love and acceptance and belonging I was desperately searching for.

There was such sincerity in employing spirituality to help me realize the “heterosexual ideal,” yet strangely, the more I tried, the more I felt harmed, defiled, and dirty - rather than purified, helped, and relieved.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it's like. 

Just how psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually devastating it is when you continuously and ardently open yourself to other people, granting them access to some of the most intimate and sacred parts of your self and inner world, not only granting them permission but encouraging them to edit, tamper, change, adapt, modify, and fix these parts of you according to whatever they deem to be best and most in alignment with God’s will and your good.

It’s like a certain kind of emotional mutilation takes place.

After a while, you can’t help but feel violated and transgressed.

Bruised.

Shameful.

Disgusting.

Not to mention — betrayed.

Betrayed by not only all the people who told you all of this would “heal you” and instead has left you feeling shattered and mangled - but, most painfully, betrayed by yourself.

There's this sickening realization that maybe it was you—you were the one who abandoned yourself long ago, trying to, as Alok Vaid-Menon poetically said, “contour yourself into someone else’s fiction,” only to let yourself be utterly desecrated.

Like this was all your fault somehow.

The shame and grief of your own culpability is like adding salt to an already bitter wound.

It’s impossible to describe just how fraught an experience like this is. 

The feeling that your religious zealousness is the very thing that is simultaneously both somehow “saving you” and yet “destroying you.”

On one hand, you wonder if maybe God isn’t healing you for a lack of “faith.” So you pray for more faith, for more conviction, for more strength to be able to abandon and obliterate yourself all the more for God’s will to be accomplished in and through you.

Meanwhile - you simultaneously doubt whether you can continue in this manner. You feel so diminished, so emotionally impoverished, and destitute that you doubt the possibility that you’ll ever know peace - now or in the future. You become a trinitarian of a different variety as despair, hopelessness, and loneliness become your three most basic realities.

It’s almost like some kind of spiritual Stockholm Syndrome.

You can neither relinquish your faith nor recommit to it.

You are held captive in a chronically violent and unsafe place, and yet you empathize and identify with your captor’s goals. You somehow trust that the entity doing you harm has good reasons to make you feel so unsafe.

Even if it utterly obliterates you, it’s for the better.

It’s for God’s glory and your good, after all.

It's no surprise then that the sleepless nights of my childhood, tormented by my perception of evil and my violent warring against it, continued well into my young adulthood.

And the sleepless nights turned into days, and those days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and months into years. Suddenly, it was 2019, and I was preparing for my graduation from Biola.

Not unlike how it all began with my mother at the ocean, I stood again on the precipice of another vast unknown. This time, however, the expanse before me was one of despair, and there was blood on my hands from the years of violent warring, which never had any victors, and I was alone. So alone I didn’t even have myself, a mere apparition itself haunted by the feeling that maybe it didn’t have to be this way - but lost at how to discover anything else, lost at how to believe anything different.

How do you have faith when faith was what got you here?

Graduation came, and despite years of concerted effort, I was confronted with a very disturbing truth:

I was queer.

And there seemed to be nothing I could do about that.

The question was:

What now?

This Post's Song: Silence by TWO LANES

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Read the next part:

2. Disclosures and Decisions

Do I dare Disturb the universe — T.S. Elliot I want to be two people at once. One runs away. ― Peter Heller I remember the lingering smell of birthday candle smoke that arose above the plate of two-tiered confection before me and being encircled by the bright smiles and eyes

Yielding to YesTim Jurgensen