Exporting Conversion Therapy

A trans-Atlantic evangelical alliance is popularizing a dangerous and debunked practice across African nations.

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Attending the fourth Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in the landlocked East African nation of Rwanda, Elizabeth Woning is a long way from home. Handing out pamphlets for a suggested donation at the event, the pastor and co-founder of the U.S.-based “ex-gay” organization Changed Movement shared why she came all this way.

“GAFCON is focusing on the places where, in my opinion, Christianity is spreading,” Woning, a self-described former lesbian, told an interviewer on camera. “It’s vital to be able to seed them with the vision for wholeness from the LGBT experience.”

Organized by the conservative Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, which is strongly opposed to same-sex marriage, GAFCON IV gathered more than 1,300 delegates, including 315 bishops, from fifty-two countries in the Rwandan capital of Kigali in April 2023. While Woning’s homophobic message of becoming “ex-gay” has lost favor in countries like the United States and United Kingdom, because of how harmful and dangerous it is, anti-LGBTQ+ Christian organizations including the Changed Movement have now found a new target: the people of Africa.

Or, as Woning told her interviewer in 2023: “Christianity is spreading quickly in the [Global] South, as it declines in the [Global] North.”

The Changed Movement exists in an ecosystem of conversion therapy-focused projects, initiatives, and groups supported by two other organizations: the Core Issues Trust (CIT), a registered charity in Northern Ireland, and the U.K.-based Marriage, Sex and Culture (MSC) Group.

The CIT may be based in the United Kingdom, but its International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice (IFTCC) project, which calls itself a “home for the once-gay,” has a leadership team packed with Americans. Two out of the five members of the executive board—Carolyn Pela and Laura Haynes—are U.S.-based. Both Woning and Ken Williams, co-founders of the Changed Movement, sit on the general board.

GAFCON’s 2023 meeting turned out to be pivotal for the CIT and its interest in spreading conversion therapy and the “ex-gay” message across Africa, where LGBTQ+ rights are less advanced and social acceptance is relatively low. In its post-meeting report, the CIT highlighted that attendees from Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria in particular “could not seem to get enough resources” from the conversion therapy organization. While homosexuality is not penalized Rwanda, it is illegal in Nigeria and infamously carries the death penalty in some cases in Uganda. Inspiration was taken from GAFCON to create the Africa Project. As the name makes plain, the effort seeks to export the values espoused by the CIT into Africa. The Africa Project is “informed by the [IFTCC] with regard to the clinical and pastoral care of those with sexuality and gender issues.”

For Woning and the Changed Movement, traveling to GAFCON was a “pivotal event in the global church that united in agreement on biblical interpretation of ethics relating to LGBTQ+ sexual relationships,” she tells The Progressive. Despite bringing her approach from the United States to Rwanda, she frames the “ex-gay” movement as an opportunity for sovereignty.

“Africa and the Global South are being pressured to embrace Western social agendas on sexuality and sexual identity,” Woning says. “Our presence affirmed their independence from governmental and social pressure to embrace the LGBTQ+ subcultures not indigenous to Africa. Though same-sex sexuality and gender incongruence have historically existed in Africa, the social frameworks and cultural demands of LGBTQ+ do not. Africa has the right to hear alternative views.”

Organizations involved in promoting conversion therapy are acutely aware of the scientific and political backlash against the unproven, unscientific, and harmful practices falling under the conversion therapy umbrella. Instead of using the term “conversion therapy” in their lobbying, several terms including SAFE-T (Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy), are used to rebrand the debunked methodology. On the IFTCC “learning” digital platform, two courses are offered by Joseph Nicolosi Jr., founder of the California-based Reintegrative Therapy Association. Nicolosi purports that “spontaneous sexuality change” is possible. 

Now, CIT is taking the next step of assembling Christian leaders from across the African continent who are willing to join its advisory counsel. In the longer term, the goal of the Africa Project is to create up to three “educative experiences” for both African pastors and pastoral care workers each year—and to ultimately influence African organizations and religious associations to perform conversion therapy.

