Some years ago I wrote a long-two part narrative detailing the intellectual journey that led me to Catholicism. It was a sort of philosophical narrative, and not genuinely biographical. I omitted several major factors that contributed to my conversion, because I was ashamed, and because I preferred to keep things on an intellectual plane. In a way what follows is a fuller re-telling of that story, with its sequel.
. . . . .
I grew up in a non-denominational Christian household. My dad was a pastor, both parents were very devout. We were raised going to church and reading our bibles. This was the 1990s and it was a solidly Evangelical environment. My parents had (among much better things) books by Philip Yancey, James Dobson, and Chuck Swindoll on their shelves. We listened to Adventures in Odyssey on the AM Radio.
I'm not sure when I first started experiencing a physical attraction to other men. I'd guess it was by around age 8 or 9, and certainly not later than that. The reality presented itself gradually, and made me uncomfortable. I was taught that homosexuals are that way because of sexual abuse or a psychologically unhealthy relationship with their parents. These things did not apply to me, and yet I had nonetheless somehow developed this shameful and perverse tendency. I told no one.
Even setting aside the religious questions, "gay" was the preferred term of abuse among boys in the 90s and 00s, and there was a general fear of being gay or being thought to be gay. The fact of my attraction to other boys, rather than girls, was a terrifying and closely guarded secret. Changing in the locker room in middle school was a distressing experience.
As a child and a teenager I basically lived in books. I grew up reading and rereading Tolkien and Lewis. At age 14 I read Mere Christianity and became serious about Christianity and the idea of forming an intellectual defense of it. Later on, in high school, I got into philosophy, read Plato, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard. I found that no defense of Christianity was forthcoming, but became thoroughly devoted to the project of philosophical enlightenment and personal authenticity. I wanted to have an authentic self that was completely aligned with the principles of faith.
When I started college (2007) I gave up religion for a while. Some Sundays I would get up early and read Kierkegaard alone somewhere. Sometimes I would go to mass, because it was easy and non-committal and wasn't full of dumb emotionalism. My parents had sent us to Catholic schools because they were better than the local public schools in Chicago, so the liturgy and the basic concepts were familiar. For a while I was quite depressed. I'd gotten fairly close to a friend of mine in high school, who started and helped run the Philosophy Club with me. He went to the University of Chicago. I went to Yale. I would write him letters. I felt like I had lost all my friends, and was terrified by the secular environment I'd been plunged into, terrified that somehow I'd be intellectually bludgeoned into accepting evolutionary psychology and materialism.
In college I started also to look at pornography for the first time. It was shocking and revolting to me, but also very exciting. I would go through long periods where I locked up my laptop in order to prevent myself from looking at porn. Over time I found what I liked. I tried mostly to watch straight stuff, but only really cared about watching the men. I developed a series of rationalizations for this, which I have since learned is common.
The summer after my freshman year (2008) the friend I mentioned slit his wrists and ended up in a psych ward. He had been drinking a lot, had started using cocaine, and was generally in a bad place. I loved him. I'd spent that summer reading Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Levinas on my own time, and went to stay with him for a few days at one point after he got out of the hospital. We spent a couple of days telling each other our life stories. At the end of the visit I felt the need to somehow communicate that I cared by being radically open with him. I think that was the first time I came close to telling anyone I was gay. I didn't actually go through with it. Instead I told him I was addicted to pornography, which, looking back, I wasn't, and also, looking back, must have been extremely odd.
My second year of college, in class and on my own time I pushed further into 19th and 20th century philosophy. I did a seminar on Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. I liked Foucault and was fascinated by his sympathetic treatment of the concept of analogy in the Middle Ages. I found the first volume of the History of Sexuality riveting, because it gave me reason to believe that homosexuality was a social construct, that my affliction was not inherent in who I was. I despaired of philosophy after Derrida. It seemed to go nowhere and devolve into a series of highly sophisticated conceptual games.
The summer after my second year of college (2009) I spent in Germany. I ended up pretty socially isolated there, and more or less by chance took up a correspondence with a fellow I knew from college who had a similar background to mine. He grew up southern baptist, had similarly gotten into philosophy as a teenager, loved poetry, and was the son of the principal at his christian high school. He'd been running-back on his high school football team. I had always wanted to be athletic and strong, but for various reasons felt like I couldn't be. He represented everything I liked about myself, and the lack of everything I hated in myself. In the course of our correspondence we found that we had a lot in common, were similarly disenchanted with the evangelicalism we'd been raised in, and had both considered converting to Catholicism.
That summer was a turning point for me. I was on the edge of giving up on religion, and somehow in the midst of that I found this person whom I was physically attracted to, who could be a great friend to me, and who was drawing me into Catholicism. But it wasn't the Catholicism I knew from my parochial elementary or Jesuit high school. It was the catholicism of Newman and Ratzinger, grounded in the Fathers and the idea of magisterial authority and profound theological traditions. I found that Catholicism held a firm line on sexual questions, which appealed to me, and claimed to offer the grace necessary to rid me of my sinful habits. I fell in love with him, struggled to cast that love as platonic friendship in my head, and dove headfirst into Catholic theology.
