Justin Greenfield | The Dr. J Show
In this deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation, Justin Greenfield shares his journey of faith, healing, and self-understanding after years of struggling with same-sex attraction. Together, he and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse explore why simply telling people to “just stop” often fails, how childhood wounds shape adult struggles, and what real compassion, science, and Christian sanctification actually look like. This interview challenges popular narratives, offers hope rooted in truth, and points toward peace that comes not from denying pain—but from facing it.
Justin Greenfield is an author, speaker, and spiritual director who received his master’s in spiritual formation from the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology and also holds a 4-year degree in missions. In 2003, God revealed His love to Justin while a student at Johns Hopkins University. God provided key insights that led him out of homosexuality. Today, Justin speaks on issues related to church fellowship, compassion, sanctification, evangelism, and sexual identity. Justin has been speaking at churches, conferences, and on radio stations nationwide since 2004. Justin runs a spiritual direction and coaching practice for those looking for support on their own sanctification journey.
If we don’t speak first, the Enemy wins. If we wait for those struggling to come to us, we’re more likely to lose them to the Devil. Here’s the problem: the overwhelming majority of people struggling with homosexuality aren’t revealing themselves to anyone in the church. They want to be invisible, because they are terrified of what will happen if somebody finds out their secret. Why risk facing shame and contempt, especially when they’re not seeing changed lives of other homosexuals in their church?
The solution: we speak redemptive truths over broad groups of people in our lives. That way, we reach those in need without them having to raise their hand and say, “Here I am!” If you read this book, pick up some great insights that can change lives, but simply wait for those who need help to come to you, then the Devil has already won those in your life. You must proactively speak holistic, redemptive insights to your circles of influence, whether that’s a pulpit, a small group, or the dinner table.
So who is one person you can share this information with, that homosexuality is typically developmental and the result of a number of statistically relevant factors, oftentimes including same-sex love-hunger? Who can you pass this video along to who may not struggle with homosexuality themselves, but just like everyone these days, they need to understand it? People need love and the lack of insights devastates lives. How can you say something to one person today?
[1] A Barna poll shows that 27% of Christians aged 18-37 identify as LGBTQ. New Insights into the Generation of Growing Influence: Millennials In America A Research Report by George Barna, Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, p. 98
http://godloveshomosexuals.com/
greenfieldministries.com
Transcript
(Please note the transcript is auto-generated and likely contains errors)
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:02:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What is? Stop it! Theology.
00:00:02:06 – 00:00:11:18
Justin Greenfield
Love God and love people the way that we’re called to. As Christians, you can’t do that when you’re still caught up in your own junk and have it resolved your issues.
00:00:11:22 – 00:00:18:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You could see that. You don’t just tell an alcoholic, stop drinking as if that’s all that was involved. You know, there’s a whole.
00:00:18:10 – 00:00:35:06
Justin Greenfield
Exactly. I would pray and pray I. I cry myself to sleep asking that God would take these attractions away. I remember very clearly the vow I made as a kid when I said, I will never be like my father. The debt that he owed me. And so.
00:00:35:06 – 00:00:37:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Oh, say that again.
00:00:37:10 – 00:00:41:03
Justin Greenfield
I would be nice to him from the debt that he owed me.
00:00:41:05 – 00:01:07:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
A recent Barna poll shows that among Christians between the ages of 18 and 37, over a quarter, 27% identify as LGBTQ. What in the world is going on and what is the church going to do about it? Hi everyone! I’m Doctor Jennifer Roback, Moore’s former Ivy League economics professor. Author of six books on marriage and family, and founder and president of the Ruth Institute.
00:01:07:22 – 00:01:35:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
My research convinces me the traditional Christian sexual ethics is reasonable and humane, and will bless anyone who embraces it. But we can’t hope to build a society based on Christian principles. If we’re hemorrhaging a quarter of our young members. That’s why I was so delighted to discover Mr. Justin Greenfield, a man raised in a Christian home who nonetheless experienced same sex attraction and a whole lot of suffering around it.
