Alana Chen’s Suicide Shows Canada Did Not Outlaw Christianity

Christian practices that cause severe mental health crises and death deserve no respect or protection at law

Frank discussion of LGBTQ mental health crises and suicide follow. If you’re a young person in crisis, please reach out to Trevor Project, where trained counselors are waiting to help you around the clock. Or call the National Suicide Prevention LGBTQ Lifeline.

Canada just outlawed conversion “therapy,” making it a crime to “provide or promote services intended to change or repress a person’s sexual orientation or gender expression.” The law is probably the toughest on the globe, much tougher than any state ban in the U.S. It leaves little wiggle room for religious exemptions, and many Christians are furious. Thousands of pastors across Canada and the U.S. spoke from pulpits last Sunday in a coordinated condemnation of Canada’s new law.

“Canada outlawed Christianity and nobody noticed,” screams the headline of a popular podcast on iHeartRadio . . . As if engaging in counseling and pastoral practices guaranteed to produce severe mental health crises and suicide are a necessary or desired part of Christianity.

Let’s talk about Alana Chen, a young woman dead by suicide

I’ve followed Alana’s tragic story since her death in Colorado in 2019, but her family made headlines again last week as Christian leaders lined up to condemn Canada’s conversion therapy ban. Alana’s mother, Joyce Calvo, just shared portions of her daughter’s journal in a wrenching column for the National Catholic Reporter as she works to shed light on the tragedy, point out that similar tragedies are unfolding right now, and urge Catholic Church leaders to leave LGBTQ adolescents alone.

Joyce makes several important points:

1. Contrary to popular belief, Catholic dioceses in the U.S. often promote conversion therapy and even sponsor conversion therapy organizations like Desert Streams Ministries. She writes, “My goal for this essay is twofold. I hope it will alert Catholic parents to beware the devastating impact the church can have on their LGBTQ+ children. And I hope it will persuade people speaking for the church to abandon their misguided and dangerous attempts to alter what God has made.”
2. Nuns and priests encouraged Alana for years to use conversion therapy techniques to suppress or eliminate her attraction to other teenage girls. These nuns and priests met with and counseled Alana in secret, subjecting Alana to what her mother calls, “rules and regulations, spiritual/mental abuse … shaming and degrading her.”
3. Nuns and priests urged Alana to hide the counseling from her parents. When Alana was 14 and first admitted to a priest that she believed she was a lesbian, he urged her not to tell her parents because he was afraid they would affirm her. Instead, he counseled her for years to confess and suppress or eliminate her attractions.
4. Nuns and priests continued to urge Alana to suppress or eliminate her attraction to women after she was hospitalized over plans to kill herself in church. Alana told her sister then that she felt “defiled” and “impure,” terms she learned in her pastoral counseling, during which she was instructed to confess any particular incidents of attraction to women before receiving the sacrament of communion.
5. Nuns and priests referred Alana to conversion therapy programs like Desert Streams and to a licensed psychologist who specialized in conversion therapy.
6. The Catholic Church in Colorado continues to promote and practice conversion therapy for adolescents, in spite of a state law banning it. They deny their efforts to change/eliminate “unwanted same-sex attraction” amount to conversion therapy and they claim pastoral counseling is not subject to the law.

Of course pastoral counseling is conversion therapy

Desert Streams Ministries, whose staff provide training to Protestant and Catholic clergy and lay people across North America, say they, “help Christians suppress or extinguish sexual/romantic attraction to people of the same sex.” That is the definition of conversion therapy, and the results are as tragic as they are predictable.

As Alana’s private journal reveals, the counseling she received, to extinguish her same-sex attraction or suppress it to the point she no longer noticed it, is the definition of conversion therapy. The fact that she received the toxic counseling from nuns and priests doesn’t make her any less dead.

This old, toxic story just won’t go away

For decades, ever since we LGBTQ people started standing up and telling the world we no longer consent to being silenced, shamed, suppressed or oppressed, Christian organizations have insisted we’re “choosing” our attractions, have insisted we can un-choose them through counseling, prayer and faith practices.

For decades, the Christian organizations making these claims have collapsed, closed up shop, and even apologized for misleading people. The only verifiable outcomes of services organizations like Desert Streams offer are severe mental health problems and a high suicide rate.

Alana Chen is not the exception, she’s the rule.

The harder LGBTQ people sincerely try to eliminate “unwanted same-sex attraction,” the more likely they are to try to end their lives. Data show that teens forced into conversion therapy are actually more likely to emerge mentally healthy than teens who enter programs because they want to. Neither subset of teens emerges with any change in how they experience sexual attraction.

Conversion therapy is like snake handling

When I was a kid in rural Alabama, my Baptist preacher dad met a family who attended a fringe Pentecostal church where people didn’t just “speak in tongues” and engage in “faith healing,” they brought live rattlesnakes to church and passed them around in a show of faith.

Dad took me to visit one of the families, who for Christian reasons refused to allow their kids to be treated with antibiotics or blood transfusions. They believed if people got sick, they should have enough faith to pray for healing, and if they didn’t heal, then their death must be God’s will.

Dad’s voice shook with emotion on the ride back home. He told me, “If any of those kids die, from a snake bite or because they got sick and their parents wouldn’t take them to the doctor, watch me do everything in my power to see the parents put in prison. You don’t hurt kids. You just don’t.”

Generally, in the U.S., the law has come to mostly agree with Dad. Christian faith does not excuse putting kids at risk. If you take your kid to a snake-handling service and they get bit, you’re in big trouble and your faith won’t legally extricate you. Ditto if you deny medical treatment to your child on Christian grounds, like the Pennsylvania parents whose two-year-old died in 2018 of an easily treatable bacterial pneumonia.

Hurting people on Christian grounds doesn’t make the hurt acceptable

We have enough data to be certain the kind of conversion therapy nuns and priests subjected Alana Chen to is as dangerous as snake handling, with outcomes as predictable as withholding antibiotics from a sick toddler.

That’s why Canada’s federal government passed a criminal ban on conversion therapy ban so tight some Christian pastors are afraid it will criminalize pastoral counseling.

News flash: it’s supposed to.

Pastor James Coates, a Canadian pastor jailed last year for refusing to comply with covid-19 public health guidelines, told Fox News that the Canadian ban is “anything but loving,” claiming it will “shut the LGBT community off from the saving and transforming message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Coates doesn’t get it. Like thousands of other Christian pastors last week, he apparently refuses to look at data that shows Jesus’s transforming message has zero track record of changing sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s almost like Jesus is telling people they don’t understand his message. Coates could open up his eyes and see if he chose to. So could the nuns and priests in Colorado who falsely insist they can help teens like Alana Chen stop being gay.

For as long as LGBTQ young people keep suffering and dying, laws against Christian conversion therapy will be critically needed. But that doesn’t mean Christianity has been outlawed, just like laws criminalizing Christians for withholding medical care from their children do not outlaw Christianity.

As a matter of fact, contrary to Coates’s assertion, the U.S. and Canada are bursting with Christian churches that share Jesus’s love without condemning LGBTQ people, without falsely claiming that faith can change or suppress same-sex attraction. Want to find a church like that? Check out Church Clarity, a crowd-sourced database of thousands of LGBTQ-affirming Christian congregations:

Christian practices that cause severe mental health crises and death deserve no respect or protection at law. You don’t hurt kids. You just don’t.

Christian conversion therapy is as dangerous as snake handling. Pass it on.

James Finn is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, a frequent columnist for the LA Blade, a contributor to other LGBTQ news outlets, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].

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