My infatuation with that friend led me pretty deep into the church, and once I got started on the whole catholic theology binge, I stayed hooked. The problem was that my friend was not gay. I was totally psychologically wracked during this period. I felt a desperate sense that if he ever really knew me, he would reject me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be affirmed for who I was, but I could not be open, and the very basis of our friendship was a religion that taught that I was deeply disordered. The friendship didn't last. Eventually he became disturbed by my excessive emotional attachment and erratic behavior, and cut off contact with me.
Being rejected sent me into a depressive tailspin, since I couldn't admit to myself that I was romantically attached to him, and was completely humiliated and heartbroken.
I shifted out of that by deciding I wanted to become a Dominican friar, and I got wrapped up in the idea that I would get to be a holy religious. This was also the period when I first encountered the existence of Courage, and read about various restorative strategies to help people like me stop being gay. For a couple of years I was very angry at my Father, whom I blamed unjustly for my affliction. I tried to rectify what I imagined were deficiencies in my own masculinity.
The Dominicans don't accept converts as novices unless they've been in the church at least 3 years, which I hadn't yet, so after college (2011) I decided to go to the Dominican House of Studies as a lay student. During my time there I entered spiritual direction with one of the priests, who was the first person I ever came out to. He was kind to me, but also a terrible guide—he seemed to think that will-power and personal creativity would make me chaste, if not straight. Not so. I continued to look at porn regularly, despite creating all sorts of obstacles for myself, and continued the cycle of masturbating and going to confession once or twice a week. This made me extremely unhappy, and I would spend long periods of time alone in my room in a state of deep despair over my failings.
My time at the DHS was the first time I really started to come to terms with the fact that I was stably attracted to men, and that I had never really been attracted to girls. This was also when I became aware of the CDF guidance on the exclusion of homosexuals from priestly orders. I was disturbed. Ultimately I gave up the idea of becoming a Dominican for several reasons: first, because I was afraid of the trauma of being rejected because of my sexual orientation or lack of chastity. Second because I was turned off by the personality of the Vocations Director, and the stories I'd heard about the man who was then Novice Master for the province. My second year of grad school, as an act of mild rebellion against the straight-laced Thomism of the environment, I picked up Foucault again and wrote my MA thesis on him.
After grad school (2013) I spent some time teaching theology at a Jesuit high school (the same one I attended). My department was hyper progressive and basically not Christian. Most of the Catholics I knew from college and grad school were conservative, theologically orthodox people, or at least wanted to be. My colleagues weren't even interested in believing in the sacraments. I was very upset by this and became more radically conservative as a result, started reading Lefebvre and Mattei, attending the traditional latin mass, etc. I did spiritual direction with a priest of Opus Dei for over a year. I taught CCD at their parish in Chicago. Around this time I also founded The Josias with some friends as a venue for my increasingly extreme Catholic political views.
I think it was after I quit my teaching job in spring 2015 that I really started to decide to be OK with being gay, with the fact that my attraction to men was never going to go away. I was still really into Thomism, still devoutly traditionalist, still spent most of my free time talking about theology and philosophy with fellow catholics online, and was a big proponent of integralism. I was committed to chastity (or the attempt to be chaste) and kept going to confession weekly. But at some point my conviction that the spiritual regime prescribed by the church was going to make any difference in my ability to be chaste began to wane. I got sick of the routineness of it all, and the fact that the church offered nothing of any help to me, when I knew that most men my age were doing the same things. Perhaps the normal course of things was to be saved by means of a deathbed confession. I thought a lot about the case of Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's Brideshead. It seemed like the most realistic picture of my hope for salvation.
Eventually after leaving my teaching job I moved to New York to work at First Things. I still went to mass, but I stopped going to confession almost completely and only went 2 or 3 times a year. I decided that if God wasn't going to provide the means for my sanctification through the sacraments, and prayer, etc., then I wasn't going to fret about it, because I had done all the things and made every reasonable effort to avoid near occasions of sin, short of going into the wilderness as a hermit. I determined that probably most people were going to hell.
By this point (2016) Francis had really started going wild with the Synods and all that. Early in his pontificate I had taken the "media spin" line and assumed he was wacky but OK. Then, "well no one said he had to be perfect" and "there's no guarantee of papal prudence". Then it was "he's probably a heretic but he won't actually teach heresy authoritatively". The number of disturbing episodes continued to add up. By the time he changed the catechism on the death penalty (2018) I was basically devastated. I expected the bishops to rise up and correct him in defense of orthodoxy. No one did. I cannot remember a single one. And then the McCarrick scandal was breaking right around that time, which was also horrific. And so I was stuck in this nightmare situation where my bishop was implying that anyone who didn't accept the new teaching on the death penalty was a heretic, and I began thinking "My gosh, this is exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s; what it means to be Catholic is changing, and I'm watching people bury their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the blatant contradictions."