00:01:35:21 – 00:02:05:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Justin is a gifted communicator and spiritual director. He holds a master’s degree in spiritual Formation from the Talbott School of Theology. His passion is to equip Christians with the tools they need that will help them care for people who are dealing with homosexuality in some form or another. He’s going to tell us how he found relief from same sex attraction, and he’ll give you the insights and tips that can help you help yourself, and to help other people.
00:02:05:04 – 00:02:12:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Bookmark this page. You’re going to want to share this conversation with others. Justin Greenfield, welcome to the doctor J show.
00:02:12:18 – 00:02:15:09
Justin Greenfield
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
00:02:15:11 – 00:02:38:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Well, I was very interested to meet you when I saw the column that you wrote in the Christian Post. Our mutual friend Brendan Showalter put us together, and, you know, and then we’ve had a little bit of communication. I’ve read some other things that you’ve written. And so, I think you’re going to be an interesting addition to the work we’ve already been doing about leaving pride behind, because you have a, you know, you each story is a little different and offers a little perspective to it.
00:02:38:17 – 00:02:52:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So why don’t we I’m going to start with one of the most arresting things that you said at the very beginning of the little article that you sent me, which was you describe something called stop it theology. What what does stop it theology.
00:02:52:06 – 00:03:27:08
Justin Greenfield
Right. So stop it. Theology is kind of the antithesis of sanctification. So if you want to go and embrace Jesus deeply within yourself, resistance is one of the tools. However, there’s got to be a lot more that you do to take off the old man and put on the new man. And so I see it oftentimes in the church, people will do Bible studies and fasting and community, those kinds of things which are generally applicable and super, super good.
00:03:27:08 – 00:03:58:17
Justin Greenfield
We got to be about them. But sometimes we forget the wisdom of the proverbs to take a look at why we do the things that we do, and to resolve root issues like lies, vows, unforgiveness, defensive detachment from a same sex parent is oftentimes for those who face same sex attractions, things like that that you really need to work through in order to love God and love people the way that we’re called to as Christians.
00:03:58:17 – 00:04:04:16
Justin Greenfield
You can’t do that when you’re still caught up in your own junk and have it resolved your issues.
00:04:04:18 – 00:04:27:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so the point is that if the church, if the only message you get from the church is just stop. Just stop it no more, you know, it’s like, yeah, I knew that like a long time ago. I knew I should stop it. And if I if it was that simple, I would have done that already. But this is there’s something more complicated about these patterns of attractions and addictive processes.
00:04:27:17 – 00:04:45:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And unforgiveness is and they’re all these things. It’s there’s something more complicated about it. And yes, of course, we’re not going to say, sure, roll with, roll with it, do whatever you want. The church should not be saying that, obviously, but just shouting stuff it is not is not going to be.
00:04:45:13 – 00:04:47:18
Justin Greenfield
It doesn’t help anybody.
00:04:47:20 – 00:04:59:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah that’s right, that’s right. And if you looked at if you looked at other kinds of problems, you could see that you don’t just tell an alcoholic, stop drinking as if that’s all that was involved. You know, there’s a.
00:04:59:10 – 00:05:00:05
Justin Greenfield
Whole exactly.
00:05:00:05 – 00:05:06:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Community aspect. There can be all kinds of pieces for, for individuals. But but.
00:05:06:02 – 00:05:34:17
Justin Greenfield
Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, for alcoholism and for anorexia, for other sins, for other lies that people will start believing, oh, I you know, I look in the mirror and I see somebody who’s 50 pounds heavier or I, you know, the lie that oftentimes is common for anorexics is that they need to be in control, things like this that if you like, my insurance is going to pay for you to go to a clinic to resolve those issues that are underlying a sin issue.
00:05:34:19 – 00:06:00:05
Justin Greenfield
But for homosexuality, they do quite the opposite. They tell you, go resolve the anxiety that you have for practicing homosexuality. But the whole world, even even in the Christian community, you see so many people who at best it stop it at best it’s just keep following Jesus. But nobody actually deals with the root issues, right?
00:06:00:05 – 00:06:20:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. And that’s where a therapeutic process can be helpful for some people. And they’re a variety of different therapeutic tools that are out there. And, and so that that’s why that’s valid and important. Just, what are you why don’t you tell us a bit about your story? You were born into a Christian home. You’ve struggled with same sex attraction.
