Understanding Change Allowing Counseling

Christian Counseling, Conversion Therapy, and the New Debate Over Reparative Therapy

Welcome, once again, everyone out there to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris. As always, we have two guests with me today that I'm very excited to introduce to you, and I'm really excited actually for the topic we're going to be talking about because it's something that is frankly, it's a little outside of my expertise, but this is something that I think a lot of Christians are grappling with and probably going to be grappling with more in the coming years, whether in the United States or Canada or other Western countries.

And so we have with us today, Rosaria Butterfield with us. And she has a website rosariabutterfield .com where you can find out more about her writing. And she's a pastor's wife. She's a homeschool mom.

She's a former university professor, appreciate you being on with us. And then Dr. Andrei Vanmal is also with us. And he is very involved with Christian organizations in shining the light of biblical truth and just common sense on areas of sexuality and gender.

You can find out more about his work at cmba .org. You can actually go to YouTube and just type in his name and you're going to come up with a lot of stuff on really the topic we're going to be talking about today.

So I appreciate you joining us as well, Dr. Vanmal. Thank you for having me. So I want to start off, if we can, with you, Rosaria, and the document that you released recently. What was it? Three weeks ago, maybe.

And you had something to say about your previous position on conversion therapy. And I just want to say before I let you talk about it, I was so impressed with how you the humility that you exuded, the just the frankness, the directness that you had.

And you essentially reversed your position. And so I just want to open with you. Would you just explain to people what what was it that you reversed your position on? What did you think before about conversion therapy?

And then in brief, what do you think now?

Rosaria Butterfield’s Retraction and Reassessment of Reparative Therapy

Yeah, yeah. OK, thank you. Thank you for for those questions. Well, in 2014, I had written an article for the Gospel Coalition, and I just in a pretty wholesale way and just a pretty uncharitable way, dismissed reparative therapy as a heresy.

In that article, that article was written right after a hundred students at Wheaton protested against my testimony. And one of the things I believe to be true at that time was that reparative therapy was and side B Christianity, side B gay Christianity is the well, you know, it's the it's the Greg Johnson position that you can be gay, you can be proud of being gay.

And as long as you don't act on it, you're not in any sin. And what I believed at that time was that reparative therapy and side B Christianity were two ditches on the side of the road of orthodoxy. And I believe that because they were actually saying the same thing, ironically, about about homosexuality.

They were saying homosexuality is not a sin, acting on it is. And they both were using this category of orientation as a very stable category when, in fact, it's a 19th century invention. It's it's a very it's it is a socially constructed category.

There is no category of personhood called LGBTQ. Or if you wanted to add an H, what you have is you are man or you are a woman. You have the creation ordinance. And in the creation ordinance, you have heterosexuality as the pattern of God's goodness.

So I, you know, anyway, I came out hard and heavy on both of these positions. And I, you know, I mean, you know, sometimes, you know, when you're when you're when you're looking back on the things you've done in the past and they were foolish and sinful and people say, well, why did you get there?

And you say, well, I you know, because I'm foolish and sinful. I mean, you know, I mean, I had some theological reasons. I'm a reformed Presbyterian. We have a particular understanding of biblical personhood that really situates total depravity.

As as a central component, really, of of of of, you know, what being born again is going to mean. And so, you know, from my neck of the woods, we were saying things like both reparative therapy and gay Christianity are using an unbiblical anthropology, an unbiblical idea of personhood.

And so, you know, in addition to that, you know, I was a bit of a mess myself. I have a pretty messy conversion story and it's taken quite some time. And while sanctification is progressive, it's pretty slow.

I had a number of friends at the time who told me that they had been harmed and hurt by reparative therapy. And I believed them. And so and then things started happening in the world. And I started realizing that those words were wrong and they were sinful and they were harmful and and they were being used by evil forces to do evil things.

And so I wrote a retraction of those words and I put it up on my website. And my website is a very small little place. It's not it's not a big deal. I didn't publish it anywhere. I really wrote it for the moms and the grandmas who write to me and want counsel and help for their their lost children and grandchildren.

