The Persecution of Gay People in Post World War II USA.
Part Two of my critique of Simon Ponsonby’s Sermon on ‘Homosexuality.’
Introduction.
Already we have had the entirely predictable knee-jerk reactions to Charlie Bell’s, and my own critique of Simon’s sermon. Stephen Foster came out all guns blazing in his following Sunday sermon, shooting from the hip, with both barrels, with great passion and zeal, drawing on Simon’s sermon introduction, and making it clear he felt Simon was being ‘stoned’, or attacked. Marcus Green similarly laid in with a short epistle, ‘Let’s all be friends.’ Both within just a couple of days of me publishing these critiques.
I would prefer some objective critical engagement with Simon’s sermon. Sadly, it is being swept under the carpet. It was removed from the internet, the day after I highlighted its existence to St Aldates friends.
When people calling out blatant and violent homophobia, (not physical violence, but spiritual, mental, and emotional violence), are then labelled as ‘attacking’ the preacher responsible, you know something has gone seriously wrong in the Priesthood. A cover up is happening, protecting their own. This is the ‘circling of wagons’ we expected.
Neither, I or Charlie were attacking Simon Ponsonby, we are simply calling out his sin, and the sins inherent within the sermon, and all that they represent. These principles of loyalty to leadership, and ‘do not touch the Lord’s anointed’, are standard fare amongst conservative evangelicals. We have watched them played out tragically in abuse cases involving conservative evangelical leaders. Furthermore, does Simon, or his sermon really needed defending, or hiding? I am sure Simon is man enough, when he considers it the right time, to respond in person to the critiques offered of his sermon. Or he will ignore them, and me, in the hope that we, like his sermon, simply disappear.
I stand by every word I have spoken regarding the sins manifest in this sermon. My words were not a knee-jerk reaction to this sermon. They were the result of many weeks of research, study, reflection, and night after night of being locked in prayer, over someone I once considered a precious and trusted friend. The devastation and betrayal I felt upon first hearing this sermon were total.
What seems at stake here, is a principle for the Priesthood; if Simon can be called out for his sin here, then no Priest is safe from being called out for their sin. No Priest should be above accountability. We can call out Trump for his sins, we can call out Johnson for his sins, but we are not allowed to call out a Priest?
The fact they have hidden the sermon, says everything you need to know; it was not the gospel.
The reason some feel Simon is under attack, is because of the violence embedded in his sermon. It is far easier and less painful to pretend the sermon is ‘not so bad really’, than admit to the painful reality: it is full blown homophobia being manifest by one of our most loved charismatic leaders and speakers. Each of us is thus forced to make a decision about the sermon, and the sins Simon has manifest, that means friendships might become strained, loyalties divided and exposed. Friendship and loyalty do not, and have never defined love, truth, or grace. They have proved, in many cases, to cover over a multitude of sins. Love, truth and grace, are principles which define the nature of friendship. Love does not tolerate abuse, but establishes boundaries. My friendships are not without boundaries, and Simon has violently transgressed them in his sermon.
In any other context than church, Simon would have been immediately suspended, had someone complained about his ‘lecture’. UK Law is very clear; homophobia, transphobia and racism are defined by the Crown Prosecution Service, as being determined by those who experience and suffer them, or by any other witnesses. Many gay people have already experienced and declared this sermon to be blatant homophobia, as have straight people, clergy, and bishops, as further witnesses to its ugliness and destructive nature. Whether they have the courage to publicly state that, is between them and God.
Homophobia is not determined by the sincerity, ignorance, or intent of the one who inflicts it. They may believe, as Simon does, that he is not homophobic, or being homophobic in his sermon. Fortunately, and rightly, he is not the one who gets to decide this. Fortunately for Simon, he is also protected from prosecution by UK Law, on the basis of exercising his faith, under the clause of ‘religious beliefs’.
Am I loyal to a leader, or to love, truth and grace?
This sermon was a perfect example of a Priest, embedding homophobia into a parish church. The sermon was applauded by the church. Until the sermon and embedded beliefs are repented of, by both Simon, and the church, it is only safe to assume they are still embedded within the church. By how many, we do not know.
When the Priesthood is unable to accept scrutiny and accountability, and dismisses it as attack, then it suggests the Priesthood is threatened by the truth.