00:06:20:13 – 00:06:33:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You’ve you’ve journeyed in, you’ve journeyed out. And as I like to say, there are a lot of pathways into an LGBT identity. There are a lot of pathways out. So tell us your particular story.
00:06:33:04 – 00:07:00:08
Justin Greenfield
That’s right. So I would say probably the first time I had same sex attractions was about the fourth grade. And at first it wasn’t like I had no idea about sex, like how that would even function. But I, I just was attracted to people’s bodies. Right. And so that was really confusing to me. But, I kind of was like, well, maybe all guys feel this way.
00:07:00:10 – 00:07:26:12
Justin Greenfield
And, and so it’s, it’s okay. Part of me thought that and part of me thought, well, this is really awful. Like, I knew what the Bible says. But I didn’t have any, like, close guy friends to be able to ask that question. Like, hey, do you feel these things like, is this normal? So you know what you do when you have a challenging thing that the church is and talking about, and you don’t have a lot of help with as you pray.
00:07:26:12 – 00:07:52:08
Justin Greenfield
And so I would pray and pray, I, I cry myself to sleep asking that God would take these attractions away. And this is, you know, certainly as I move further and further along through through grade school, I’m realizing what it meant, having other people who would call me gay or fag, those kinds of things before I even knew what they meant.
00:07:52:10 – 00:08:28:18
Justin Greenfield
Right. And so it was devastating. There were a couple things going on in my home life previous to that. So my father wasn’t around very much when I was young. He was off in different places of the country working, and later on I found that he was, having a lot of affairs while he was gone. So, he’s had unfortunately, he’s had many, many marriage is at this point, and so it’s a common pattern with him, unfortunately, whatever is going on with him, you know, he really needs to work out his stuff with Jesus.
00:08:28:19 – 00:08:53:07
Justin Greenfield
But all he knew as a kid was, where’s dad? You know, I would see the other kids in my neighborhood with their fathers, and I would want that. And I would beg my dad to come home. And on occasions when he would come home, I would hide from him because he was oftentimes very angry and loud. There were a lot of fights between my mom and my father, not physical, which is verbal.
00:08:53:07 – 00:09:12:08
Justin Greenfield
There were many nights as a kid I remember just sitting on we had stairs and so they’d be downstairs, my room was upstairs and I would I would go down and I’d sit on the bottom part of the steps and I would just listen to them fight because I couldn’t sleep. And I, I remember one time, like yelling at them like, hey, knock it off, you know?
00:09:12:14 – 00:09:34:01
Justin Greenfield
And my mom was like, you could tell she was really sad and upset about it because I was upset and she didn’t want that. But my father was just angry. So he was just yelling at me to, you know, go back to bed and, so the you know, the anger was really this, this aspect of him that I wanted nothing to do with.
00:09:34:01 – 00:09:54:07
Justin Greenfield
Right? I felt so rejected by my father. He wasn’t there. And then he was not a savory character to me. And so I remember very clearly the vow I made as a kid when I said, I will never be like my father. And that’s a common vow that you see with a lot of people who end up with same sex attraction.
00:09:54:07 – 00:10:18:10
Justin Greenfield
Some of it’s conscious, some of it’s unconscious. But mine was conscious. I knew I knew what I said, and unfortunately, I didn’t just put up a block between my father and me, but what my father represented, which was masculinity. And of course, I didn’t realize that at the time. You know, you’re just a kid and you’re not aware of your defensive strategies, and, things get mixed up.
00:10:18:10 – 00:10:37:06
Justin Greenfield
And so I think when I saw guys doing an activity where I got, like a whiff of whatever, it was, like my father, I just would step back. I would take a step back from it and not participate. Plus, I didn’t really have the skills, the social skills to interact with the guys because I wasn’t getting that at home.
00:10:37:06 – 00:11:08:10
Justin Greenfield
I had a lot of female input from my mom because she was there and she was a Christian, right? So she tried to keep us under the wings of the church. And and she brought me to Christ. I made the decision to follow Jesus when I was five years old, and my mom wasn’t sure if that was something that a kid can actually do at five years old, but she she has told me that my behavior changed radically after that, so she felt like it was a true conversion.