And I wanted to make sure I wasn't giving them, you know, the wrong information. So the process that that led into that was was long. I'm a university professor by training. So and I'm Presbyterian. So that means that whatever you guys do in a day, I'm going to take a year, you know, to just sort of work it out.

But but, you know, there are a number of things that that we're just coming to there. One was, John, your podcast. I was listening to Darren Mell share his testimony, and it was really powerful. And I remember just, you know, nodding in agreement.

And then and then he mentioned my name and he said my name with so much, I don't know, kind of sadness and anger and betrayal. And I had to stop. And I thought, you know, this is a brother in the Lord.

And I have really I really hurt him. And I don't even understand what some of these terms are. And so I reached out to Christopher Yuan, who basically knows everybody in the known evangelical world. He's sort of my Mr. Helpdesk when it comes to finding people because I'm not on social media.

So, well, I guess I am on social media. I don't have any accounts on social media. I'm living proof that you can completely eviscerate me on social media and nothing really happens, too. But that that might be its own its own story.

So so Christopher wasn't able to get me in in contact with Darren, but he was he was at a conference when I texted him and he said, Rosaria, I'm listening to this man named Andre VanMaal. And he is well here.

Let me just tell you what he's saying. And then he literally texted to me Andre's presentation. And I just said, Christopher, please get me in contact with this man, because I I it's almost like I woke up having a terrible dream that I was on the the ball field and I'm wearing the wrong team colors, running the ball in the wrong direction.

And I, you know, with with, you know, Canada BC4 coming down the road and everything else, I I need I need to correct course. And so Christopher got me in contact with with Andre. And then then a group of us started to meet via Zoom.

We call each other the team. We come from lots of different perspectives. And we have been working through our different perspectives on on reparative therapy. And one of the people that has been a friend for a while, but I have really reconnected with was Anne Pope from Restored Hope Network.

And she encouraged me to just, you know, come to the Restored Hope Network conference and just, you know, ask my questions. And I was about you know, I was excited to do that. It was in North Carolina and my kids wanted to come and hike in the mountains.

And and that means that they're teenagers. That means they would do the driving and I could do the knitting. And, you know, so that was all good. And before leaving, a friend of mine stopped me and said, Rosario, you can't possibly go there.

These people hate you. And I said, well, you know, if they hate me for a just cause, I will repent and then they will receive me, you know, and I have questions. And it was a wonderful conference. And I learned a lot.

And and I came to a position after that, that there are still some concerns I have about reparative therapy. I'm not I'm not on I wouldn't say I'm on board, but what I'm not is opposed to it. And there's there.

See, I think there's a big difference in that there are people who will still be unsatisfied with my position. But I believe in freedom for health care choices. And I there are things about reparative therapy that I learned that I really, really liked.

And I'll tell you what some of those are. One is that reparative therapy takes seriously what it means to have been a victim of abuse and assault. Part of why that is so important right now is, you know, we've got was it called Lighthouse?

What was the guidepost?

What was the guidepost solutions for the southern guidepost solutions?

Strange, dangerous, you know, feminist informed new definitions of abuse. That's right. Which I think really shadows over what real abuse is like. Now, I and many, many others, you know, praise God did not, you know, our homosexuality, I guess I should say this for the readers, I'm not I'm I'm a biblically married woman, happily married.

I have four children. I have no desire to ever return to the sin of my past. But, you know, one of the highlights of the sin of my past was a deep, dark sexual sin. You know, mostly in the context of lesbianism, at least for ten full years, where I was also an activist for LGBTQ rights.

And so it was not abuse that led me there. And I, you know, praise God, it was it was something else. And so I'm uncomfortable with this idea that that the root cause of homosexuality is abuse, because I would say the root cause of homosexuality is sin, whether my sin or being sinned against.

I think the big thing that we need to understand as Christians is you can be both a victim and a sinner simultaneously. And most of us are. But nonetheless, reparative therapy might be the clarion call for what real victims go through, real abuse victims, not not what I read in that Guidepost report.