According to plans published by the nonprofit to its supporters, leadership teams from the United States and United Kingdom at the Core Issues Trust want to support alternative structures to “challenge the new orthodoxy in the state, its educational establishments, and the church.” Recent years have seen a growing number of countries and U.S. states and municipalities banning unscientific conversion therapy practices, particularly those aimed at children and teenagers. Twenty-eight states and Washington, D.C. currently have some form of conversion therapy ban in place. Neocolonial endeavors that seek to impose Western concepts of sexuality onto African nations are nothing new. But efforts to foster global collaboration and help church leaders to support those “coming out of LGBT” in Africa, are clearly a threat to already marginalized LGBTQ+ people living across the continent.

In Europe, the CIT has extensive experience in building up cross-border networks to push back against conversion therapy bans and what it calls “LGBT ideology.” The IFTCC project of Core Issues Trust holds annual conferences dedicated to helping anyone experiencing “unwanted same-sex attraction.”

Attendees of these conferences usually number in the low hundreds and include delegates from dozens of countries. The ninth annual IFTCC conference, held in Poland in October 2023, drew more than 200 participants from thirty-four countries.

In spite of CIT’s public message of support and help for those with “unwanted same-sex attraction,” deeply homophobic and violent language was used at the IFTCC conference.

Fiona Wyatt, who co-hosts a discipleship series for the organization with her husband and CIT trustee Simon Wyatt, explained at the event how she wanted to “get some research about what’s really happening, what’s really true. These LGBT freaks—do we have them castrated?” She laughed. “What do we do? We need to know.”

There’s no question that the United States has an outsized influence in the global conversion therapy movement. Close to half of speakers at the IFTCC conference were from the United States, many coming from Christian organizations that have long fought against LGBTQ+ rights, such as Glenn Stanton of the fundamentalist Protestant Focus on the Family, and Quentin Van Meter, former president of the anti-gay organization, American College of Pediatricians.

One of the leaflets handed out by the Changed Movement at this IFTCC event reads: “Can a person leave homosexuality? We did.” Offering “encouragement, resources, and community for all who are impacted by homosexuality,” the literature continues to promote the falsehood that it is possible to choose to stop being gay, against the guidance of all mainstream medical organizations.

The Changed Movement is only one of several controversial ministries based at Bethel Church, a megachurch in the Northern California city of Redding. The Healing Rooms ministry is promoted by Bethel as a place where “joy-filled believers” can experience the complete healing of physical ailments, including late-stage cancer. The church has also attempted to resurrect dead people through prayer, most notably a dead two-year-old. These efforts were unsuccessful.

More than twenty books and resources are offered on the official Changed Movement website to GAFCON attendees. These materials include books for children and teens, such as Choosing by Ellie Klipp, which purports to show the risks of puberty blockers and gender affirming medical care, as well as how science shows it is allegedly impossible to change your sex or gender.

At the bottom of the webpage about the Africa Project, the CIT offers the “latest information from Peter in Kenya.” Peter Mulinge, who is “well known to many for his ministry among Kenyan men leaving LGBT behaviors,” is introduced by Lisa Nolland, chief executive officer of the Marriage, Sex, and Culture Group in the United Kingdom, as an “ex-gay leader,” who is “one of our partners, and someone we have worked with for many years.” In a YouTube video from October 2023 linked on the page, Nolland points to the challenges Mulinge has allegedly faced during his work.

“Under the Biden Administration, some call it ‘regime,’ things have gotten much worse in places like Africa. Because LGBT groups are hugely funded. It’s very, very worrying,” she says.

Through Life Choices, a program run by Mulinge, he works with close to sixty boys and men whom, he says, are struggling to quit homosexuality. In the linked video, Mulinge explains that he has been an “ex-gay” for many years, since he was “delivered from this madness.”

“It has not been a walk in the park. It has been a tough ministry . . . . This has not gone well with the gay activists, the progressives. These guys are funded from abroad, they are given a lot of money,” says Mulinge, whose own Life Choices program is used by U.K. charities to raise money.

In 2019, Nolland traveled to Kenya to see Mulinge’s work firsthand. In an article published by the Christian newspaper Heart, Nolland says she is “particularly impressed by Life Choices, a program run by once-gay Peter Mulinge,” as he has “been able to help many with unwanted same-sex attraction.”