00:11:08:12 – 00:11:36:00
Justin Greenfield
But unfortunately, my mom also had many issues in her life and, I had a brother who’s two years older, and we it was almost like we were we were fighting for position and it was the position was the good child. There was like the golden child and then the not so good child. And the way, like, mom always had to have a golden child because she needed somebody emotionally to connect with.
00:11:36:02 – 00:11:56:18
Justin Greenfield
And I actually realized these things as a kid at a certain point, because I was not as good at the game as my brother was, the game was not to do enough to be the good child, but if you got the other child in trouble, then you would be the good child, because there always had to be one.
00:11:56:20 – 00:12:18:21
Justin Greenfield
At a certain point I realized what was going on. I hated the game, and my brother was better at it. And so I stopped playing the game. And at that point, I officially took on the full time role of the black sheep. And my mom, she was she was verbally she would verbally attack me and then it became physical.
00:12:18:23 – 00:12:46:18
Justin Greenfield
So there are many times when and it and and it would switch. It’s, it was like sometimes she’d be like reading her Bible in the room, and then the next minute she’s over top of me, swinging her arms back and forth. And I could tell when she walked in from work. She walk into the door and I would know she was looking for a fight, and if she was in, I would go to my room and I would lock my door and I wouldn’t come out till dinner.
00:12:46:20 – 00:12:56:00
Justin Greenfield
So all of this is going on in my in my home life and in my heart, and, so, so that took a journey where, you know, eventually my mom realized.
00:12:56:00 – 00:13:17:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That part of what you’re saying is quite typical. The, the, the idea of an unattractive father or an unavailable father, that you’ve got that in spades. Sometimes the mom has too close of a relationship with the boy. And so the boy identifies with her. But that’s not exactly your pattern. But what you did have was the your brother.
00:13:17:13 – 00:13:39:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
The other possible male role model was no help. And then the other kids piling on. I want I wanted to hear you said it was about fourth grade, that you felt like, I’m attracted to boys. Something’s off here. Sometimes people will say, I always knew I was gay. Was that. Does that ring true for you? Was that part of your story?
00:13:39:12 – 00:14:05:15
Justin Greenfield
Yeah, I think that it was the same sense of the need to attach to guys. It was still that emotional sense that sort of strung through my life. It just took a little twist in fourth grade where, you know, the sexual hormones came in and they didn’t match the book that I had received that said, this is, you know, here are the puzzle pieces for the birds and the bees, how it’s supposed to work.
00:14:05:17 – 00:14:20:16
Justin Greenfield
And I wasn’t seeing that in my life. But yeah, I mean, I, I would, you know, I live that way for a little bit, and, and I just felt like that was, that was a part of me that was, that was always there. I certainly didn’t think it was developmental.
00:14:20:18 – 00:14:23:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And when did the other boys start teasing you?
00:14:23:19 – 00:14:50:14
Justin Greenfield
It’s hard to say. I think I had always been, a little bit more reserved. A little bit less, outspoken. I remember as a kid having some good guy friends in the neighborhood, but I never felt as close because I wasn’t as as good with the activities. I didn’t have a father to throw the football with or play basketball.
00:14:50:16 – 00:15:18:18
Justin Greenfield
And so I go and try to hang out with them. And I wasn’t the cool kid. I wasn’t somebody that they really like. I wasn’t picked first for, you know, for the teams at recess, I just, I didn’t fit in. So I think, I think that it was all always kind of there. And I tried to attach for a while and deal with some of the bullies because it wasn’t everybody, you know, but there were enough people.
00:15:18:18 – 00:15:25:06
Justin Greenfield
There were enough of them that were really intentional about making my life miserable.
00:15:25:08 – 00:15:38:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And you didn’t really have much solace elsewhere in your life. That’s right out of it, you know? Yeah. So so that that cumulative effect of of all of that, all those different forms of rejection.
00:15:38:11 – 00:15:38:21
Justin Greenfield
That’s right.
00:15:38:21 – 00:15:45:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s hard to develop a sense of yourself as a as a worthy guy, as one of the guys. Right? That’s right. It seems like there were a lot of.