That that is that I think really is a very dangerous posture to take. So I really appreciated, you know, the way that that there was real care, real care given to real victims. The other thing that I really appreciated is the way that transgenderism.

And I know that Andre is going to talk more about that. But I just that's a whole different, dangerous, crazy situation. That has transgenderism has completely trounced whatever the Me Too movement or the Church Too movement had to, you know, I don't think we're even going to be talking about homosexuality in the coming months and years.

And when someone is entered into that kind of delusion, there are medical needs that that person will need to come back. And we need that. So I like the way that reparative therapy is speaking directly to those, some of the medical needs that members that people who are they call it de-transitioning are going to need.

And so that was really it. And so then I, you know, with my husband's permission, of course, started to work on a retraction. And I shared it with with the people I love. And and people gave me good feedback.

And then at the end of the day, Kent and I looked at it and said, you know, who do we know who knows how to lock down a PDF? You know, and then we then we put it out there.

Why the Term “Conversion Therapy” Is a Weaponized Label

Yeah, well, that's all very helpful. And again, I just want to let you know, and everyone who's listening of how how good that piece that you put out there was on this, that statement, because one of the things from where I'm sitting that becomes discouraging, I think, at times is when there's public error and then attempts to obfuscate it or minimize it, pretend like it never happens, sometimes even changing positions, but never really admitting that you've changed positions among certain people in evangelical elite circles also.

And for you to come out as a popular author in evangelicalism and just say, I was wrong, humbly, I get things wrong. And this was one of them was a huge encouragement to me. And I think to many who listen in this audience, because that's true repentance.

That's just I was wrong. Jesus showed me where I was wrong. And now I'm going to tell people that don't follow what I said previously. So thank you for that. And thank you for explaining that. I think it's very helpful.

Dr. VanMol, I wanted to ask you about reparative therapy in general, just because there's two levels in my mind at which this is discussed. I have, I think, approached it from more of a political angle, where I see this as an attempt to get into church pastors, counseling offices, and to make that kind of activity illegal.

And I think we've seen that in Canada. We're seeing that attempts at that in California. And I thought reparative therapy is just, this is one of the ways they're trying to approach this. And that's kind of the angle at which I've approached this.

But I know that there's obviously another important discussion here. And that is, can Christians even use reparative therapy, whether it's illegal or not? Is this a useful thing, medically speaking? Is it in line with a Christian anthropology?

And so I'd just like to hear from you on what is reparative therapy? And then is this, as I've approached it, am I correct in my assessment that this is going to, the attack on it is going to lead into attacks on biblical counseling?

And then I guess it's a three-part question.

And then can Christians use it? Yeah. Well, the thing is that from the start, the attack was always intended not just to be against mental health, but to be against theology. The assault on mental health is the stand-in piece, the first base, the proxy.

But they're after theology. So it's not just that private conversation the pastor will have with you. It's anything he says from the pulpit. Your Bible teacher in a class you're in, she says, God designed your body for the opposite sex.

Whoops, we've crossed a line. You see what I'm saying? And you'd think in light of the first amendment, none of this would survive. And yet here we are. So let's start with conversion therapy. That word coined in 1991 by an activist psychologist, that was its first appearance in the peer review literature, was designed to be pejorative.

It's misrepresentative. It's deliberately provocative and vague. So anybody who wants to come out there and say, I was hurt by conversion therapy. And everyone assumes, oh, well, okay. Well, excuse me, what did you mean?

Well, I was talking to a pastor and he told me the way I was living wasn't right. You see what I'm saying? But that second question is never asked. So conversion therapy is anything they want to call it.

And I've even found in the very secular peer review literature, where scholars are complaining about this. So why is the term so vague? Anybody can say anything. We're supposed to buy off on it. But most importantly, it's a jamming tactic.

It's intended to shame you. If you are any kind of a mental health expert that wants to assist somebody who is unhappy with their same-sex attraction or is gender confused, they want you to be shamed out of doing that.

