Content note: homophobia, religious and spiritual abuse
By Elora Dodd
As homophobia falls out of vogue in the wider culture, Christians may find themselves scrambling to preserve their sense of self as the “Light of the World,” while still condemning the more-than-ever-accepted “homosexuals.”
While I was still embroiled in Evangelicalism, I drew far more of my self-esteem than I would care to admit from the fact that I was “saving the world.”
Accusations of prejudice aimed at Christians just like me felt particularly impossible to stand under. I threw everything I had into my religion, a religion which promised to rescue anyone who actually wanted to be saved.
It rubbed me the wrong way when people accused Christians of being oppressive, to say the least. Didn’t they see how hard I was working to save the world?
Now, looking back, I see that my religious experience was culty at best. But back then, it felt like people were waiting to spring on me at any moment if I accepted “the gays.” Worse yet, I (correctly) suspected that I was gay myself.
I found myself deeply pulled between the need to condemn the gays for their sins as I was commanded, and to the need to not be the bad guy in anyone’s story. I suspect I am not the only one who felt this pull, closeted gay or not.
That’s where DARVO comes in.
DARVO is a specific strategy which many abusers use to shift blame away from themselves. While DARVO is often used by individuals, sometimes institutions will also employ this strategy. DARVO is misdirection at its finest — and most sinister. It enables an abuser to reframe themselves as the victim, largely by shaming and mischaracterizing the actual victim.
DARVO has three steps. The first is D for “Deny.” The second is A for “Attack.” The third part is RVO, which stands for “Reverse Victim and Offender.”
The “Deny” in DARVO means to cast doubt on aspects of the abuse, or claim it never happened altogether. The “Attack” means to call the victim’s character into question.
“Reverse Victim and Offender” means to reframe the abuse in such a way that the abuser was somehow harmed by the victim, not the other way around.
We often see DARVO used to discredit victims of sexual assault.
Some examples could be denying that the assault ever happened, like “She’s just making it up” or claiming the act was actually consensual: “She wanted it — she was just playing hard to get.”
People often “Attack” survivors of sexual assault by negatively drawing attention to the victim’s sexual past, saying things like, “She’s a slut! What did she expect?” or implying that the victim deserves to be assaulted because of some perceived imperfection: “But look at what she was wearing!”
Examples of “Reverse Victim and Offender” would include claiming that the victim is somehow irrational for speaking up: “She just wants attention!” Others frame the potential consequences to the abuser coming directly from the victim, rather than the court system, society, and his own actions: “She’s destroying his promising basketball career!”
Growing up in a strict Southern Baptist church, I was taught that LGBTQ people go to hell. That was absolutely the message being sent.
However, I almost never heard someone actually say, “if someone is gay, they go to hell.” That would sound too harsh. That would sound mean. We couldn’t be mean — we were the light of the world, remember?
So my religious leaders, role models, teachers, and books used statements straight out of DARVO to reframe the message, without really changing it at all.
Deny:
Instead of saying, “Gay people go to hell,” my teachers denied that gay people could actually pursue a relationship with God in the first place.
I heard statements like, “If someone is really following God, He will help them overcome homosexuality,” and “If someone is living that lifestyle, do you really think they could love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength?”
The real kicker, though, came whenever a long-time churchgoer (LGBTQ or not) un-converted themselves and left the religion, to which the reply was always, “They must have never been saved in the first place.”
This terrified me as a child. As I grew, I watched famous pastors and authors leave the faith, and trembled inside. If someone could be one of the most famous Christian leaders out there and not really be a Christian, what hope did I have? Sure, I thought I was saved. But I was nowhere near as impressive as some of the “never actually saved” ones.
I would find myself praying the sinner’s prayer over and over in a manner eerily similar to the descriptions I’ve heard of OCD compulsions.
This argument claiming “they were never saved in the first place,” by the way, is an excellent example of a logical fallacy called “No True Scotsman.”
No True Scotsman arguments say, “Everyone in this group has these characteristics, and if they don’t, then they were never actually in the group to begin with.”
People use this fallacy to deftly sidestep evidence, no matter how convincing, that people in the group might not all share the characteristic after all, by insisting that it simply doesn’t happen. Any evidence to the contrary must simply not be true.
This faulty argument, as it applies to queer Christians, is that queer Christians simply don’t exist.
No matter how much they profess to love God, no matter how selflessly they love their neighbors, and no matter how convincingly they present the arguments for inclusive theology, they simply can’t be Christians. They just can’t, because Christians wouldn’t be gay.
No matter how much evidence there is that Christians can be gay, the conservative church will continue to deny it.
Attack:
Instead of directly saying, “Gays go to hell,” my teachers portrayed LGBTQ people as fundamentally, intentionally evil — you know, the kind of people that someone in these churches would assume to be already going to hell.
They said things like, “Being gay might be the unforgivable sin.”
How could I feel bad for LGBTQ people if they were choosing to go to hell? The unforgivable sin, which is called “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” is a very big deal in legalistic, high-control churches because we believed you would permanently lose your salvation.
I also heard that anyone who supported gay Christians was intentionally “twisting God’s Word.” What an evil thing to do! Only a cruel and wicked person would intentionally maim the Bible like that!
This is, once again, circular reasoning. So often the argument against inclusive theology is simply “inclusive theology is wrong because the Bible says so,” ignoring the fact that inclusive theologians also use the Bible to back up their arguments.