00:15:45:21 – 00:15:46:13
Justin Greenfield
Roadblocks.
00:15:46:13 – 00:15:56:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
To that process. But you were about to say something now about, you know, taking a taking a separate turn, taking a special turn. You continue.
00:15:56:05 – 00:16:21:00
Justin Greenfield
Oh, with my mom. Yeah. So. Oh, well, physical abuse got really, really bad after my mom discovered that I was dealing with same sex attractions, I started, facing issues with images online. So I was dealing with pornography. And so she came across the internet history, and that’s when, she really became aggressive towards me. And and in scary ways.
00:16:21:02 – 00:16:43:18
Justin Greenfield
I actually ended up having to call the cops a couple times when my mom and I didn’t want to. I had, like, compassion for my mom because she, you know, she’s been through so much. She had the divorce. She’s raising two kids on her own. I just want to keep the peace. And then I reached high school and, you know, by that point, I realized the character of my mom.
00:16:43:18 – 00:17:05:07
Justin Greenfield
I wasn’t going to change her, but I just kept. I tried to keep my nose clean and get a scholarship to college and continue, to move forward. But there are a couple times when I thought she might actually cripple me or end up taking my life because I never fought back. I would put my arms up to defend myself, but I never would use the strength that I had.
00:17:05:07 – 00:17:25:14
Justin Greenfield
I was an All-American swimmer, so if I wanted to hurt my mom, like she would have been hurt. You know, she’s like this, like this tall on me, you know? So I had the strength. If I actually wanted to harm her, that she would have gotten really harmed. But she just she was so aggressive and firm, it would never move out of the way.
00:17:25:14 – 00:17:52:05
Justin Greenfield
And so is either, like, I let her hurt me really bad or I’m going to end up hurting her. And so I, I had called the cops a couple times and, so it was a it was a terrible experience, but I didn’t I didn’t want to because I was just like, let me get to college, let me get to college, let me make my A’s, let me swim fast and, and I did, and that’s where, you know, really, my life fell apart.
00:17:52:06 – 00:18:02:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So. Is similar in high school. She just you had this business with the with the pornography, and she discovered it. And the things began to accelerate.
00:18:02:16 – 00:18:20:15
Justin Greenfield
And so pornography started earlier, I think I would say probably the sixth grade. Well, that’s probably when I discovered and this was the 90s, like the internet was just coming out and, and so it was.
00:18:20:17 – 00:18:43:20
Justin Greenfield
It was harder to ingrain it into yourself than it is today, you know. Yeah. But it was out there and I saw it accessing it. I also had communicated with a couple people through. There was like a messaging system and people who struggle with homosexuality. A lot of us are really hidden in public, but it’s easier online.
00:18:43:20 – 00:19:04:09
Justin Greenfield
In these chat rooms to say things. And so there are so many people in these chat rooms who were gay. It was really surprising. And people who were, you know, kind of encouraging me that direction even as a kid. So it’s, you know, I, I do feel like there was some, some grooming involved as well.
00:19:04:11 – 00:19:24:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So, homosexual porn starting around sixth grade, increasing violence with your mom and tension in the home in high school and you looking at a, at the end game. The end game is get me out of here. Graduate from high school, go someplace good. I’ll be able to do what I want. How did that work out?
00:19:24:10 – 00:19:26:00
Justin Greenfield
Just not so great.
00:19:26:01 – 00:19:26:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Home. And what?
00:19:27:00 – 00:19:27:19
Justin Greenfield
What did you do?
00:19:27:19 – 00:19:28:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What did. What did you do?
00:19:28:20 – 00:19:44:23
Justin Greenfield
Yeah, we really worked out what happened. Well, I will say this. When. When my mom’s got abuse got so bad that I ended up calling the police. That’s when I went to God. Because I had still been trying with God and praying and going to church and going to youth group. I was there three days a week at church.
00:19:45:01 – 00:20:04:08
Justin Greenfield
Wow. But I was so closed in, you know, and I was so hurting and there was so much shame and there was so much violence at home. And I just, I was so just get me through. And at that point, when the violence got that bad and I called the cops, I said, God, I still give you permission to change me.