And of course, the title, conversion therapy, obviously has linguistic utility to it. It kind of alludes to, oh, conversion, like forced conversion, like making you be a Christian as if somebody could be forced to be one.

So it always carries that shadow of, oh, it's involuntary, someone who's dragged into it. So that's what conversion therapy is. It's a junk term. And it's a weaponized term. And of course, almost everything with the nomenclature of sexual minority issues, all the language is weaponized.

So I encourage people not even to start the conversation before you agree on the terms. So someone comes up and says, oh, do you support that anti-gay stuff? What does any of that mean? What do you mean by gay?

What do you mean by anti-gay? Like Rosario was talking about, there is no gay straight. These are ideologic constructs from mid -20th century. And homosexual, heterosexual is an ideological construct from one century before.

For all of human history, sexuality was a verb, not a noun. It's something you could do, but it's not who you were. It's behavior, not identity. And as Rosario said, aptly, this is entirely a category error.

But we are a century into thinking wrong about this stuff. And unless you call attention to the words and the definitions, the language is going to work the way it was designed. You're going to be painted into a corner and you're way behind the power curve before you even say anything.

So I hope that's not bewildering for your audience. These are important points to understand. Now you're asking specifically about reparative therapy. That was designed by a Roman Catholic psychologist, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, since passed away.

It's since kind of being replaced by reintegrative therapy. But reparative therapy, looking on their website, has these four basic rules. Disclosure versus imposing of the therapist's views, which is already a step up from what we have now, that the therapist would tell you, here's my view on this.

Here's what I'm coming from. Instead of there's only one view on this and you will comply. Secondly, encouraging the client's open inquiry, which means the client and you can directly disagree, which already runs against the whole so-called conversion naming thing they're talking about, that you're encouraged in this kind of therapy.

Bring out your disagreements. Let's hear them. You're not going to get stepped on for it. Point three, resolving past trauma, which everybody's got traumas. To be alive is to have traumas. But some of these are big.

You know what I mean? They're not all equivalent and they have consequences. And refusal for people to face that pain is part of why we see people in Christian leadership positions backslide into the homosexual position again.

Abject refusal to face their past pain or to think, oh, redemption takes care of everything. It's like, no, there are messes still to clean up, including ones you made. That's what repentance is about.

And point four, educating the client regarding associated features of homosexuality, namely known causative factors. And we don't know everything, but we know some. Underlying motivations and the health consequences.

Namely, well, if you're going to decide to pursue this kind of lifestyle, you need to know to protect yourself because you are going to be at increased risk of all kinds of bad things, physical, relational, spiritual.

So that's reparative therapy, reintegrative therapy. And I'm sorry, I should have said right from the start to your audience, I am not a therapist of any kind. I'm a board certified family doctor. That's what I do.

I'm a family physician. But I work with people who have done these things on these different committees and task forces that I've been on nationally for some years and I've gotten to learn a lot along the course of the way.

So whether you're talking about reintegrative, reparative or whatever, those are just different tools, different schools of approaching what we'd call maybe more aptly what was called sexual orientation change efforts.

The people who actually do it since I think 2016, like to call it safety, sexual attraction, fluidity, exploration and therapy. Let's see what's behind your situation and let's see where we can go. Now, by definition, by rules, by profession, the client is the one who directs where therapy goes.

And your audience might be interested to know that a whole lot of the takers, if not most of the takers for so-called conversion therapy are actually same-sex attracted people who plan to stay that way but they want to tone it down.

They want a safer, saner existence. I don't really like the way this thing swings me around. I want to be the one in control kind of thing. And there's studies about that, specifically out of the UK, three studies following this group of clients over about 10 years who specifically wanted to tone down their same-sex sexual behavior because they didn't want to end up with AIDS and the whole drug problems and all these other things that were associated with it.

And these are considered good quality studies and nobody points to them and says, oh, you're an anti-gay bigot. See what I'm saying? It's like the double standard kind of thing. Now, switching this over to the transgenderism deal, which I guess is outside the purview of your question.

