I expected this to be another false accuser against Christian efforts to rescue people from evil. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that all the journalists breathlessly covering his fall from Christ are too eagerly pushing the Narrative to notice his homosexuality was the product of divorce and child molestation, and he didn’t turn against God so much as quietly give up.
There’s no cure for homosexuality but there are vaccines: fatherhood and capital punishment.
Conversion therapy leader for 2 decades, McKrae Game disavows movement he helped fuel
By Michael Majchrowicz, 30 August 2019
SPARTANBURG . McKrae Game is gay.
He was gay when he received counseling from a therapist who assured him he could overcome his same-sex attractions.
He was gay when he married a woman and founded what would become one of the nation’s most expansive conversion therapy ministries.
He was gay when thousands of people just like him sought his organization’s counsel, all with the goal of erasing the part of themselves Game and his associates preached would send them to hell.
For two decades, he led Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina’s Upstate. Conversion therapy is a discredited practice intended to suppress or eradicate a person’s LGBTQ identity through counseling or ministry.
Okay. I’m not surprised that an anti-homosexual organization was founded by a homo-leaning guy. It’s no different than a recovered alcoholic helping other drunks to kick the bottle. Neither am I surprised at the occasional backsliding. Perfection is inhuman.
But the group’s board of directors abruptly fired Game in November 2017.
In June, Game publicly announced…
Whoa, whoa, WHOA! McKrae got fired from the very organization he founded? And there’s a total news blackout about it. All I could find for that year is that HFW’s July 2017 national conference had seven attenders per Facebook.
You useless, worthless journalists! Every mainstream media outlet is reporting on McKrae’s apostasy and finger-pointing yet not one that I checked cared to look up how he got fired from his conversion therapy organization in the first place. Don’t any of them think that mayyybe that might have something to do with his newfound bitterness at conversion therapy?
In June, Game publicly announced he was gay and severed his ties with the organization.
A year and a half to finish severing ties? Come on, what’s the REAL story? (I failed to find out.)
Now, the man once billed as a leading voice in the conversion therapy movement is trying to come to terms with the harm he inflicted while also learning to embrace a world and community he assailed for most of his adult life. …
In 2014, nine founders and leaders from some of the country’s most prominent programs and ministries wrote an open letter calling for a nationwide ban on the practice. The letter was published online by the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
.As former ex-gay leaders, having witnessed the incredible harm done to those who attempted to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, we join together in calling for a ban on conversion therapy,. they wrote in the letter. .It is our firm belief that it is much more productive to support, counsel, and mentor LGBTQ individuals to embrace who they are in order to live happy, well-adjusted lives..
.Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful,. Game told The Post and Courier. .Because it’s false advertising..
Because it’s false advertising? Very plausible. I’ve seen lots of clergy and organizations promise total freedom from sexual sin. A stupid promise to make when God promised us suffering, not good health or an easy life.
No, there’s no reliable cure for homosexuality. Yes, you should expect a lifetime struggle against your flesh. Welcome to the incel party, pal. Lest you homosexuals thinks that’s an unfair demand, take a moment to consider that we straight Christians would be able to have sex if only the very Cucks promising to save us from our sexual desires would give us their daughters. You get false hope of becoming normal, we get shame because we already are normal.
Ain’t that a shitbag full o’ FUBAR.
Nearly 700,000 LGBTQ-identifying adults have undergone conversion therapy treatments or counseling, according to a 2018 study by UCLA.s Williams Institute. The various forms of conversion have been tied to emotional and psychological trauma for many, including depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide. It’s been condemned by virtually every major medical group in the United States, including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association.
The experts who disagreed with this were shamed, doxxed, de-certified, threatened and fired. The various forms of “cancel culture” have been tied to emotional and psychological trauma for many, including depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.
While Game’s coming out and condemnation of conversion therapy is important, he needs to take ownership of the role he played in others. pain and to be sensitive to their healing process and careful with how he chooses to interact with them, said Casey Pick, senior fellow for advocacy and government affairs at Trevor Project.
Sounds like McKrae’s new allies aren’t convinced that his turn against Christ is legit.
Trevor Project is a suicide help and advocacy group specifically for LGBTXYZ. Remind me which advocacy group serves the cis-male community?
Game recently published a written apology to his personal Facebook page in which he called for the dissolution of any conversion therapy practice or ex-gay ministry. Though he condemned the practices, Game also said a group like Hope for Wholeness could serve as a community for those that believe “homosexuality is incongruent with their faith..