00:20:04:08 – 00:20:25:22
Justin Greenfield
But if I live in shame, in silence, I’m going to end up taking my own life if this other person doesn’t. And so I went from very, very introverted to very extroverted. I gained tons of friends. I went to the same school, K through 12, and it wasn’t like a like people didn’t hang out with me, but like, so sophomore year that started changing.
00:20:25:22 – 00:20:45:00
Justin Greenfield
I ended up on prom court. My my senior year. So I just turned into this person that was like vibrant and excited about life, which is like, there’s something there’s something so beautiful about that that I could finally step out. But I was like, If I’m gay, I’m gay. If I’m not, I’m not. I just got to live my life.
00:20:45:02 – 00:21:07:15
Justin Greenfield
So that culminated with me ending up in college, and it wasn’t like I just left the home life in this situation behind me. But that stuff followed me because I had become a type of person because of what I had lived through. So me trying to make it through and then I could live my life well, that’s not how it worked.
00:21:07:17 – 00:21:43:11
Justin Greenfield
I was depressed, I was anxious, I was so broken and I started drinking. I would drink to get drunk and when I got drunk, I would end up hooking up with other guys. And so that was an experience my particularly my first semester there, where God just pulled the rug out from under me. I lost my swimming because I had a recurring back injury from high school that came back, and so I ended up having to leave the swim team, which, you know, I was swimming, four hours a day.
00:21:43:11 – 00:22:06:06
Justin Greenfield
And so all of a sudden, I had this free time and really knows still no security with God or who I wanted to be. And, it was a nightmare, but there was, an experience I had at the, you know, at the end of my first semester there that, radically changed my life and demonstrated that God loved me.
00:22:06:07 – 00:22:14:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So may I ask, though your experience in college, were those your first same sex sexual acts?
00:22:15:01 – 00:22:17:19
Justin Greenfield
There were a couple in high school.
00:22:17:21 – 00:22:35:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Okay. Let’s see. But, you know, you were doing a lot. You weren’t doing a lot of acting out in high school. When you went away to college, you had the porn experience. You had the fantasies, you had that part of the process. But when you went off to college, you kind of cut loose with that.
00:22:35:06 – 00:23:00:00
Justin Greenfield
Right. Yeah. Everything kind of went out the window, and I, I grew up in the suburbs and so is mostly a conservative area. But when I went to college, I went to Johns Hopkins University, which is in, in like Baltimore semi downtown. And this is the first time you walk by churches and you see the big rainbow flags and like all this stuff, like it was completely different than the world that I had grown up in.
00:23:00:02 – 00:23:16:20
Justin Greenfield
So everybody was about it. You know, there was no need to, to hide it terribly. Although I wasn’t like super open with everybody. I sort of had my gay friends and my not gay friends. Yeah. Things changed a lot when I went to college.
00:23:16:22 – 00:23:28:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now back to this pivotal experience. But I wanted to have that comment. I wanted to be clear, you know, what that was like. So toward the end of that first semester, something dramatic happened, right?
00:23:28:04 – 00:23:53:23
Justin Greenfield
So there is a Christian on my hall and her name is Catherine, and we’re still friends. She’s she’s a very kind hearted individual. And she had been praying for me, unbeknownst to me, the whole semester that I would share with her what was going on with me. She she wasn’t going to break into a conversation about homosexuality and God, but she knew that I wanted Jesus.
00:23:53:23 – 00:24:15:07
Justin Greenfield
She knew that I had grown up that way, and it was clear that I was I was dealing with this. And so one day I’m I’m in my dorm room and all of the, the dorm rooms, they open directly to one main hallway, a coed, dorm. And so she sees me and I’m a mess. I’m just like, crying.
00:24:15:07 – 00:24:38:15
Justin Greenfield
I’m thinking about life and, like, you know, I, I wanted something different than what I was experiencing. And I could see when I would go to the clubs. I saw the 30 year old man who was like, they had one foot in the grave. They were treated differently. And and you look in their eyes and it was just hollow.
