Sometime last year, when I was still going to the Lutheran church, the local bishop asked my pastor to assess what his congregation thought about homosexuality. (This was in preparation for the report that came out later in the year, to general disappointment it seems.) I said something like, “Well, you can decide it’s a sin or that it’s not a sin, but if you get into the ‘reparative therapy’ thing I’m leaving.”

The recent flurry in the blogosphere about Zach, the teenager whose Christian parents are hustling him into a boot-camp-like sexual rehab center, reminds me of why. It’s actually not because I think categorically that homosexuals never change. It seems unlikely that they will, but some swear they have. And perhaps more convincingly to me, some things about myself have changed that I never would have thought possible. So I’m not going to try to dictate what the Spirit will and won’t do.

It’s the way things change, though, that seems at odds with this sort of rehab model. I remember after this discussion about conversion with Dwight I reflected that, whenever the Spirit seems to have done anything to me, it’s usually been when I’m not really trying or sometimes even paying that much attention. It catches me by surprise. And that makes sense actually, because my will seems mostly to just get in the way. If I’m sitting there trying consciously to control or eliminate some aspect or feeling, then like a Chinese finger puzzle it only grips harder. And if someone else is pressuring me, my ornery nature takes away even my desire to do it. Don’t try to change me to make me into what you want, or worse, to just make me normal.

The program Zach describes fairly screams of the quest for normal. It’s less like sanctification than a high-school clique gone berserk. Only listen to Christian music, the rules say — but that doesn’t include Beethoven or Bach. What, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion isn’t Christian? Or his Christmas or Easter oratorios? But I suppose Bach isn’t in the evangelical subculture. And the codes for dress, food, behavior, speech, and everything else seem bent on turning the subjects not just hetero, but into white-bread American conservative archetypes.

There’s no room for the Spirit to move in this sort of hyper-regimented existence. And there seems to be no contingency plan if it fails to work. Another thing I’ve learned from experience is that while some things may unexpectedly change, others stubbornly stay the same.

[via The Musings and Teachings of Camassia]