Yeah, he does sound conflicted about this anti-gay thing. I’m not convinced it isn’t a personal spat with the board of directors. We’ll get to McKrae’s actual statement but this article has some background on him first.
Game was born and raised in a Southern Baptist household in Spartanburg.
He said he has never been particularly close with his family . his parents and an older sister. As a child, Game felt isolated from other boys his age. In secret, he wore his sister’s clothes. Looking at his own reflection in the mirror, he’d study the way her dresses draped his body. The way the fabric flared out when he twirled.
At school, he said, his classmates taunted his more feminine qualities, nicknaming him “McGay.”
By age 11, Game said he began to believe he may be attracted to other boys. Confused and ashamed, he kept his feelings to himself, he said, until he turned 18.
For the first time he was on his own. Game moved into a duplex just across the street from where his mother lived.
We can infer a divorce from that. I looked for confirmation and found this from the very same newspaper… pro journalists are SO useless!
Segue.
By Michael Majchrowicz and Mary Katherine Wildeman, 2 October 2018
Heh, even the same author.
As a young man, [McKrae] Game began a relationship with a gay neighbor following his parents. divorce, but the experience left him a wreck, his biography on the group’s website stated.
End segue.
By chance, a gay man who was about 20 years older than Game moved into the adjoining apartment, and they became close.
The mutual attraction was undeniable, and, in secret, the two developed an intimate relationship.
Bullshit that happened by chance. As soon as he was legal, he moved into his lover’s house. McKrae was likely raped and sodomized by him, as a child, after his father could no longer protect him.
It was a kind of freedom Game had never known, but he also battled debilitating anxiety and insecurity, he said. …
At one point, Game said he experienced a nervous breakdown that lasted two weeks.
.My brain was telling me .you’re going in the wrong direction.,. he said. “But my body was telling me otherwise..
Then, in the summer of 1993, Game was attending a conference for Evangelical Christians when, during a church service, he felt compelled to approach the pulpit. There, he sobbed as he prayed for salvation.
A typical salvation story. He came to his senses and tried to escape the corruption.
When Game returned home to Spartanburg, he said, his mother footed the bill for a counselor who pledged he could get to the root of why Game had grown up to be gay. If Game worked hard enough, he was told, his attraction to men would lessen.
For the next six years, Game saw that counselor once a week.
.I guess my thought process was “this will become manageable.,. he said. .My hope was to get to the point where I could lay this down, meet a girl, fall in love and have a family..
At one point, the counselor reasoned Game was drawn to other men because his father had not been invested enough in him as a child, prompting Game to seek out male attention. As therapy, Game said, the counselor had him act out father-son role-playing scenarios where they played with toys on the floor.
You can’t go back to your childhood so that sounds like ineffective treatment. But the counselor’s reasoning was correct. Perhaps a better way would have been, in better times, to go to the cops and have that homosexual child molester publicly hanged.
I suspect it’s hard to overcome sexual trauma when the perp is living free and clear.
In 1995, Game met his wife through church. They married in 1996, have two grown children and remain together. Today, Game said, his wife knows he is gay. Julie Game did not want to participate in this story.
Game said he was honest about his same-sex attractions from the beginning of their relationship. He told her he was seeking help and had been told, if he stuck with counseling, his attractions would lessen.
They didn’t.
False hope. One of the Cult Of Nice’s worst offenses against the Cross.
On numerous occasions his wife confronted him about his consumption of gay pornography. Whenever she would catch him, Game said, he’d toss the magazines into the fire.
A decent wife, surprisingly, who knew to not speak to the press and understood that porn isn’t adultery.
The breaking point came after Game said he had an affair with a man.
Game.s counselor told him about a retreat in Virginia, led by group called Exodus, for people who were gay and didn’t want to be. They went.
After the retreat, Game told his wife about his affair.
That was quite the exposure to temptation: a long-distance trip to a sex-themed conference where nobody knows each other and your wife isn’t around to help against temptation. Perhaps national conferences and large-scale therapy programs aren’t the solution to unhealthy sexual attraction.
Also because unrepentant homosexuals love to corrupt and defile the innocent and those trying to escape. Two words: Boy Scouts. If I was an alcoholic, I wouldn’t go to a national meeting of AA if there was a large, organized and militant group of lawbreakers lusting to spike the punch bowl.
Back home in Spartanburg, Game wrote a letter to the owners of the shop where he purchased his magazines. In the envelope, he included a photo of him and his wife and implored them to never again do business with him.