Maybe you don't want me to do that. No, that's fine. Jump into it. Transgenderism is an ideology. Whereas gender dysphoria is a diagnosis. So is autogynephilia and other things that come under that blanket, which is to say all things gender dysphoric fit under the umbrella term transgenderism, but transgenderism includes a lot more.

So think of transgenderism as an ideology. Gender dysphoria is the diagnosis we're talking about where people are very uncomfortable with their sexed body. There we have decades of literature showing the overwhelming probability of underlying mental health problems.

You know, for really good studies, just out of the past, I think since 2014, coming out of European centers, out of Australia, other places, showing that the clients that were coming to these gender clinics already had mental health diagnoses of longstanding.

So those don't go away just because you decide, I'm going to put on a persona of the opposite sex. They're still there to be dealt with. And amongst those mental health problems are also neurodevelopmental problems.

And specifically I'm talking autism spectrum disorder. And these people and these kids in particular are really vulnerable to it, to the whole ideology that's everywhere now and is being passed along by social contagion and advertisement for goodness sakes.

But the kids that like Asperger's, that's part of the autism spectrum thing. But kids with spectrum disorder don't do well with abstract ideas. They tend toward the concrete. And so what happens with minimal coaching, which is all too easy to find on the web, especially the dark web, is they become convinced of this false concept that, oh, now I know why I'm different than all the other kids.

It's because I'm trans. And it's exactly the wrong idea, but they really lock onto it. And it's kind of hard to get them to let it go. So the problem is in the US, Canada, Australia, the activists in medicine and mental health are just driving this train over the cliff, full speed ahead kind of thing.

Whereas places like the UK, Sweden, Finland, and France that were leading the charge of so-called gender affirming therapy, by which we mean transitioning people that are gender confused, they're going the other way.

They didn't have enough complaints, did scientific reviews, national level stuff supported by the medical organizations as well as the government. And when they reviewed the literature, it's always the same conclusion.

Man, everything's low to very low quality. In fact, the UK high court case of Bell versus Tavistock, that judgment put wonderful things into writing, looking off of different summaries that were done in the UK, one of which goes by the acronym NICE because of the organization of government that does these kinds of reviews.

So NICE 1 and NICE 2, NICE 1 was about puberty blocking agents. NICE 2 was about cross-sex hormones. And these and other things, including some quotes from some of my colleagues in America appeared in this court decision where they basically said, gender affirming therapy has not been proven safe, not been proven effective.

It is experimental. And the greatest caution should be exercised in allowing kids to do this and a bunch of other stuff in there. Consequently, the UK, within weeks of that Tavistock decision, their national health services, gender identity development service, the biggest gender clinic for kids in the world, stopped it cold.

No gender affirming therapy under 16 without specific court order. So it would be like a big deal. And not between 16 and 18, unless it's in a very controlled experimental type situation. And even then, they recommended that the courts be solicited on it.

Sweden incorporated that. And Sweden was already, it's not like they just did what the British did. They were already well along in reviewing this. Again, they're national level scientific organizations, divisions of government going over the literature.

Same conclusion. And so their main hospital that was doing it also stopped cold, with the exception between 16 and 18 of a tightly regulated study situation. Point being, there really haven't been these tightly regulated, having the control population, all the things that are supposed to be happening in a well-done study, hard to come by, very hard to come by.

And Finland did it as well. And again, these are countries with lead dogs, lead horses, pushing the gender affirming therapy bandwagon. And in France, their Académie de médecine, I think, put out a statement on it and had a nice, convenient to read publication on their website that they took the liberty of translating in English for us.

So when the French do that, they're serious about something. And again, in the US, when we bring this up, the teams I work with and stuff in legislatures or for courts or whatever, the other side all but ignores it, like it's not happening.

And it's gonna go down. I mean, the weight of the evidence alone is gonna end because it's happened before. Gender affirming therapy was big in the 70s. Here, Sweden, elsewhere, and Johns Hopkins University was one of the institutions really leading it.

