C of E Bishops Set to Wave Through a Conversion Therapy Ban That Tramples Free Speech and Free Choice

The bishops' bench backs Labour's Conversion Practices Bill. They are wrong to do so.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 30, 2026

Orthodox Christians opposed to the Labour Government's Conversion Practices Bill should expect no support from the 26 Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords.

The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, a prominent supporter of the LGBT agenda in Parliament, has fired a warning shot across the bows of any fellow bishop feeling lukewarm about the draft Bill, which the government published on June 25. He welcomed what he called the government's long overdue move to protect a community he alleges has suffered physical and psychological abuse. Any episcopal doubter will now think twice before saying so out loud.

VOL believes this is wrong-headed policy. It violates free speech, and it violates the sincere, voluntary wish of many men and women to be free of unwanted same-sex attraction.

Many now believe “conversion therapy” has been defined so broadly as to be rendered meaningless. In its place, a new and more precise term has emerged: SAFE-T — Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy. Readers can find more here: https://learning.iftcc.org/sexual-attraction-fluidity-exploration-in-therapy-safe-t/

The numbers driving this debate come from the Williams Institute at UCLA, which remains the most-cited source on the subject. Its research puts the figure at roughly 698,000 LGBT adults in the U.S. who have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, about half of them as adolescents. A companion estimate found 20,000 youths would undergo it from a licensed professional, and 57,000 from a religious or spiritual advisor, in states without a ban. The Institute has continued to press those numbers — as recently as October 2025, in an amicus brief filed in Chiles v. Salazar, the case challenging Colorado's ban on licensed counselors providing conversion therapy to minors.

That case has since been decided — and decisively. On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in favor of Kaley Chiles, the Colorado counselor who challenged her state's ban. Writing for the Court, Justice Gorsuch held that a law restricting what a licensed therapist may say to a client based on the viewpoint of that speech triggers strict scrutiny under the First Amendment — the most demanding standard in constitutional law. Even Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, no conservatives, joined the majority. Only Justice Jackson dissented. Whatever one makes of the underlying clinical debate, the nation's highest court has now said plainly that talk therapy is speech, and the government does not get to outlaw one side of a conversation just because it dislikes where that conversation might lead.

Even activists increasingly concede the underlying premise is shakier than advertised: same-sex attraction is now treated by many as symptomatic rather than the essential driver of identity. No one is born gay. Gay is not, in itself, the problem to be solved or the truth to be defended.

It is a question almost no one is permitted to ask.

Few subjects in contemporary Western society are more instantly explosive than conversion therapy — the clinical and pastoral effort to help individuals diminish or redirect unwanted same-sex attraction. It has been condemned by governments, banned in a growing number of jurisdictions, denounced by mainline churches, and dismissed by virtually every credentialed professional body in the English-speaking world. To raise the subject is to invite the charge of homophobia. To practice it is, in some places, to risk prosecution.

But is the condemnation warranted? And more importantly, is it honest?

The question is not whether coercion is wrong — it is. No serious defender of conversion therapy advocates dragging unwilling patients into a therapist's office and demanding that their sexuality be altered against their will. That caricature, however vivid and useful it may be to critics, does not describe what reparative therapy's defenders are actually proposing.

The Case of Young Johnny

Consider two scenarios. In the first, a father drags his reluctant teenage son to a therapist's office, announces that the boy is gay, and demands he be “fixed.” The coercion here is obvious, the outcome predictably futile, and the damage to the young man potentially lasting. No serious clinician would defend such a scenario. Neither would most reparative therapy proponents.

In the second scenario, a young man walks voluntarily into a therapist's office, articulates his own distress over same-sex attraction, and asks for help in addressing it. He is not being coerced. He is not acting under parental pressure or duress. He is exercising precisely the kind of personal autonomy that liberal democratic society claims to prize above nearly everything else. He is asking for help with something he experiences as unwanted.

Why, in this second scenario, should he be denied that help?

That is the question the current cultural consensus refuses to answer honestly. Instead, it pivots: he is told that attempting change will likely make him suicidal; that he was born this way and resistance is futile; that his attractions are immutable, constitutive of his identity, and ought to be celebrated rather than questioned. These claims are presented not as contested hypotheses but as settled science. They are not.

The Science Is Not Settled

The claim that sexual orientation is fixed at birth — that there is, in effect, a “gay gene” that determines the matter — has never been established by the scientific evidence. Decades of research have produced no definitive biological marker. The American Psychological Association, which has been at the forefront of condemning reparative therapy, acknowledged in its own 2009 task force report that sexual orientation does not appear to be a simple choice — while simultaneously conceding that some individuals reported that change efforts actually resulted in an increased capacity for opposite-sex attraction.