Have no doubts, I love Simon, I have no choice, he is a brother in Christ. It so happens that I genuinely love Simon anyway, despite his sin. My love is genuine, sincere, and deep, but, our friendship came to an abrupt and shattering end, the moment I heard the horror of this sermon, and the depth of prejudice in it. I happen to love Simon enough to challenge and call him to repentance. Our friendship will not be restored until Simon has the courage, grace, and humility, to express repentance for the content of his sermon, and the sins he has indulged in preaching it. He has wounded many.
It is God’s loving kindness that leads us to repentance. I love Simon enough, to stand before him and ask him to repent. Such a stance has cost me reputation in this city, and will divide even the LGBTQIA+ community. My words may seem harsh to some, but they are commensurate to the violence Simon has levelled at myself, my family, friends, and community, not least the victims of the teaching and conversion therapy espoused and practised in the sermon itself.
He has exalted himself in this sermon, over the gay community as their judge. What he expresses in his sermon, is not ‘What God Says about Gay People’, but what Simon thinks about gay people. If he still believes what he has preached here, I, like Charlie Bell, have grave concerns about his pastoral role in a church full of young people and students, some, who we know, are LGBTQIA+. The fact that Stephen Foster keeps the normative theology of the church a closely guarded secret further adds to the risk, for LGBTQIA+ people in his church. Such practise is deceitful, dangerous, and potentially fatal for vulnerable LGBTQIA+ people.
My role is simply to help open Simon’s eyes to the homophobia within his chosen paradigms, heart and mind. I am not responsible for his, or anyone else’s responses. That is their choice to make and live by.
I have been asking for four years for St Aldates Senior Leadership to be honest, transparent, humble, and open about their beliefs regarding LGBTQIA+ people. For that, I have been frozen out of my own church. The only evidence I have about the normative theology of St Aldates Church, is this sermon.
Stephen Foster refuses to even speak to me, has rejected the mediation process, set up by the Diocese. I struggle to see how such a stance represents the Christ we both serve.
Sermon Critique. PART 2. HISTORY.
Simon is at great pains here in both his very limited understanding and portrayal of history and his careful use of rhetoric, to paint the ‘gay lobby’ as a dark and violent existential threat to humanity, the social order, and the church. He uses snapshots of history, wrenched out of true context, to try and prove the ‘gay lobby’ was a bullying, manipulative and destructive force against humanity and Christian morality and belief. He is embedding that phobia deeper and further into his church.
One needs a much wider, greater, deeper grasp of the sciences Simon is misusing, to understand the hopeless situation in which gay people found themselves from the end of the 19th century and into the middle of the 20th. Simon’s rhetoric subliminally suggests that all the ‘gay lobby’ he describes were interested in, was the freedom to indulge promiscuity and orgies, rather than the actual truth; that the majority felt they were fighting for their lives, after decades of violent persecution by the state.
A New Secular Priesthood supersede the gospel and the role of the Church as the source of ‘Salvation’ – or healing, wholeness for the individual and for society.
The emergence through the 19th century of the science of the study of human experience, psychoanalysis, largely through the success of two of its most famous practioners, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, led to the creation of a new secular priesthood of the sciences; psychoanalysts. Their popularity, influence and authority grew at such a rapid pace, that in just a few years they changed the western world’s understanding of humanity. One of the main reasons for this success, was that psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry became vital tools in seeking to heal people from the traumas of two world wars.
They also revolutionised the worlds understanding of those who experienced same-sex attraction, from Christendom’s two-thousand-year-old vision and diagnosis of it being a moral failing and sin, to it becoming a disease and sickness. It was a revolution in the understanding of gay people, that has led to a hundred years of intense persecution of gay people.
This new understanding, pathologizing gay people, ‘Homosexuals’, was without any criticism, and even the church welcomed it in as their new version of the ‘absolute truth’.
In May 6, 1868, the itinerant, Austrian-born writer Karl Maria Kertbeny wrote to fellow queer activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, coining the words for the first recorded time, of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. By the late 1930s these words were become familiar and frequently used within the new clinical studies and the science of psychoanalysis.
As the Nazi’s rose to power in 1930s Germany, with their obsession for both racial purity and creating a master-race or Übermensch, (Alpha males) or ‘supermen’, amongst the first people they targeted for extinction were the disabled, handicapped, gay and transgender people. The new science of psychoanalysis helped fuel the Nazi judgement of gay people as being sick deviants.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/the-men-with-the-pink-triangle-heinz-heger
The leading humane psychoanalyst of homosexuality and transgender people of that time was Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. The Nazi’s raided his premises, burnt all his books and sent his clients and friends to the death camps. Gay and trans people were amongst the first to be murdered in Nazi death camps, and they were forced to wear the pink triangle or star, to highlight their priority for destruction, from the moment of their diagnosis and arrest, – alongside the Romanies and Jews rounded up and sent to the camps.