And when Professor Paul McHugh took over their psychiatry department, the first thing he did is, well, you guys do all these screening tests, all these psychometric evaluations of people coming into your sex change clinic, take those same tests, let's apply them again sometime after.

And they did. And they found that nothing improved. So in short order, the clinic was shut down and most of the nation's gender clinics did the same. That was 40 years ago. Here we are, we're repeating the error and now we're doing it with kids.

But there's so much money behind it. Ideology, big corporations, big philanthropy organizations. There's a lot of steam. And of course, the general secular progressive leftist organizations have come on board too.

But I am pleased to tell you that what I've witnessed and participated in, in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, elsewhere, is the opposition to gender affirming therapy, as they call it for minors, is an all hands on deck movement, hands across the aisle.

There's even an organization by that name out of the UK. By which I mean, people opposing this happening to kids are conservative and liberal and everything else. They are believers. They are non-believers, everything else.

They are actually sexual minority organizations. There's gay groups. There's an adult trans group, completely opposed to this happening in kids. It's not that they oppose it altogether in adults, but it's like, no, no, no, no.

You protect kids from this kind of stuff exactly because they're kids. So, but our current administration in Washington is obviously of an altogether different mind and wishes to mandate that doctors like me, the mental health experts out there, would have one and only one choice, and that would be gender affirming therapy.

That if a confused kid or adult comes to us, the only thing we tell them is, here's how you get on the train, you know, to get onto puberty blockers, if you're at that age, cross-sex hormones, and if you choose, you know, gender affirming therapy, gender affirming surgery, which they also called gender confirming surgery, proving how weaponized the language is.

You can't even discuss it without being on their terms, which is why you need to oppose their terms. You know, of course, we want to do that biblically, compassionately, respectfully, you know, honoringly,.

But you still do that with a backbone. Yeah. Wow. Well, it's encouraging because right now it does not feel like that movement is running out of steam. It sure feels like they're holding sway, at least in the United States.

And as you just said, there's a lot of money behind this. In fact, the other day, what you just said about trans people or LGBT people who identify this way, opposing this in children, I saw a video online of a lesbian, practicing lesbian, who just said, look, if I knew in the 90s, when I was advocating for lesbianism on a political level, that it was going to lead to this, you know, library hour and everything else, I would have never done it.

And, you know, I don't know what the numbers are. It sounds like you know a lot more than me, but if people are starting to wake up, I mean, that's an encouraging thing. I was wondering, I do have a question for Rosario, but I want to ask you first, Dr. Venmal, about whether or not this is compatible with Christianity.

That's an objection that gets brought up. Is that, well, you know, this repair, I think I was pronouncing it wrong.

I said reparative. You're saying it's reparative. Is that how you pronounce it? No, I mean, reparative or reparative, that's all fine, or reintegrative. But SAFE-T is actually the acronym they prefer we use.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, what term should I use? SAFE-T. Okay, so this kind of therapy is, according to some Christians, out of step with a biblical anthropology, with this is, in fact, Greg Johnson, I think, called it a prosperity gospel of sorts to think that you can possibly be delivered from these kinds of attractions, because I guess they're so intrinsic to who you are.

So what do you say to that? And I'd actually like to get both of your answers to this, both you and Rosaria on this. What do you say to someone who offers that objection and says, well, it's good that we don't want that SAFE-T therapy.

We just want a biblical approach, whatever that is.

Biblical Anthropology, Temptation, and the Case for Counseling

Well, ultimately, I think that the Critics Foundation is unbiblical because they are canonizing temptation. Here's the one temptation you can't get any help with because it's so intrinsic. It's so special.

Nonsense. Why is someone else's temptation more holy than my own? Temptation's temptation. Why do we canonize theirs? You know what I'm saying? It's ridiculous. It's saying, hands off my sin, hands off my problems.

That's one thing. If someone doesn't want to participate, I mean, the ground level requirement for any kind of counseling, pastoral or otherwise, is a willing and motivated client. You can't drag someone to it.