He was honestly trying. Not afraid to burn bridges and ask for help. The Internet Age is the worst time in human history for sexual continence.
Game continued counseling, and during those sessions, he said, he developed his philosophy that would become the central tenet of his ministry: if you determined the cause of someone’s attractions, you could learn to repress them.
Alas, there are no shortcuts. We will never reach the point of an easy, trouble-free life on this side of eternity. We must worship God as living sacrifices, denying our impulses every day, and if your neighbor doesn’t have your problem then rest assured it’s only because he was given a different set.
Hope for Wholeness was Game’s life’s work. For years, he worked remotely with Exodus International, an Orlando, Fla.-based conversion therapy network that comprised more than 120 ministries across the United States and Canada.
Ending this article and proceeding to the next:
McKrae Game: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
Game said on a Facebook Live video September 3, 2019, that he was indoctrinated by evangelical beliefs when he led gay conversion therapy groups. In his practice, he said he would ask a participant if they wanted to be gay. If they did not, he would attempt to counsel them through minimizing their same-sex attractions. People were only asked to participate if they wanted to minimize their attractions, he said. They could only participate under their own volition.
This is what’s being outlawed by the bans on conversion therapy. Homosexuals who voluntarily participate in order to reduce or end their unwanted, unnatural desires. This ain’t electroshock therapy by Pavlovian behaviorists with coke-bottle glasses.
And now, his viral Facebook post by way of Heavy.com. Formatting partly mine because God gave us paragraph breaks in hopes that we would use them.
I WAS WRONG! Please forgive me!
Unpacking the memories. In the discussions leading up to The Post & Courier coming to interview me, I’d told the young reporter that I’d still not unpacked from my having been fired. .It was just too painful. I’ve just been putting it off. . It all had been stacked up in our home office, which is a wreck, thus taking it all up to the den. The young reporter asked, .Would u be willing to let us film you and me talk to u while u go through the boxes?. I said .I guess I could do that..
Even the timing of his firing is very curious, if it took two years to reach the “moving out” phase.
It was very cathartic going through the boxes, explaining each item, book, and pictures, including one of me and Joseph Nicolosi.author of Reparative Therapy and late director of NARTH, Joe Dallas, and my counselor Dan Garvin of Solid Rock. I went through each item, one at a time: my plaque from my 2010 marathon, ordination certificate, a toy Hummer I used to explain coveting, and garden gnome that was underneath one of my many plants that were in my office. Many books on understanding the roots of homosexuality, brokenness, sexual healing, Christianity, many Bibles, and my Hope for Wholeness badge I wore when displaying at conferences. Two cases of my book The Transparent Life. And my prize possession of my Promise Keepers hat that was signed by the men on the bus (to/from Bolder Colorado from Spartanburg, a 37 hr bus ride) that said me sharing changed their lives.
He asked me after we got done what I would do with it all. I said I’d donate the normal books, throw away the books on homosexuality, keep the personal items like the embroidered Truth Ministry podium swath that someone (I don’t remember who) made for me. He asked me why I’d keep the items. I said, .That was 20-26 years (20 in ministry leadership) of my life, it’s a large part of me (though its like a distant memory). I will want to keep them to remember..
The memories aren’t all bad. There’s many good memories. But I certainly regret where I caused harm. I know that creating the organization that still lives was in a large way causing harm. Creating a catchy slogan that put out a very misleading idea of “Freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ” was definitely harmful. Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful.
Sodomy is all of that. It corrupts the body with disease, the soul with perversion and the mind with cognitive dissonance between how the human body is made versus how it is being used. No wonder homosexuals often have stress lines like gills on their faces.
And God’s opinion on Sodomy is not debatable. Eternal damnation awaits the unrepentant. As with every other type of evil.
People reported to attempt suicide because of me and these teachings and ideals. I told people they were going to Hell if they didn’t stop, and these were professing Christians! This was probably my worse wrongful act. At one time I was working with so many youth that I had a weekly youth group, where they.d share why they were there, and I would guide them in how to not be gay. What a sad commentary of my past verses today, or a bad joke as many may see it. I believe all of these young men are now out/gay and one that I worked with for many years is married to a man and living in San Francisco.
I hope God kills that city with fire, like He did with Sodom.