These were the beginnings of the modern worlds pathologizing and demonisation of gay and transgender people.
When the Nazi’s destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld’s books and life-long, study, research, and work, the world lost an invaluable and huge clinical research project into gay and trans lives rooted in a humane and just ethos of their dignity, equality and inclusion.
In his place, the new science of psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry became fixated upon the judgement and diagnosis of ‘homosexuals’ and ‘homosexuality’ as a diseased and sick expression of humanity. This diagnosis was not separate from Christendom’s vision of same-sex attraction as a sin, or ‘abomination’, but superseded, reinforced and amplified it many times over, and stopped any more humane vision and understanding of same-sex attraction, being gay, from being a possibility, – until gay people finally began to organise and fight such violent oppression by state, church, and society, in post war USA during the late 50’s and early sixties.
Even today, most gay people still hear and view the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ as pejorative and prejudiced labelling.
Post war USA and the social conditions gay people found themselves suffering under, was nothing less than persecution. It was a persecution rooted in several key factors, not least the psychoanalytical paradigm of Freuds many disciples, who had gained extensive social, medical, clinical, and political power, and had designated gay people as mentally ill, deviant, and perverted. Christendom simply absorbed these new beliefs without question or analysis. Being gay was now no longer just sin, it was to be mentally ill.
Section 28 in the US Military.
Two World Wars had seen the US military forces absorb the new science of psychology, and in some ways, placed them ahead of any other nation in the world. For example, the US Air Force was able to diagnose severe trauma in its bombing crews and allow them rest and recovery before returning them to active service and war, whilst the RAF and other nations, labelled those suffering extreme trauma and PTSD as cowards lacking moral fibre, sending them straight back into battle, even when they were in psychological breakdown, or subjecting them to Court Martials for ‘cowardice.’
For gay people in the US military, during the Second World War, the psychology and the state took the opposite view, holding ‘homosexuality’ to be both a moral evil, and a sickness, disease, and perversion, that warranted immediate discharge under Section 28, – a ‘Blue Card’. This blue card remained on peoples records for the rest of their lives, as constant as their age and sex markers, ensuring they could not gain employment in any government agency and most civil ones. It was the beginnings of a violent state persecution of gay people, regardless of their character, gifts, and abilities to perform their duty and service; an evil injustice.
This new exclusion and ejection of gay people from the military, was not dependent upon their behaviour, of having committed ‘a crime’. Their persecution was because of their ‘being’, for being who they were. This was the seismic shift in the western world’s view of gay people, which the church swallowed wholesale.
Simon is entirely blind to this historical truth, that the beliefs he holds about gay people being mentally ill, are not rooted in any orthodox Christian faith, but in the Freudian psychoanalytical school emerging in the early 20th century. A belief system he goes on to espouse and practise in his sermon.
Mistranslation of the word ‘Homosexual’ into the 1946 RSV Bible.
Even theologians in bible translation teams are influenced by the ‘secular sciences,’ and the societal politics and pressures around and upon them, in their work of translating words and meanings from millennia ago, into contemporary culture*. There is wide and scholarly consensus that the mis-translation and installation of the word ‘homosexual’, into the 1946 Revised Standard Version Bible, ‘the’ authoritative and most popular bible of its day, was a tragedy that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of gay people, from the ensuing judgement and violence that befell them, resulting in thousands of murders and suicides, which have arisen from the post World War Two systematic and homophobic theology, that ensued from this mistranslation.
In 1957, the head of the RSV translation team admitted that the use and insertion of the word homosexual into the 1946 RSV had been a tragic mistake. Even worse, they had only just signed a ‘no further changes for 10 years’ contract with the publishers, this did not expire until 1966. Between 1946 and 1966, all the other old and new bible translations simply and slavishly copied the RSV, in using the word homosexual in their texts. Around this new word in Christian language, a fist full of terror texts where gathered, to form a post war systematic homophobic theology. This systematic homophobic theology has been used as a weapon to attack LGBTQIA+ people with ever since.
The German Lutheran Bible, translated in 1522 by Luther himself, appears to have honoured a much older tradition and belief in Europe; that the two Greek words, translated ‘homosexual’ in the 1946 RSV, were believed to mean ‘abusers of boys’, referring to the ancient Greek and Roman evil of pedastry, which they believed Paul was addressing.
