The article, unsurprisingly given its venue, takes as unquestioned premises that homosexual desire and homosexual conduct are always evils to be avoided. It notes an important shift in the claims being made by the “ex-gay” movement, a primarily Christian movement that has been around for some decades now, promising to lead gay people away from homosexuality. In the early days of the movement, it claimed that a gay person could transform him- or herself into a heterosexual through a pure act of will. Those claims have now disappeared. The article reports that “[e]arly hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.”

Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, the largest of the ex-gay groups, “is frank that change does not eradicate temptation. He wonders if change is ever 100 percent complete in this life. ‘One thing we can expect as Christians is a life of denial,’ he says. ‘I don't think we're afraid to tell people that they may have a lifetime of struggle. Freedom isn't the absence of struggle, but the life of struggle with joy in the process.’”

“The ex-gay movement seeks to integrate the reality of same-sex attraction into a life of discipleship. In that lifelong journey, they expect many changes, including changes of feeling and attraction. But they emphasize that each person's experience is different, and that instant transformation is extremely rare.”

“Not surprisingly then, ex-gay ministries appeal almost exclusively to Christians. Most participants come from evangelical backgrounds and can't resolve their Christian faith with a gay identity.”

An accompanying article describes a recent study of “reparative therapy” (therapy that seeks to transform sexual orientation). The study struggles to cast that therapy in the best possible light. But among those who were deemed to have successfully converted to heterosexual, most “did not report themselves to be without experience of homosexual arousal, and did not report heterosexual orientation to be unequivocal and uncomplicated. Sexual orientation for the individuals in this study (and indeed for most of us) may be considerably more complicated than commonly conceived, involving a complex interplay of what we are instinctively attracted to, what we can be attracted to with proper attention and focus, what we choose to be attracted to based on how we structure our interpersonal environments, our emotional attachments, our broader psychological functioning, (of course) our religious and moral beliefs and values, and many more factors. We believe the individuals who presented themselves as heterosexual success stories at Time 3 are heterosexual in some meaningful but complicated sense of the term."

The abandonment of the claim that sexual orientation can easily be changed is very big news. Poll data suggests that those who think homosexuality is innate are overwhelmingly likely to support gay rights, while those who think homosexuality is a choice are likely to be opposed. “Of those who consider it a choice,” a New York Times poll reported in 1993, “only 18 percent rated it as acceptable, compared with 57 percent of those who regard it as something gay men and lesbians cannot change.” (The story is here, but the link may not work for all readers.)

Now, there’s nothing illogical about thinking that homosexuality is innate and nonetheless opposing gay rights. One can regard it as an unfortunate fact of life that some people are permanently denied sexual happiness. The Christianity Today article ends on that note: “Our attractions, always disordered to some extent, must be submitted to Christ, who alone can redeem us. For those who feel strong same-sex attractions, that task is especially difficult. But it is the same basic struggle every Christian must face.”

But that story is a hard sell. Americans like happy endings. They like to think that if homosexual sex is forbidden, then another avenue to sexual fulfillment is easily available to gay people. That’s why the leadership of the Christian Right has tended to be fairly quiet about the ambiguities and tensions in the experience of those in the ex-gay movement. As Tanya Erzen shows in her fascinating study of the ex-gay movement, this has produced considerable tensions. One of her informants, a committed member of the movement, denounced the hypocrisy of his fellow Christians:

“Most of them can’t handle the truth. If you’re in the church and you’re a drug addict, murderer, whatever, guys will come up to you and slap you on the ass. You’re one of the guys. But if you state you struggle with homosexuality, you get the whole pew to yourself.” (P. 66 of Erzen’s book, “Straight to Jesus.”)

The appearance of the Christianity Today article is a significant event, because it shows that mainstream conservative Christianity is now willing to admit these uncomfortable facts. This, however, is a decidedly unstable cultural formation. My guess is that once it is generally admitted that homosexuality isn’t a matter of casual choice, resistance to the gay rights movement will be drastically enfeebled, and the salience of gay rights as an issue in American politics will begin to fade.

I used to feel decidedly hostile to the ex-gay movement. This article, Erzen’s book, and another good study by Michelle Wolkomir have persuaded me that the movement is, wittingly or not, a progressive force in American politics. They demand that the immutability claim be taken seriously, and they are not easily dismissed by the right, because they agree with the right about nearly everything else. They have a credibility and a competence in the pertinent theological claims that no one else can possibly match. They are able to speak to their own cultural group, in the same way that sophisticated Islamic feminist theologians can speak to theirs. And I predict that the truth that they are putting forth will, intentionally or not, destroy the cultural formation that they are trying to preserve and participate in.