Pray Away. Directed by Kristine Stolakis. Netflix, 2021. 101 minutes.

Love the Sinner. Directed by Jessica Devaney and Geeta Gandbhir. Women Make Movies, 2017. 17 minutes.

Pray Away follows the stories of Julie Rogers, John Paulk, Yvette Cantu Schneider, and Randy Thomas, leaders of the ex-gay movement who are now ex-ex-gays. Critics’ reviews listed on Metacritic describe Pray Away as a collection of powerful personal stories. The film focuses on how Exodus International and other ex-gay “ministries” evolved organically, like 12-step recovery programs, during the 1970s. The movement trended during the 1980s and 1990s because reporters and talk show hosts at the time liked to present “both sides” of an issue, even at the risk of creating some false equivalency, and they used the ex-gay movement as the “other side” in stories about gay rights (Dixon and Clarke 2013). In the early 2000s, the Republican Party gave ex-gay activists a central role and used ex-gay rhetoric to help justify the oppression of minoritized sexual and gender identities. Moral injury from this eventually took its toll on Pray Away’s focal subjects, who became convinced about the harm they were doing to others. Exodus itself closed down in 2013 as it started to lose its political war against marriage rights.

User reviewers on sites like IMDB, which might more closely reflect students’ reactions, variously describe Pray Away as poignant, uninteresting, or even offensive. A review entitled, “Pray Away? You Mean Go Away,” is one of several that describe the film as an unasked-for and indulgent apology tour from some people who are now doing well for themselves materially but have little hope of ever repairing the damage they caused to countless lives. The film’s protagonists themselves lament that their movement has not followed them into repentance but instead continued the work uninterrupted under new leaders. These leaders include ex-transgender activist Jeffrey McCall, also featured in the film, and John Paulk’s ex-lesbian ex-wife Anne, who declined to be interviewed. A viewer cannot help but notice the many apparent school-age youth in attendance at ex-gay conferences and gatherings and wonder if a documentary about their stories might be a better use of time.

One way to use Pray Away in class would be as not just a piece of history but as a humanizing portrait of people who made complicated moral choices while they were young and in the public eye, and who are now coming into their own as adults in a historical moment in which the political and cultural forces that defined their early lives have changed. Students could benefit from the exercise of cultivating empathy for these focal subjects and situating individual life courses within the social contexts that have produced them. As a piece of history, Pray Away could be used with Cured (2020), which describes the struggles during the Civil Rights era to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Love the Sinner describes Jess Devaney’s personal journey from someone who was happy to leave her Evangelical Christian past in the past to someone who wants to own it and leverage it to change society. Love the Sinner could be used in a class by showing it straight through and then, during a second playthrough, pausing regularly to unpack the many issues it raises about anti-oppressive work around Evangelical Christianity.

The film opens with the story of Jess’s mother having taken refuge in conservative Christianity after leaving Jess’s alcoholic father, illustrating a feature that attracts people to conservative religious institutions and keeps them involved even when they know all about the abuse and hypocrisy. The idea is that a conservative religious institution “deals with everything” people face in their lives (Martel 2019, 376), so their cost-benefit analysis might genuinely favor staying. Jess eventually becomes disaffected and leaves, as young adults with concerns about oppressive ideologies can be expected to do (Ream and Rodriguez 2014). Notably, she does not mention her own minoritized sexual identity as centrally important to this choice (2:29). Her turning point comes when her brother is shot in the 2017 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.

Jess visits their old church and interviews the lead pastor, whom she knows from childhood. He does not visibly react when Jess comes out to him. He offers talking points about “love the sinner, hate the sin” that sound more political than religious, and they probably are. It could be pointed out in class that fewer than half of people who identify as Evangelical ascribe to Evangelicalism’s characteristic theological beliefs. Rather, they feel connected to an institution that helps conservative politicians rhetorically justify oppression (Verhaagen 2022).

Jess’s next conversation is with a megachurch pastor. Her consciousness-raising succeeds with him, and he voices the need to “go back and re-examine [his] heart” in the wake of Pulse (9:38). Later, he will leave that church for another role (Reynolds 2017; see also the pastor’s website). At the end, Jess reflects on the promises and limitations of personal-relationship-based incremental change, for which she says that there might not be time (14:06). A class could pause here and reflect upon what this remark implies about visions for social change. One vision that exists is of a steady march toward full equality (Wuest 2023). Another vision is that there are “dual and dueling forces” (Kendi 2017, x) in which periods of progress toward equality are followed by periods of progress away from it. Jess’s remark appears to reflect some hope in the first vision, provided that enough is done quickly enough to achieve total victory, but it raises the specter of the second vision, since time may run out before the tides of history predictably change and perhaps bring about another Pulse.

Geoffrey L. Ream is a professor at the Adelphi University School of Social Work in Garden City, NY. He earned his PhD in human development in 2005 from Cornell University. Specializing in quantitative methods and secondary data analysis, he has authored and coauthored several highly-cited research articles about suicidality, homelessness, mental health, and conflicts with religion among youth with minoritized sexual and gender identities. He helped start two organizations serving homeless youth with minoritized sexual and gender identities in New York City. He participated in Evangelical Christian fellowships during college and now attends an Episcopal church in New York City.