The conservative evangelical Church of England right now has hidden the evils of Smyth, Fletcher and Pilavachi, all abusing boys and young men, whilst simultaneously persecuting gay people. Is God trying to tell them something? To me it sounds like God is shouting at them, and the writing is on their wall. They persecute gay people and have protected abusers of boys, in their own midst. This is an evil.
*Today the leading scholars in the sciences of psychology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and theology, all admit that their own understanding is both limited and defined by the society and culture they exist within. Conservative evangelical theology, with its hermeneutics of ‘Scripture, Tradition and Reason’, seems unable, and unwilling to take this step of self-reflection and humility, which prevents learning, this is why it is become increasingly detached from reason, science, and human experience, anchored in hollow claims of being ‘The Absolute Truth’, that appear ever more absurdly authoritarian, protectionist and cultic, to most of us listening in from outside their bubble.
The 1946 RSV translation team which had been working for many years previously, had absorbed the both the secular science of psychoanalysis, and the paranoia of the state, and society, which regarding gay people as an existential threat to the moral and social order and a kind of virus that might destroy the discipline of the armed forces, the holiness and ‘purity’ of the church, social stability, and cause them all to collapse from within. They themselves were pickled in this societal paranoia; it had become ingrained in the American psyche. People like Simon, have developed their theology and world views, regarding gay people, from this lethal cocktail of paranoia, rather than from a researched, reflective, and objective understanding of history and science, which should inform and help shape their theology.
American Psychiatric Association and the DSM.
The situation for gay people in post war USA was about to get far, far worse. As thousands of gay and lesbian military personnel returned from the war and were discharged from service, many were reluctant to return to their own insular and conservative families and communities, whom they knew would not, and could not accept them, they did want to be so isolated or ostracised. Consequently, gay communities established and flourished in the port cities and often the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association’s communal homes, became the centre of the gay community in these cities.
These gay men and lesbian women had formed deep camaraderie and secret networks within wartime and the military and auxiliary services, to protect themselves and survive the state persecution, and the risk of lifelong unemployment and subsequent poverty. These relationships, friendships and networks were the seeds of the organisations that became an inevitable response to their increasing persecution from state and society in post war USA. What Ponsonby denigrates in his rhetoric as ‘the gay lobby’.
The conservative and violent backlash against the now openly gay and flourishing communities was swift and predictable. With the new secular priesthood having diagnosed gays as diseased, sick, mentally ill, deviant, and perverted, AND the new popular bible translation telling church and society that any and all gay relationships were sexually immoral, and destined for hell, no matter how faithful and loving they might be, – the purge, and increased persecution of gay people was inevitable.
Two things cemented gays as an existential threat to post war USA’s survival and flourishing. ‘Cold War’, fear and paranoia were becoming ingrained into the American and Christian psyche. With this paranoia of potential imminent extinction from nuclear catastrophe, there were two supreme threats to the American Dream; Communists and Gays. One cannot underestimate the totality and conflagration of this paranoia in human hearts. It was in this fertile soil of fear in the human heart that state and social persecution of gays, and systematic homophobic theology was forged. Humanity always seeks a scapegoat.
Post war, the phenomenal growth of psychoanalysis as a means of healing from trauma, meant it experienced exponential growth as a science and industry. Its authority as ‘absolute truth’ rarely questioned, even by the church, and certainly the church had lost its monopoly upon both healing of the soul, and absolute truth. Welcome to post-modernism folks.
The concept of homosexuality as a pathological disease was accepted by the vast majority of the medical establishment. This included the American Psychiatric Association, which considered homosexuality to be a psychiatric disorder, mental illness. Homosexuality as sin, became very much a secondary consideration of post war USA’s obsession with the gay threat.
The first step to containing the gay threat was the creation of the new secular priesthood’s (American Psychiatric Association’s) bible, the DSM 1, in 1952. Gay people’s condition was diagnosed and classified as a ‘sexual deviation’ within the larger ‘sociopathic personality disturbance’ category of personality disorders. The sexual deviation diagnosis included ‘homosexuality, transvestism, paedophilia, fetishism and sexual sadism’, as examples.
This embedded a deep revulsion of gay people within professional medical, clinical, and psychological analysis and care. It ensured the industry great wealth; gay people now represented a huge demographic to be ‘cured’ or ‘healed’. Psychiatry often walks hand in hand with the pharmaceutical industry, a booming industry, desperate for new markets and profit. Psychologists had a field day cultivating their theories about ‘homosexuals’ as the ‘open season’ was declared. Their demand as healers increased exponentially.
