THE EX-GAY MOVEMENT
There are now over two hundred evangelical ministries in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, China, and Mexico under the umbrella of Exodus International.26 Ministries affiliated with Exodus such as Desert Stream, Breaking Free, and Whosoever Will are locally run but under the administrative control of Exodus. Exodus sponsors a national conference every year and an international conference once every two years. It has a board of directors with revolving membership as well as regional representatives who oversee ministries in fourteen regions within the United States. The board of directors includes Alan Chambers, the new president of Exodus, John Smid of Love in Action in Memphis, Tom Cole, the director of Bridges across the Divide, and Mike Haley, a graduate of the New Hope program who now works in the public policy division of Focus on the Family. Many of the regional directors are ministry leaders as well. For instance, Anita was coordinator for the Northern and Southern California regions, but there are coordinators for the northwest Pacific, middle Pacific, north-central tier, central Rockies, mid-central, south-central, western Great Lakes basin, eastern Great Lakes basin, southern Gulf, north Atlantic, mid-Atlantic, and south Atlantic. These coordinators are responsible for making sure the local ministries are run by trained staff and ministry leaders who have applied to Exodus to become accredited.
Bob Davies, the original newsletter author, was president of Exodus for over seventeen years. Bob was married, and with his bushy beard and spectacles, he imparted a serious and studied leadership to the organization. He decided to step down from the post to pursue a music career at his Presbyterian church in 2001. Alan Chambers, an ex-gay man who had worked with a ministry in Florida, took over and moved the central offices from a shabby strip mall outside Seattle to a modern executive suite in Orlando, Florida. The new Exodus is sleeker, media savvy, and more explicitly political. Chambers, who is bright and irrepressibly sunny, like Orlando, has revamped the Web site, logo, and publications and changed the organization's mission statement to “Proclaiming to, educating and impacting the world with the Biblical truth that freedom from homosexuality is possible when Jesus is Lord of one's life.” The logo on many of the materials reads, “Change Is Possible. Discover How.” Chambers has hired a media and ministry relations manager, Randy Thomas, who sends out regular Exodus Media Spotlights emails with news updates on social and political issues related to homosexuality. The emails have news information on youth, Christian matters, marriage, civil unions and partner benefits, activism, and legislation. The Web site includes a speaker bureau to provide organizations with an Exodus representative to discuss issues like same-sex marriage, one issue where it has become increasingly vocal. Exodus has links to the Florida Coalition to Protect Marriage and information about initiatives in other states. Under Chambers, the original Exodus newsletter has been updated from a basic black-and-white format, which featured a testimony on the front and local news inside, to a more professional color format with shiny paper, graphics, and photographs. New promotional materials feature on the cover a group of men and women of all races and nationalities wearing white shirts.
In addition to ministries geared toward women, the deaf, and multicultural outreach, Exodus has devoted considerable energy to promoting its youth ministry, Exodus Youth, an outreach to teens and other youth struggling with homosexual issues. It has developed a separate Exodus Youth Web site with music, CD-ROMs, and teaching materials as well as a program called Refuge, an outpatient program for teenagers between the ages of thirteen and eighteen who are struggling with “broken” behaviors like pornography, drugs and alcohol, sexual promiscuity, and homosexuality. The idea behind the Exodus Youth campaign, as I discuss in chapter 6, is to provide an alternative to chat rooms and online resources for gay youth, instead telling them that if they feel same-sex desire, they should attempt to transform themselves rather than take on a gay identity. The Exodus Web site was designed by Westar media group in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which has a mission “to glorify God through excellence by providing innovative radio products, creative marketing services, and unsurpassed client representation.” Westar, according to its Web site, serves as a liaison between Christian ministries and radio stations in order to enable those ministries to reach their audience with the message of Jesus Christ.
The ex-gay movement has been slow to include racial justice as part of its platform, but the Exodus leaders stress the idea of multiculturalism in speeches. The organization is primarily white, and each year there are very few African American, Latino, or Asian American men and women who apply to its programs. As Andrea Smith has argued in her work on the Christian Right and racial reconciliation, Exodus, like many conservative evangelical groups, views racism as an individual problem of prejudice that can be solved through evangelism and personal healing rather than attention to the structural or institutional practices that maintain racism.27 The Exodus strategy of racial reconciliation is only applied to groups who are deemed sufficiently Christian, and Smith argues that outreach to people of color is a strategy to expand the organization rather than address a socioeconomic platform of racial justice. Instead, the movement pours resources into missionary efforts in places like the Philippines, Singapore, and South America, where movement leaders intend to replicate the structures and teachings of ex-gay ministries in the United States. In 2002 Alan Chambers made efforts to coordinate work with African American evangelical and Christian churches in the United States by meeting with prominent African American church leaders. Every year, in honor of Black History Month, the Exodus newsletter for February features an African American man who has come out of homosexuality. Exodus consistently showcases men and women of all races in its promotional materials, but those who attend the conference events and make up the program are still predominantly white.
Speaking engagements have become a crucial part of Exodus's work, and Chambers has also cultivated relationships with more prominent religious and political organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Strang Communications, Teen Missions International, Cornerstone Music Festival, Promise Keepers, and Focus on the Family. In April 2004 Chambers took part in a debate on gay marriage at the University of California, Berkeley, and he travels constantly to speak at churches, policy seminars, and other events. In August 2005, Charisma magazine, an evangelical publication, named Chambers as one of the thirty top emerging leaders under the age of forty in the American church who will lead evangelicalism into the next decade. Focus on the Family now employs two graduates of the New Hope program in its gender and sexuality division to run ex-gay conferences and seminars, called Love Won Out, throughout the country. Exodus has established partnerships with prominent religious organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals. In the fall of 2003, Exodus had exhibits at the Southern Baptist Convention and the General Council of the Assemblies of God. Randy Thomas, the media manager, represented Exodus at former attorney general John Ashcroft's banquet in Washington, D.C., and Alan Chambers writes of having had the opportunity to meet President Bush at a Washington, D.C., churches' conference.28
The upgrade of Exodus's public image has been expensive. The individual ex-gay ministries function mainly through the fees that program members pay each month, but Exodus relies on donations from individuals and organizations. It is recognized by the IRS as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, and it is a member in good standing with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), a Christian financial monitoring organization which has strict guidelines