The Church of England is cheering on the UK’s banning of conversion therapy:
The General Synod has voted overwhelmingly to reject coercive Conversion Therapies so we welcome the Government’s commitment to explore these matters further with a view to enshrining that position in law.
Notice that the word “coercive” has been slipped in, whereas the Queen’s speech left it out:
Measures will be brought forward to address racial and ethnic disparities and ban conversion therapy.
I’m sure that no one is under any illusion that, once the law has passed, the banning of conversion therapy will be confined to the coercive variety. If that were so, there would be no need for a new law: it is already illegal to coerce someone into being something she is not by kidnapping her, confining her and subjecting her to uninvited brainwashing.
Come to think of it, that is a moderately accurate description of what we are doing to our children in school: brainwashing them into believing that boys can be girls and vice-versa. This non-binary conversion therapy is a heinous corruption of innocence that the church should be denouncing but isn’t.
Once the law is passed it will be illegal for a person who experiences unwanted same-sex attraction to seek help in combatting it. The best she can hope for from the Anglican church is to have it affirmed.
The church’s incoherence intensifies on reading the motion agreed by General Synod in July 2017:
That this Synod: (a) endorse the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK of November 2015, signed by The Royal College of Psychiatrists and others, that the practice of gay conversion therapy has no place in the modern world, is unethical, potentially harmful and not supported by evidence; and 3 (b) call upon the Church to be sensitive to, and to listen to, contemporary expressions of gender identity; (c) and call on the government to ban the practice of Conversion Therapy.
Note that there is no mention of coercion. Moreover, the church is going to listen to contemporary expressions of gender identity. That means the church will nod sympathetically when a man comes to a priest to declare he is a woman, is taking hormones to grow breasts and will soon have surgery to remove the parts God gave him but are now unwanted. In short, the church will approve his conversion therapy.
No wonder no one takes the church seriously.
In his 1903 Commentary on ‘The Book of Isaiah’, George Adam Smith, Professor of Hebrew, The Free Church College, Glasgow, observes ( on p.408) of chapters 13 and 14:
“The people of GOD are something distinct from civilization, though this be universal and absorbent as a very Babylon…
Every civilization needs to be told, according to its temper, one of these two things.
Is it hypocritical? Then it needs to be told that civilization is not one with the people of GOD.
Is it arrogant? Then it needs to be told that the resources of civilisat5ion are not the strongest forces in GOD’s universe.
Man talks about the triumph of mind over matter, of the power of culture, of the elasticity of civilization; but GOD has natural forces to which all these are as the worm beneath the hoof of the horse:
and if moral need arise, He will call His brute forces into requisition.
There may be periods in man’s history when, in opposition to man’s unholy art and godless civilization, GOD can reveal Himself only as destruction.”