While I was at First Things I had a series of experiences that awakened me to the reality I was committing to as a perpetually celibate Catholic. I helped take care of an elderly neighbor who was single and lonely and profoundly depressed. I began to worry about ending up having lived a life in solitude, without anyone to share it with, and dying alone.
In 2018 I started thinking of leaving the church and coming out. I had quit my job at First Things and entered the secular workforce. Initially, I did come out to one friend, my secular roommate from college, who was also gay and had always been kind to me, though all the religious zealotry and everything. But I still had a ton of catholic friends, and didn't want to lose them. I stopped going to mass for the better part of a year, then started again, this time going to a traditional mass near my apartment. I enjoyed the trad coffee hour, and that kept me going for a while longer.
I started exploring gay subreddits, including one advice forum that includes a lot of contributors who have come to terms with their sexuality later in life. I remember seeing the trailer for A Boy Erased and reading the book. I wrote a letter to the author talking about some similarities between our experiences, and sharing some of my own writing on the topic. At that point I still didn't think I'd ever come out or become sexually active.
There were a couple of things that finally pushed me over the edge. The first was the mistreatment of the trad community at my new parish. The TLM was an old indult mass going back to the early 90s, which the pastor had inherited when he took over. He kept pulling bullshit moves to demonstrate that he didn't like us. Finally (summer 2019) he announced that he was going to replace the TLM with a Latin Novus Ordo mass and skip the TLM for a week. I was baffled that someone could show so much contempt and lack of pastoral care for a devout and well-meaning community under their care. But it was completely in line with the treatment I'd seen of orthodox catholics and trads from the time I had been teaching onward. I was livid and stopped going to mass completely.
The last thing that pushed me out of the closet was a video I saw on attachment disorders and growing up gay. I felt like the psychologist in the video really understood me. He described exactly my own pattern of anxiety over rejection, perpetually feeling like an outsider, etc., and it blew me away. I had spent at that point about a decade reading catholic theology and philosophy, being a strict Thomist, going to mass, praying, following the advice of priests, etc., and here this guy on YouTube was capable of giving an account of me just based on the simple assumption that I was gay and grew up closeted. It was too much. The Church seemed to be inviting me to reject it—the bishops clearly didn't believe what the Church in theory is supposed to perennially teach. Francis was replaying the doctrinal watering-down of the 1960s, and the non-SSPX conservatives I knew were going along with it all out of obedience. I'd had a series of nasty interactions with people for whom obedience to the pope trumped both reason and orthodoxy. It was extremely alienating.
So, on balance I realized that I had to make a decision about the relative plausibility of different belief systems. On the one hand was Catholicism, which I'd invested so much in but which had never managed to improve my interior life much, and seemed to require an ever-expanding series of rationalizations and hermeneutical patches to remain intellectually viable. On the other hand a vast unknown predicated on the possibility that secular psychology was right and maybe I was an OK person whose desire to love and be loved by other men was something other than wicked.
I decided to leave the church and start telling friends that I was done with it all. A couple weeks after that I started dating, and after that I started coming out as gay to my friends. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to two priest friends of mine, explaining:
I've spent my life with a constant shame and anxiety about this aspect of myself, and an inability to be close to people in the way I've desired, which has caused a lot of emotional pain over the years, and sent me, for most of my 20s, into a sort of perpetual melancholy, convinced that I should always be alone and avoid particular friendships with other men. This I have done, diligently, since I was 22. To be totally frank, I feel extremely liberated and happy to have moved on from that. I have no illusions about the idea that human friendships can replace the cocoon of transcendental order provided by Thomistic theology, but, when it came down to it, the choice was between...
—On one hand, being spat on by the Church for trying to keep its rules, rules which the hierarchy hates or ignores, believing teachings it no longer values or believes, trying to uphold traditions it wants zealously to destroy, in order to remain alone in my personal life, afraid of exposure in my professional life, and surrounded by a fringe of a fringe of nice people ultimately obsessed with bizarre infighting about issues that are of no real consequence to anyone in the world
—Or, on the other hand, to accept what the Church is implicitly telling everyone (that Christianity is a gigantic scam), to learn to be at home in the world, to grow up emotionally, and live whatever sort of life I can piece together, without the schizophrenia or the contradictions.
There's too little to appeal in the first option. The transcendental satisfactions of Christian practice are so far divorced from institutional observance at this point that they no longer make sense to me. For many people they probably do, and that's fine, but I'm moving on.
So that's that. The year since I did this has easily been the best of my adult life, even with the pandemic and being shuttered up in a small New York apartment for months at a time. I have found someone I love, who loves me. I no longer torture myself over dumb rules or ecclesiastical convulsions or the damnation of mankind. I regret a lot of the wasted time, and homophobic bigotry, and religious mania, but mostly I'm just happy to feel free and whole on a level I'd long stopped believing was possible.