We Do Violence: Reflections on Boy Erased
About a month ago, I joined the pilgrimage of many queer Christians in going to see Boy Erased. For those who may be unaware, this recently released film is based on Garrard Conley’s memoir about his experience of conversion therapy in adolescence. The plotline follows the life of Jared Eamons, the son of a Baptist pastor, and it details the extent to which many conservative individuals, families, and churches were—in some cases, are—willing to go in order to purge queerness or the experience of “same-sex attraction” from their communities.
The verbal, emotional, and physical abuses inflicted in this conversion therapy program are many, but one particularly jarring instance stands out among them all. Cameron, one of the participants in the program, has experienced some sort of relapse into either gay thought or behavior—the details are never made clear. Whatever the exact nature of Cameron’s supposed sins, the pastor and leader of the program decides a sort of exorcism is in order, and various characters in the film, including his family, take turns attempting to physically beat the demons of homosexuality out of Cameron with a leather-bound copy of the Bible. This Bible is finally passed to Cameron’s sister, by looks a girl of no more than six or seven years, as those around her teach her that such acts of violence are the embodiment of what it means to “love” her brother.
As the story of Boy Erased continues to unfold, Cameron commits suicide. Having been taught that violence is the moral response to his sexuality, he deals the fatal blow in his own flogging. The scene of Cameron’s abuse and the destruction it initiates are truly harrowing.
Each strike against Cameron reminded me of the countless times our Scriptures have been weaponized toward the spiritual abuse of myself and other LGBT+ persons.
I expect some to balk at the sharpest scenes of Boy Erased, dismissing the more jarring details as distant pieces of Christian history that are decreasingly prevalent in our churches. After all, I do not personally know any Christians that support or engage in the physical abuse of queer persons, and I expect you may not either. It may be particularly easy for some to write off the use of a copy of the Bible as a tool to inflict physical harm as Hollywood theatrics. But it was in this moment that I first saw myself in the story unfolding on the screen in front of me. Each strike against Cameron reminded me of the countless times our Scriptures have been weaponized toward the spiritual abuse of myself and other LGBT+ persons. I have witnessed it at every church I have attended.
When pastors quote, “male and female, God created them” without pausing to consider whether these creation categories were ever intended to be comprehensive, they beat gender non-conforming and intersex persons with our Scriptures. When friends use the destruction of Sodom—a city characterized by severe inhospitality exemplified through attempted gang rape—as motivation to condemn same-sex love, they beat non-heterosexual persons with our Scriptures. When church leaders isolate and uphold the teaching that “a man should not dress as a woman” while flatly ignoring other Levitical laws pertaining to clothing, they beat down transgender people with our Scriptures.
I could go on for each of the infamous and aptly characterized “clobber passages.” The point is the same: flippant readings of decontextualized Bible verses employed to exclude and condemn queer people is violence. This is not to say there cannot be room for measured theological disagreement when the nuances of the biblical sources and church tradition are considered. But the reality remains: reducing queer peoples’ genders and sexualities to a list of sins with accompanying proof-texts does violence to human persons, not to mention the biblical texts. If churches truly want to communicate God’s love to the LGBT+ community, as they so often claim, their complicity in this violence has to stop.
In Boy Erased, the violence committed against Cameron proved most insidious when it degraded his conception of himself to the point that he despaired of and took his own life. This tragic progression is natural: having been taught that violence is the appropriate response to his sexuality, he joins in on his own flogging. Here too I find parallels to the common experiences of innumerable queer persons who have lived and learned in religious environments that are hostile towards our genders and sexualities. Having learned from those we love and respect to beat down experiences and behaviors that are neither cisgender nor heterosexual, we join in the process of our own dehumanization. We sever pieces of ourselves on the paradoxical promise that this will somehow bring wholeness.
Reducing queer peoples’ genders and sexualities to a list of sins with accompanying proof-texts does violence to human persons, not to mention the biblical texts.
Such self-mortification is varied in form and severity. In my own life, it has ranged from the abandoning hobbies I enjoyed because they were too feminine to abstinence from any sort of romantic relationship with other men. Though painful and regrettable, these are admittedly mild, and again I am immensely grateful to have had an easier journey than many queer Christians. For others I know, these self-inflicted pains have been deeper, in many cases attempts at physical self-harm and suicide, as in the film. Churches persist in requiring sacrifices from queer people that we do not place on others: policing how we dress, how we talk, how we sit, the pronouns and bathrooms we choose, and whom we love, sexually or otherwise. While sacrifice of self for the sake of others is fundamental to Christian practice, the requirements placed on LGBT+ persons are artificial and do not promote the flourishing of these individuals or our churches. Still, in order to belong in these Christian communities that we love, we suffer these little and large deaths.
But—praise God—my faith knows how to handle death. Indeed, the very essence of Christianity is based on God’s response to religious leaders who sought to murder and destroy that which was pleasing to God. Jesus went to the cross as those he loved and came to save stripped away his humanity and ultimately his life. Yet even in Christ’s death the grace and power of God could not be stopped, for God would bring life where others had brought death. That God’s love could be manifest in this way did not justify the actions of those who crucified him, but it showed that the death they could bring was not permanent.
It is all too easy for queer Christians to forget resurrection and focus instead on the deaths we experience in churches that should be bringing us life. As with Cameron in Boy Erased, it is often the whip we carry ourselves that causes us the most damage. But this year I have begun to let go of my scourge and allow God to resurrect this queer body out from the destruction wrought against it by my own hands and those of others. And the body that God resurrects cannot be killed again.
