For a time in my early thirties, I believed I had been changed. From the inside out. Born again. A new beginning and fresh start.
I had undergone what, in the language of the Christian evangelical world, could only be called a genuine conversion. It did not feel theatrical or socially induced. It felt seismic. My life changed in a moment. Shame receded. Purpose arrived. The scattered pieces of my identity seemed, at last, to lock into place. My life mattered and I had a destiny.
I re-organised my life accordingly. I took the Bible seriously and literally. I reordered my habits, my friendships, my ambitions. At one point I sold almost everything and moved countries to help start a church. None of this was half-hearted. I was, by temperament, never capable of half-belief.
And for a while — and this is the part I misunderstood — it worked.
The chaos that had previously marked my inner life settled into a kind of disciplined calm. The evangelical framework gave me structure, language, community and a powerful moral narrative in which to locate myself. I was no longer drifting. I knew who I was supposed to be. Most importantly, Jesus had healed me of my homosexuality.
Looking back now, with the cooler eye of age and a good deal more psychological literacy, I can see that what changed most dramatically was not my sexuality but my behaviour, my identity story, and the level of internal containment I was able to sustain.
Yet at that time, it did not feel like containment. It felt like healing.
This distinction between what feels like transformation and what actually is, sits at the heart of many sincere but ultimately fragile “healing” narratives.
Human behaviour is extraordinarily plastic under conditions of high meaning and strong community reinforcement. A sufficiently immersive belief system can re-organise daily life with impressive speed. It can quieten compulsions, redirect attention and produce periods of genuine stability. I experienced all of that. Many others have too.
What it did not do, what it could not do, was re-write the underlying structure of my sexual orientation.
That structure had been there long before my conversion, and it remained long after the emotional intensity of that period began, slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, to cool.
This is the point at which some readers, particularly those still inside strongly theological frameworks, may feel the ground shifting uncomfortably beneath their feet. Because it requires holding two truths at once. And fundamentlist Christianity cannot do that.
The first is that the conversion experience can be entirely sincere. Mine was. I was not pretending. I was not cynically managing appearances as I felt God supernaturally call me to the fro of the meeting to repent. I believed what I believed with the full force of my personality.
The second is that sincerity, however intense, does not grant the human nervous system unlimited plasticity. There are layers of the self that respond readily to new narratives, new communities, engaging worship music, charismatic preaching, new disciplines. And there are layers that are markedly more stubborn.
Sexual orientation appears, for the vast majority of people, to belong to the latter category.
Over time, not suddenly, not dramatically, but with the slow persistence of something that had never actually left, the old patterns of attraction reasserted themselves. Not because I had secretly wished them to. Not because I lacked discipline. Not because I had prayed incorrectly or insufficiently. But because the earlier sense of “healing” had been, in important respects, a narrative laid over something more deeply wired.
None of this, I should say, requires contempt for religion. Religious conversion can do many things remarkably well. It can stabilise chaotic lives. It can interrupt destructive habits. It can support sobriety. It can give people a moral and communal framework strong enough to hold them together during extremely fragile periods.
It did some of those things for me.
But in my case, it did not and could not perform the more ambitious miracle that was quietly hoped for beneath the surface language of discipleship and obedience.
It did not make me straight.
Looking back now, the word narrative has acquired a deeper significance for me than it had at the time.
During those years of faith, the Christian story did not feel like a narrative at all. It felt like reality itself. God was not a concept but a presence; Jesus was not a historical figure interpreted through centuries of theology, but the living centre of the universe. Seated on the throne of God and ruling over both my life and the world. That conviction organised my moral life, my ambitions, my sense of purpose, even the geography of my life.
Today I see that experience differently.
What I once experienced as divine intervention I now understand as the extraordinary human capacity to live inside powerful linguistic and cultural frameworks. Human beings are storytelling animals. Through language we build moral worlds, sacred histories, and identities that feel as solid as the physical world around us. Religion is perhaps the most sophisticated expression of that capacity.
From my present perspective, the God I once believed had healed me now appears less as a supernatural agent and more as a compelling narrative structure — one created, transmitted, and sustained through communities of belief over many centuries. That does not mean the experience of faith is trivial or insincere. My own certainly was not. But it does mean that the transformative power I felt then came not from a divine rewiring of my biology, but from the immense psychological force of a story that I had come to inhabit completely.
And stories, however powerful, cannot re-engineer the deeper architecture of human sexuality.
With the perspective I now hold, I no longer believe there was ever any supernatural mechanism in play capable of doing so. Human sexuality, in all its stubborn biological embeddedness across species and cultures, does not appear to be the kind of system that yields to prayer, however fervent, or to theological conviction, however sincere.
What religion offered me was not rewiring but narrative — powerful, coherent, temporarily life-organising narrative.
And narrative can carry a person a very long way.
For some, perhaps, it carries them a lifetime. For others, particularly those of us whose temperaments strain toward a rather unforgiving internal consistency, the gap between story and structure eventually becomes too wide to ignore.
When that happens, the earlier sense of miraculous change often has to be reinterpreted, not as fraud, and not as self-deception in any crude sense, but as something more human and more psychologically intelligible: a period of intense behavioural reorganisation under the influence of an immensely compelling meaning system.
That may sound less dramatic than the language of healing.
But it is, I think, more accurate.
And accuracy, however sobering, has at least this advantage: it allows us to understand how thoroughly decent, educated and sincere people can believe that something fundamental has been remade, only to discover later that what changed was real but partial: powerful enough to re-organise behaviour, but not powerful enough to re-write the deeper biological architecture of desire.
If my own story illustrates anything, it is not that religious experience is fake or emotionally insignificant. My conversion was neither. It re-organised my life, gave me discipline, purpose and community, and for a time it steadied an inner world that had previously been chaotic.
But what it did not do was alter the deeper grammar of my sexuality.
What I once interpreted as divine intervention I now understand as the extraordinary psychological force of a narrative fully inhabited, a story powerful enough to guide behaviour, but not powerful enough to redesign the organism that was living inside it.
And that, I have come to think, is the truth behind many testimonies of healing.
Conversion can change the story we tell about ourselves.
It cannot rewrite the nature we never chose in the first place.
“The most powerful stories are not those we tell others, but those we tell ourselves about who we are.”
— Daniel Kahneman