The roots and origins of all this lay in various emerging streams and schools of thought. In 1899, a German psychiatrist had electrified his audience at a conference on hypnosis, with a bold claim: He had turned a gay man straight!
All it took was 45 hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel! Albert von Schrenck-Notzing boasted. Through hypnosis, he claimed he had manipulated one man’s sexual impulses, diverting them from his interest in men to a lasting desire for women.
He didn’t know it, but he had just created a phenomenon that would later be known as ‘Conversion Therapy’—a set of pseudoscientific techniques designed to quash LGBTQ people’s sexuality, and make them conform to society’s expectations of how they should behave. (Quash, Kosh – Kool-Aid).
Homosexuality, especially same-sex relationships between men, was considered deviant, sinful, and even criminal for centuries. This was the paradigm inherited from post Constantine Roman Christianity, again obsessed with the model of the ‘Alpha Male’, entwined in their new defining model of holiness; the ‘eunuch’ or, the celibate Priesthood, the ultimate imitation of Christ and godly masculinity.
In the late 19th century, psychiatrists and doctors began to address ‘homosexuality’ too. They labelled same-sex desire in medical terms—and started looking for ways to reverse, cure and heal it.
Whilst some in the late 1800’s believed homosexuality a disease or sickness, others believed that homosexuality was a psychological disorder instead. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that humans are born innately bisexual and that ‘homosexual people become gay because of their conditioning’. But though Freud emphasized that homosexuality wasn’t a disease, per se, many of his colleagues didn’t agree. They began to use new psychiatric interventions attempting to ‘cure’ gay people. (Simon uses Freud’s ‘conditioning’ theory in his anecdotal section of the sermon, using his own psychoanalytical beliefs to define the gay people he uses as his subjects to prove his role as their healer.)
Some LGBTQ people were given electroconvulsive therapy, others were subjected to even more extreme and violent techniques like lobotomies*. Other ‘treatments’ included shocks administered through electrodes, implanted directly into the brain. Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist in New Orleans who pioneered the technique, used this form of brain stimulation, along with hired prostitutes and heterosexual pornography, to ‘change’ the sexual orientation of gay men. Heath contended he was able to turn gay men straight. There is no proof that any of his evil cruelty ever succeeded in changing gay people’s sexual orientation or core identity. Many other gay people suffered chemical castration, an equally barbaric treatment.
An offshoot of these techniques was ‘aversion therapy’, which was founded on the premise that if LGBTQ people became disgusted by homosexuality, they would no longer experience same-sex desire. Under medical supervision, people were given chemicals that made them vomit when they, for example, looked at photos of their lovers. Others were given electrical shocks—sometimes to their genitals—while they were subjected and forced to look at gay pornography.
*Lobotomy is a type of brain surgery that became popular in the 1930s as a treatment for mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. It involves severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain by the insertion of a metal spike through the eye socket.
In 1949, the peak year for lobotomies in the US, 5,074 procedures were undertaken, and by 1951 over 18,608 individuals had been lobotomized in the US. Many of these were gay men. (The number of lobotomies performed in the UK was proportionately much higher.)
If you want to understand what gay men and lesbian women might suffer in arrest and incarceration, in attempts to cure them, try watching the movie, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, from the book by Ken Kesey.
The influence and combination of the 1946 RSV and the 1952 DSM1 in further cementing fear, paranoia, and revulsion of gay people into church and society is beyond measure in terms of the damage, ignorance, prejudice, and hatred they created right through to today, helping shape such beliefs and sermons like Simon Ponsonby’s.
McCarthy and the State persecution of gays.
In 1950 a deep Cold War paranoia gripped the USA, and Senator John McCarthy gave it full voice. The purge of Communists became conflated in this unholy inferno, with the persecution of gays. McCarthy was not the author of either the Communist or gay purges of government and civil services, but he is remembered as such. The purge of gay people alongside communists was the result of Republicans and Democrat politicians vying for control of government and state power, and using the presence of gay people within each other’s numbers and government positions, for political point scoring, to gain power.
In one year, 1950, ninety-one homosexuals in government services, were identified as a serious threat to national security. It was assumed being gay led one open to communist blackmail and extortion, even that homosexuality was a communist virus, and that gays were the most likely therefore to be communist agents. It was far easier to convict gays than it was communists, and the political scapegoating of gay people created huge political power.
Homophobia had gripped the US psyche every bit as much as their fear of Communism and nuclear annihilation, and were viewed by many as an equal threat.