More recent research has further complicated the narrative. Data from large longitudinal studies, including work drawn from the Add Health dataset in the United States, have found that a non-trivial number of people who report same-sex attraction in adolescence do not report it in adulthood. Sexuality, for many people, is not a fixed point but a trajectory — and that trajectory, for some, moves in directions the current orthodoxy prefers not to acknowledge.

There is also emerging evidence suggesting that identification as gay, lesbian, or bisexual — while still widespread — may have plateaued or even begun declining among younger cohorts, after years of sharp increase. If orientation were purely biological and immutable, such shifts would be inexplicable. Their existence raises questions that honest inquiry ought to welcome.

What the Bans Actually Prohibit

Laws banning so-called “conversion therapy” in jurisdictions across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere are frequently written so broadly that they effectively prohibit any licensed therapist from assisting a patient in reducing unwanted same-sex attraction — regardless of whether the patient is an adult, regardless of whether the patient sought the therapy of their own free will, and regardless of whether any coercion or harmful technique is involved.

What this means in practice is that a twenty-five-year-old man who is a devout Christian, who experiences his same-sex attractions as alien to his faith and his self-understanding, and who freely seeks professional assistance in addressing them, will find that most licensed therapists are legally prohibited from helping him pursue that goal. He may be offered acceptance-based therapy, designed to help him embrace his attractions. He may not be offered assistance in reducing them.

This is not neutrality. It is a particular ideological position enforced by law — and, after Chiles, one now on far shakier constitutional ground in the United States than its drafters assumed.

The Testimony of Changed Lives

Advocates of the current consensus frequently assert that no one has ever successfully changed their sexual orientation, and that those who claim to have done so are either lying, deluded, or in a state of miserable suppression. This claim does not survive scrutiny.

There are numerous documented accounts — not anecdotes from fringe ministries, but peer-reviewed studies, including work by Jones and Yarhouse published in 2007 — of individuals who underwent some form of sexual reorientation effort and reported meaningful change: reduced same-sex attraction, increased opposite-sex attraction, and in many cases stable marriages to spouses of the opposite sex. These are not uniformly happy stories, and the researchers were careful to note that outcomes varied widely. But the categorical assertion that change never occurs and cannot occur is empirically false.

Moreover, the pastoral witness of theologically orthodox Christian communities — Anglican, Catholic, evangelical Protestant — includes significant numbers of men and women who have chosen celibacy or heterosexual marriage while continuing to experience some degree of same-sex attraction, and who describe this path not as one of suffering and suppression but of vocation, integrity, and genuine flourishing. Their voices deserve to be heard, not dismissed.

Freedom of Conscience and the Limits of Tolerance

Western liberalism has long prided itself on the protection of minority viewpoints, the defense of individual conscience against majoritarian coercion, and the right of persons to make significant decisions about their own lives without requiring the approval of the state or the dominant culture.

These commitments are now under severe pressure. A man or woman of sincere religious conviction who believes that homosexual practice is contrary to the will of God — and who therefore seeks professional assistance in ordering their desires in accordance with that conviction — is being told by governments and professional bodies that their choice is not a legitimate one. Not because they are harming others. Not because they are being coerced. But because the dominant culture has decided that their goal is impermissible.

That is a remarkable and troubling development. Whatever one believes about homosexuality — and Christians of good faith hold a range of views — the suppression of voluntary therapeutic options for consenting adults ought to concern everyone who takes seriously the meaning of individual freedom.

A Pastoral and Prophetic Word

The church's responsibility in this moment is neither to capitulate to cultural pressure nor to pretend that pastoral care for those who experience same-sex attraction is simple. It is not simple. The suffering of men and women who feel caught between their faith and their desires is real and ought to be met with genuine compassion.

But compassion does not require endorsement. It does not require the church to tell a man who comes seeking help that his desire to live in accordance with orthodox Christian teaching is itself the problem, or that the only therapeutic path open to him is the one the culture has approved. The church has always believed that human desires, disordered by sin, can by God's grace be redirected — not always easily, not always completely, but genuinely. That belief is not bigotry. It is orthodoxy.

America's highest court has just affirmed, by an 8–1 margin spanning its ideological spectrum, that the state has no business dictating which side of this conversation a licensed counselor may take.

Britain's Labour Government is about to do the opposite: criminalize the speech of any therapist, pastor, or counselor who helps a willing adult pursue the very goal he came in the door asking for — with a maximum penalty of five years in custody. And the Lords Spiritual, the 26 bishops whose ancient seats exist to bear prophetic witness against the overreach of the state, are not merely silent. They are cheering it on. Dr. Walker did not just welcome this Bill; he made sure no colleague would dare to dissent. A church that will not defend the conscience of the suffering, the voluntary, the consenting adult who simply wants help — against a government wielding the criminal law — has forgotten what it is for.

History will not be kind to bishops who mistook capitulation for compassion.

— David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and publisher of VirtueOnline (virtueonline.org), the leading orthodox Anglican news and commentary website.