They've got to want to be there and they're going to have to work hard, be it biblical counseling or other. So I think it's ridiculous to canonize temptation. Secondly, their approach assumes that the only problem with same-sex sexual attraction and behavior is theological and moral.

And it's not. It has other causative factors that even the very secular folks have identified and is in the literature. Trauma is one of them, and it's a big one, but it's not the only one. There's many roads to brokenness, and we are all broken in one way or another.

So whatever your problem, your weaknesses, your false conceptions, there were a lot of ways to get there, but you're the only one who got there the way you did. So you need skilled counselors that know what they're doing with this stuff.

But yeah, I just disagree with every part of that. And for those from, say, like the secular atheist side who are going to say, well, homosexuality is not a pathology, so applying counseling to it is ridiculous.

Well, bereavement's not a pathology either, and nobody has problems with any kind of counseling for that. Pastoral, biblical, secular, oh, what are you seeing the counselor for? Oh, my mom died, and it's really hard on me.

Oh, yeah, bereavement. Sure, go ahead. That'll help. No one's upset about that, and it's not a pathology that you're dealing with. And again, you're going to get into a mud-flinging contest when you bring the term pathology to same-sex attraction.

But again, some of the takers on this who want help getting out or quieting it down are fully atheist. You know what I'm saying? So biblical counseling isn't anything they're ever going to step into. Consequently, applying good therapy to their situation is at a minimum doing good by all men.

It's a biblical mandate kind of thing. And medical historian H .E. Sigarest said Christianity entered the world as the religion of healing. Before Christianity was around, I mean, Judaism had the same undergirding philosophy, of course, but it wasn't very widely distributed.

But say like in the Greco-Roman times, the ill were repulsive. The way you treated the dead and the dying were just to push them away. Everybody's a leper kind of thing. Christianity, Judeo-Christian faith enters into it and says, no, you're a special creation.

You're created in the image of God, deeply loved. You have dignity. Boom, boom, boom. And applied that to medical care and help medical care be something that wasn't just something for the rich. We invented hospitals.

Look at all these mercy ministries right along through. The modern scientific movement is a direct result of Christian theology. I mean, science as such happened all over the world. But William Lane Craig notes that a scientific enterprise was always stillborn in these different cultures until it reached the Christian culture.

We can argue how Christian it was, but of Western Europe, where you have these presuppositions that allows it to charge on and become a field. And it was directly a result of Christianity. And no field of science was more influenced by Christianity than medicine.

Now you can argue, well, it certainly has fallen a long way, hasn't it? You bet, but it's not over yet. So again, these Christian contributions, even the idea of universal human equality and universal human rights are directly out of scripture.

So says Jürgen Habermas, Europe's preeminent philosopher, who's also an atheist, and say like his French number two, Luc Ferre. And they both say the same thing. So Christianity's been offering the world a lot that it didn't have before.

And its contributions to medicine are a prime part of that. And of course, our views toward illness and toward people, et cetera, that are suffering. And that brings us to where we are now. People are suffering.

Same-sex sexual attraction and behavior has negative stats, negative behaviorally, negative in terms of health, disease states and whatnot, higher levels of domestic violence. And yeah, the push here for 20 and 30 years is to blame it all on externals.

Oh, it's minority stress. It's stigma. No, there's a lot of studies that contradict that. And I've written about that for the CMDA and other groups. Whatever part that plays is small. It's significant, but small.

The problem is internal. The behaviors are leading to bad places and good competent therapy counseling can help a person with that.

Biblical Counseling, Pastoral Care, and Practical Help for Those Struggling

Yeah, I'm thinking on a practical level here, if my friend, let's say, is struggling in this area and he's offered a choice between go to a Christian counselor or a biblical counselor and then go to someone who's gonna give him what we're talking about now, more of a secular approach to this, what am I gonna tell him?

And that's, I think, what perhaps is behind a lot of the questioning in Christians or at least a lot of what layman Christians, when they hear objections to this, that's what they're thinking. They're saying, well, of course, we should go to the biblical counselor.