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Heretic Adjacent | April 1, 2026
Conversion therapy has always been less about healing children than about soothing communities that can’t bear the thought that God might love people exactly as they are.
That’s the truth underneath all the clinical language and the familiar appeals to conscience and religious liberty. Turns out, the promise of conversion therapy was never really that a child would become more whole (they did not), but that anxious adults wouldn’t have to change (often, indeed, they did not).
Parents wouldn’t have to question what they’d been taught, and churches wouldn’t have to face the possibility that what they’d been calling truth was, in fact, fear.
Consequently, when the Supreme Court rules against Colorado’s ban on conversion-therapy talk therapy for gay and transgender minors, treating it as protected speech, we should be honest about the real-world effect of what’s being protected. Because it’s more than just speech in the abstract. In practice, the ruling protects the ability of adults, often wrapped in religious authority, to keep telling vulnerable children that the problem to be solved is them.
That should break our hearts.
Because, I would argue, the child at the center of all this was never really who this whole thing was about in the first place. The community around these kids was always the real audience, desperate to be reassured that the world still made sense. Conversion therapy offered the promise of that reassurance. It told adults they didn’t need to wrestle with fussy things like complexity, humility, or repentance. Make the kid carry that burden instead.
But, I mean, that’s not healing so much as a demand for self-erasure, isn’t it?
Undoubtedly, the psychological damage is real enough. (Talk to someone who’s been through conversion therapy, if you don’t believe me.) But even beyond how it screws with a kid’s head, the damage is also spiritual.
Why?
Because conversion therapy teaches an innocent child, in the name of God, that the truest thing about themselves makes them unlovable. These kids learn that belonging comes only after pushing that part of themselves so far down that it doesn’t pop up when company’s over. They’re taught that peace comes only after they become easier for other people to tolerate.
When that happens in church, of all places, instead of announcing good news to the vulnerable, the church becomes the place where these kids learn that honesty about who they are is spiritually inconvenient to the people who claim to love them.
But Jesus had no stake in making people more acceptable to religion, just so the neighbors would feel comfortable. He didn’t preoccupy himself with trying to make stigmatized people easier for the pious to endure. Instead, he touched the untouchable and restored those who didn’t get picked first at recess. He kept choosing mercy over boundary maintenance.
So, to put the finest point on it: Telling children (in Jesus’ name) that their identities are a defect from which they (and the rest of us) need to be saved, is already to have wandered a fair distance from the Jesus path.
And maybe that’s what too many Christians still can’t bear the thought of: Because if God actually loves queer kids and trans kids exactly like they are, not as future projects or as problems to be solved, then a great deal of Christian culture has some repenting to do.
Why?
Because some Christians were willing to wound children rather than let their imaginations be enlarged by grace.
Isn’t that the deeper issue here? Not simply whether a court got a case wrong, though I think it did, but what kind of faith community still finds it emotionally necessary to traumatize children.
Think about it: What kind of church needs a child to become less so it can continue feeling good about its theological integrity?
What kind of gospel asks the vulnerable to suffer so that the powerful can remain comfortable?
No. I know. Not one centered on Jesus.
The church’s calling isn’t to soothe itself by telling children their very identities are faulty. If we take Jesus seriously, then our highest calling is to bear witness to the wideness of divine love, to tell the truth about human dignity, and to become a community where no child ever has to wonder whether being beloved by God requires becoming somebody else first.
Children should never be responsible for making our theology feel safe.
Because if our idea of salvation depends on teaching those children they’re broken, then it’s not the kids who need conversion.
It’s the church.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from the Rev. Derek Penwell's Facebook page. Click here to read the rest of his Substack essay.