On suspicion of being gay, you could be detained, interrogated, and removed from your job and position in any government or civil office, without warning. What followed, for over twenty years was the often-violent persecution of gay people. Law enforcement targeted gay people, imprisonment and incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, became common place.
In public places gay people became targeted by Law enforcement, and any show of affection to someone of the same sex, could result in arrest and incarceration.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html
Ponsonby rightly highlights the late sixties and early seventies as the peak of the conflict as gay people fought, firstly for their lives, rights, equality, and freedom from violent persecution by both state and society. He paints this in his sermon and rhetoric as a battle for ‘sexual freedom’ – to be promiscuous, this itself is a gross violation of history, gay dignity, love, and faithfulness in relationships, many of which were and are, like many marriages, never primarily about sex.
By the late sixties, the psychiatric movement and the APA had already started to move away from its pathology of gay people, and the resulting cruelty and violence which that had caused them, in both clinical and medical treatments and attempts to ‘cure’ them. They had already turned away from the previous dominant analysis of homosexuality being a mental illness to be cured, to one that considered being gay as a normal variation of humanity.
There were not an insignificant numbers of psychiatrists and psychologists, who were either gay or lesbian themselves, and knew themselves to be as normal and healthy as any other person. There were also many heterosexual members of the APA, who through study, and everyday observation, realised the overwhelming majority of gay and lesbian people they knew, or saw professionally were not sick, diseased or suffering any psychological deviance, any more than themselves. This was the natural, logical conclusion of the science of psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry, and human experience revealing that homosexuality was a normal, healthy part of being human.
The vote to remove ‘homosexuality’ as a disease, sickness, pathological condition and mental illness, from the DSM in 1973, was not as Ponsonby claims, won by what he paints as the bullying and threats of the ‘gay lobby’ from without. The vote within the American Psychiatric Association was won with a clear majority of 58% of its 10,000 members!
As professionals, they would no more change their beliefs because of political lobbying, than Ponsonby would change his, for the same reasons. To suggest so, is to slur and denigrate their integrity as a professional body. The external pressure of the gay lobby, only confirmed what they already knew to be true.
This reflected the growing consensus within medical, clinical, and scientific bodies, of homosexuality as a normal variation of being human.
What I find most disturbing about Ponsonby’s argument and portrayal of history, is that he appears to believe the removal of being gay as being a mental illness, from the DSM, as being a regressive step for the scientific, clinical and medical community. This is extremely worrying, but does explain how Simon views himself, as someone gifted to heal gay people from their mental illness or sickness. It is the explanation for his totally sincere and loving tone throughout most of his sermon. I’ll pick up on this in Part 3 of my critique.
What Ponsonby’s version of history does not tell you, is that as the psychiatric and clinical community moved away from ‘conversion and aversion practises’ as being both unethical, damaging, violent, harmful, and dangerous, the conservative evangelical church embraced these damaging beliefs and practises, and developed what became known as ‘Conversion Therapy’, a misnomer of demonic proportions, if ever there was one.
In order to validate the churches new adoption of failed science, to cure the disease of homosexuality, the church not only took a huge regressive step into secular ‘pop psychology’, and humanism, it turned its back on the authority and power of the gospel, and the ministry of Jesus, as the being the primary means of restoring souls to God and wholeness.
The ministry of Jesus is so evidently that of breaking shame from the lives of everyone he meets. The restoration of souls to God and wholeness can only be achieved by breaking shame from people’s lives. This is our gospel. This is our primary ministry of pastoral care towards everyone.
As we will see in part three of my critique, what Ponsonby does in his beliefs and exposition, in his sermon, or ‘lecture’, is lay crushing burdens of shame upon LGBTQIA+ people, in his insistence of holding onto, not ‘biblical’ beliefs, but the failed and flawed beliefs of Freudian psychoanalysis and the clinical practises which the scientific communities of Psychiatry and Psychology long ago renounced as dangerous and extremely damaging to the LGBTQIA+ community; conversion practises and ‘therapy’.
That he has failed to exercise due diligence as a ‘Pastor of Theology’, in researching history is shameful. He has used a carefully prepared, misrepresented, presentation of history, that lacks any wider objective or contextual study or reflection. In so doing he demonstrates clearly his prejudice and homophobia. His sermon, and his section on history, in which he claims to be ‘clearing up facts’, does just the opposite, distorting history to justify a homophobic narrative. His sermon’s use of history, is history as written by the oppressor.