Rather than consider the evidence that Jesus really does accept “the gays,” some churches argue that any church supporting “the gays” is evil because they are misusing the Bible, and we know that they are misusing the Bible because we know that supporting “the gays” is evil. It’s circular.
That is not to say that people who oppose inclusive theology are unintellectual or unintelligent.
I simply want to point out that growing up Evangelical, one of the core tenets of our faith was the idea that homosexuality is evil. It was right up there with “Don’t murder people,” and ranked well above boring commandments like, “Don’t covet,” and “Don’t gossip,” and “Don’t protect pedophile pastors.”
I am not saying that everyone who disagrees with me is foolish.
I am saying that some churches elevate certain pet theology or doctrines to be equal with belief in Jesus, creating an unhealthy codependent relationship between bigotry and the gospel itself.
This faulty argument, as it applies to LGBTQ people, is that LGBTQ people simply aren’t righteous.
No matter how much they devote themselves to their communities, no matter how boldly they fight for justice, and no matter how much of their time and money they give to charity, they simply can’t be righteous.
Even though King David raped a woman and murdered her husband to cover it up, he still gets to be exalted as a hero of the faith. But a consensual homosexual relationship? That’s automatically disqualifying. Someone righteous cannot be queer.
No matter how saintly some LGBTQ people may behave, the church will continue to attack them.
Reverse Victim and Offender
Instead of saying “Gays go to hell,” my teachers depicted gay people as a threat to the natural social order, and as active, willing instruments of the devil to destroy Christianity.
Church-goers railed at the gays for “shoving it down our throats,” “destroying the country,” “corrupting our children,” “wanting special treatment,” “undermining parenting,” and “normalizing the lifestyle,” which was said with a threatening tone to clarify that it’s a bad thing.
These condemnations erupted from people in churches I attended simply because someone admitted they were gay on TV or said they had a same-sex partner.
When same-sex marriage became legal in 2015, Christians around me complained that “the gays” were trying to “twist” and “pollute” God’s holy covenant.
The unspoken message was that “the gays” had purposely chosen to destroy marriage for the rest of us. Now it didn’t seem so holy anymore, because they had dishonored marriage. They had dishonored us.
As more and more people came out, Christians around me fretted that “the gays” were “destroying the country.”
As I’ve written in a previous blog post, this led me to worry that ISIS would murder my parents in front of me, and I was afraid this would be at least partially the fault of “the gays.”
After all, we were told that LGBTQ people were destroying the righteousness of “this Christian nation,” and “this Christian nation” was supposedly a lot like the Biblical nation of Israel, and whenever Biblical Israel slacked on their holiness, then God would have them invaded and tortured and enslaved as punishment, so therefore the US was going to get invaded and tortured and enslaved, just because people were coming out.
I genuinely worried that LGBTQ people and abortions would get my family tortured before my eyes.
Christians around me even portrayed the simplest acts of honesty as calculated attacks.
Admitting you were queer in a public space was somehow “shoving it down everyone’s throats.” Telling a child they didn’t need to be ashamed if they were gay was “promoting the lifestyle to children.” People just asking people to respect them was somehow asking too much, and they considered this to actually be persecution of Christians.
I grew up associating gay people with the Roman emperor Nero, who tortured untold numbers of Christians to death in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. After all, we were told that “the gays” were forcing us to “embrace evil” or face punishment from our government. And by embrace evil, I mean not directly refusing them their rights, like employment and healthcare.
By the Christian logic I was taught, we had a right to deny “the gays” basic human respect as equals under the law. The message that I received as a kid growing up in the Evangelical movement was that they were to be shunned, and they were too evil to even stand next to if you could help it.
By reversing the victim and offender, the church convinced me that expecting us not to deny LGBTQ people their basic inalienable rights was an attack on every Christian.
This faulty argument, as it applies to gay people in society, is that LGBTQ people cannot receive basic human respect without “stealing” it from someone else. If they get married, they are ruining marriage for other people. If they admit they are gay or queer on TV, they are ruining the TV show for everyone else.
If they assure children that they don’t need to hate themselves if they turn out to be LGBTQ, they are stealing a straight child and replacing them with an LGBTQ child under their influence. If they have confidence in their sexuality, they are promoting sin and therefore eroding our national security. If they help people be less afraid of “the gays,” they are corrupting society.
In the vein of Christianity I grew up in, someone can never just be LGBTQ as a zero-sum game. It’s always snatching away the joy and safety of someone else. No matter how simple and unrelated to the church any expression of sexuality is, the kind of Christianity I grew up in portrayed it as a crime — a crime in which we were the “victims.”
Now, as an out and proud gay — and practicing Christian — I find myself fighting a rising tide of deflection from the church.
No matter how many people decry the church’s abuses of LGBTQ people, mainly Christians maintain that they were always kind to us in the first place. The DARVO messages might not protect queer people from the church, but they protect the church from taking any kind of responsibility.
The church told me that all my devotion to God was pointless, and that no matter how hard I reached for Him, He must have never reached back — because I’m gay.
The church told me that I was wicked and evil and predatory — because I’m gay.
The church told me I was a threat to everyone I loved — because I’m gay.
But when I say that the church told me I was going to hell, they get to hide behind the claim: “But we never said that.”
Elora Dodd is an Autistic comedian who performs online for her more than 600k followers, often under the digital pseudonym Online 1 Room Schoolhouse. When she is not engaged in general nonsense, she serves as an advocate for the two causes closest to her heart — disability advocacy and religious trauma survivor advocacy. She is also gay, which is cool. You can connect more with Elora through her LinkTree.
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