I hope to catch up with him. I believe I.ll message him today. Hopefully he.ll not be too angry with me. When the reporter asked me if I’d like to see Hope for Wholeness shut down, I said I’d like all exgay ministry and conversion therapy counselors and organizations shut down. I told him I believed the only positive and productive use for HFW and exgay ministry is for those that believe that homosexuality is incongruent with their faith, to receive and have a community of like minded people so that they can live healthy lives, and in the end that was what I was trying to do.
Those are mutually exclusive statements. One wonders about his emotional state; picking through the memories of a freshly lost career of 20 years is a terrible time to be interviewed about it by reporters sniffing at a Pulitzer Prize for Best Narrative.
Today, I’m thankful to have it all behind me. I plan to communicate with anyone, including media, that wants to speak with me. I.ll take advantage of any opportunity I get to share my experiences, and my belief that exgay ministry and conversion therapy IS HARMFUL. At some point I.ll write a book about my experiences and certainly a revision of my Transparent Life book, which I plan to offer the ones I have on Amazon soon. I.ll include a note with where I am today and my new beliefs and hope they do not take personally my words against homosexuality.
Largely the book is not about homosexuality, but how to live authenticly honest and open, though at the time I had not fully grasped this concept myself. It’s all in my past, but many, way TOO MANY continue believing that there is something wrong with themselves and wrong with people that choose to live their lives honestly and open as gay, lesbian, trans, etc. The very harmful cycle of self shame and condemnation has to stop. It’s literally killing people!! Learn to love. Learn to love yourself and others.
Even now with most of the facts in hand, I’m not sure what to make of McKrae’s apostasy. He’s not the Christ-hating demagogue that the headlines had me expecting. His story sounds like a typical one for homosexuals and he tried to go about handling it in a Christian way for many years, succeeding to the point of a successful marriage despite flawed theology and heavy spiritual opposition.
Best guess, he burned out on trying to do right and now is letting his worldly desires run the show. It takes effort to believe that our efforts will be worthwhile, to not grow weary in doing good, to not envy the wicked their many, easy successes.
These days, it’s an easy way to fall.
Your second-to-last paragraph made me think of Jason.
Two deaths in a year have been devastating for him. I believe you offered to meet with him last year. Can you say what happened? Since he is still so alone, I am assuming yours’ and others offers to visit him didn’t happen.
“Best guess, he burned out on trying to do right and now is letting his worldly desires run the show. It takes effort to believe that our efforts will be worthwhile, to not grow weary in doing good, to not envy the wicked their many, easy successes.”
He who continues to the end will be saved. Someone should tell this guy that it is not at all important how he started out, all that matters is how he ends up. God does not all all hold his sodomy and his struggles with it against him. He needs to forget what is past, and reach out for what is yet to come. It’s not too late, he could put this stumble in the past too, if he doesn’t wait to long. We should pray for him.
Philippians 3:
13 Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,
14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Jason never replied to my offer for a camping trip. I didn’t repeat the offer because I’ve had increasing trouble understanding what he writes. Later on, I tried to reassure him that he was a Christian and his response… made it clear he didn’t want to talk to me. Whatever help the guy needs, I’m not it.
I wonder if I wronged him. I’m the reason he quit the Salvation Army. I suggested to him that after having worked every major holiday for years on end and no reward, he should demand the next holiday off just to see how his superiors reacted.
As I predicted, they were upset to the point of a formal reprimand that the guy who worked every holiday for at least three years in a row refused to do four. He broke with them shortly afterward and I thought him the better off for not allowing himself to be used like that. Shortly afterward, he took a long hiking trip in Appalachia that he’d always thought about doing and I recall it even led to a partial reconnection with his father. Then he got a new, better job and moved from Fresno to Santa Rosa, a promising improvement. I considered him a MGTOW success story.
And then something happened. He went dark for a time and returned a different person.
Looking back, I wonder if the Salvation Army was giving him enough moral support and companionship to have been worth the maltreatment. Not something I would have considered at the time.
Weak men need crutches. There’s no shame in that, especially in our society that tears men down with unholy fury, but the organizations and social networks that once helped men cope with the hard times have been targeted and destroyed by Team Evil. I think both Jason and McKrae are casualties of that lack of support.
I appreciate your lengthy reply, it fills some gaps. He was offline a couple of times, but now we know one time may be due to his brother.
I hope you’ll reach out to him again – but I am sure you’ve prayed and thought about it, but he’s in lots of pain, and people in pain drive people away unintentionally. I know men in lousy marriages need the fellowship of other men, but we can be hard to hang out with due to an inordinate desire to process and talk about the unbelievable things we experience.