In a fundraising appeal promoted by both the Core Issues Trust and the Marriage, Sex, and Culture Group, readers are asked to give generously to fund a Christian library, a program discouraging abortion among teenage girls and young women, as well as the Life Choices initiative.

Particularly aimed at teenage boys, youth counselor Mulinge, who is said to have successfully overcome a “lifestyle of same-sex relationships,” administers the program to those who want to “escape this way of life.” Both spiritual and psychological counseling is provided to these teenage boys.

Despite not calling these practices conversion therapy, any efforts to “cure” or “heal” so-called “unwanted same-sex attraction” would be viewed as clear examples of conversion therapy by all mainstream medical, psychotherapy, and counseling organizations.

The American Psychological Association, American Medical Association, American Counseling Association, and many others are uniformly opposed to conversion therapy, in all its forms, due to the harm it inflicts upon survivors.

Soon after the delegates filed into the Kigali Convention Centre, the prime minister of Rwanda, Édouard Ngirente, opened GAFCON IV and thanked organizers for “choosing to hold this important conference in Kigali.” At a large booth promoting the CIT and the Changed Movement, the IFTCC Declaration was on display.

With more than 2,000 signatures and dozens of co-signing organizations, the declaration argues against banning conversion therapy across the world. More than half of signatures listed on the public declaration list come from the United Kingdom and the United States, with dozens of others signing from African countries including South Africa, Uganda, Cameroon, and Namibia.

Building a truly international network to spread conversion therapy is increasingly a reality thanks to the literature, fundraising, and organizational support offered by Western organizations. From Kenya and Rwanda to South Africa, under the guise of spiritual counseling and religious freedom, harmful conversion therapy practices are taking root across Africa.

Back in the United States, the Changed Movement, which calls itself a “grassroots network of people who have left LGBTQ behind to follow Christ,” remains active from its home base in Northern California.

Woning and Williams formed the Changed Movement in 2018 when California State Assemblymember Evan Low introduced AB-2943, which would have banned conversion therapy in the state. Williams and Woning, together with almost thirty others, went to the California State Capitol in Sacramento to share their stories and offer their “ex-gay” testimonials book to state senators. Assemblymember Low later shelved the bill.

But the reach of the Changed Movement spans beyond California. In 2023, Changed Movement member David Reece testified in favor of an anti-gender-affirming health care bill in the Montana Senate Judiciary Committee.

While primarily focused on the United States, testimonies from those who have shared their stories of conversion to the Changed Movement come from countries including Colombia, Australia, Malaysia, and South Africa. One South African who contributed his account of surrendering his sexuality to God is Leon Jonck.

Like others, Jonck describes a vivid experience of God talking to him directly. “I watched as He pulled my spine out of my brain, and it looked like a bunch of loose wires,” Jonck shares. “He said, ‘We are going to rewire your mind. It’s not going to be easy, but I am going to do it with you.’ ”

Fellow South African “ex-gay” Jandré van der Walt, a student at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, makes a similar declaration of his “freedom” from homosexuality: “God told me, ‘Jandré, you are not gay. That’s not who I made you to be.’ ”

Previously an advocate for gay marriage before her transformation into a prominent “ex-gay” campaigner, Woning identified the first step in “helping someone with their sexual brokenness or gender confusion.”

“The identity that you get from LGBT, the meaning that you get, the belonging you get, the community you get from LGBT identity has to be displaced,” she said.

“You can’t really jump from that cultural world into Christian faith or into a Christian culture,” Woning continued. “How do you get there? You get there because the love of Jesus supersedes your value for the gay community.”

“My journey out of lesbianism, which involved self-directed, sustained efforts to change my beliefs and associated behaviors,” Woning tells The Progressive, “has been the most beneficial and fulfilling aspect of my life.” Woning also states that the Changed Movement “reject[s] all forms of physical violence, force, manipulation, shame, or humiliation.”

The CIT and the Marriage, Sex, and Culture Group did not respond to multiple interview requests. 

This investigation was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.