00:24:38:17 – 00:25:01:12
Justin Greenfield
And I didn’t, I didn’t I saw where the rabbit trail was going. I didn’t want that for myself. All this time, I was still sponsoring a kid through Compassion International, by the way, which is, an organization that gives, education and food and shares the gospel in third world countries. So you sponsor a kid and they get, you know, these things.
00:25:01:14 – 00:25:23:18
Justin Greenfield
And so I was like, that’s great for him. But I still didn’t know how a relationship with Jesus was supposed to work for me. So anyways, I’m breaking down. Catherine comes by and she’s like, what’s up? And I spill my got. So I say, I’m gay. I don’t want to be, you know, I, I prayed to God, I want to follow him, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that.
00:25:23:20 – 00:25:49:00
Justin Greenfield
And so she looked me in the eyes and and she said, Justin, I don’t think that God made you gay. I think that experiences that you had as a child, probably with your father, have made you think that you’re gay. Now, I was doing more than just thinking, but she said the right thing. It got me down a track of thinking, how did I become this way?
00:25:49:02 – 00:26:14:04
Justin Greenfield
And I can tell you when I was a kid, I remember very distinct times when I would pray to God to take this away. And, and I felt like either either God or my image of what I would parrot back to myself or what I think Sunday school God would say is you need to forgive your father. And I thought one thing had absolutely nothing to do with the other.
00:26:14:06 – 00:26:33:07
Justin Greenfield
And so I felt like he was putting my problems in a box over here and forget it. Like, you just be a good little churchy Christian boy. Forgive people, and we’re going to forget about this. So it was it was the same sort of idea. And then when she explained to me what was going on, I had this major breakthrough, this insight.
00:26:33:08 – 00:26:57:05
Justin Greenfield
It was like a key to unlock what was actually going on. And holy smokes, my life can be different. And I realized that God had. The bigger part of it is that I realized God had been loving me that whole time. He had been speaking to me as a kid. He really was wanting to have a relationship and bringing me out of what was really hurting.
00:26:57:05 – 00:27:10:20
Justin Greenfield
It was it was devastating to to to face the challenges that I did and not have, any solutions. So at that point is when I recommitted my life to to Christ.
00:27:10:22 – 00:27:34:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And what’s really striking is the way she framed the question. You know, she didn’t deny that you had the feelings, but she did. Do you know that God made you gay? And that’s right. So what that that opened up for you was the a path of thinking through. Why do I have these feelings? Why do I seem like I’m different, you know, and all the rest of us, and that you follow that track down.
00:27:34:13 – 00:28:02:09
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Now you’ve started off by telling us the problems with your father, so it’s clear that that’s clear in your mind. You know that this is obviously a related thing. And that that brings me to a way that the question is often framed. You know, recently I did a video, responding to Milo and his conversation with Tucker. And, and I’ve, a number of occasions I’ve made this point, you know, look, there’s the science is not there to say that people are born gay.
00:28:02:12 – 00:28:22:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
People have been looking for the gene. People have been looking for the hormones. People have been looking at an identical twins. It just that’s not what it is. It’s not. People are not born that way. And inevitably somebody will come back and say, either to my face or in the comments or something, they’ll inevitably come back and say, well, do you think I was?
00:28:22:04 – 00:28:43:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Do you think I chose this? Do you think I chose to be gay? When did you choose to be straight? You know, this is the this is the response. There’s something wrong with the way the question is being framed. Can you reframe the issue in a more helpful way than this? Either you were born this way or you chose this.
00:28:43:04 – 00:28:44:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Reframe the question for us.
00:28:44:08 – 00:29:11:12
Justin Greenfield
Yeah, that that’s that’s a wonderful question. I, I’ve always wondered about, you know, those issues growing up and then and then realizing what was going on. It was like, I don’t have two choices. There’s this third root of there’s developmental stuff. There’s actually stuff that you can resolve and the science is there. And I think that there are a number of Christians who want to be compassionate.
00:29:11:13 – 00:29:34:18
Justin Greenfield
This is I feel like the where we need to take this is we have to reach out to those who actually want to be compassionate, and they just need the science. There are people who don’t want the science. They’re there. They don’t want to listen. They’ve had a gay friend, and so they shut down everything else except it’s okay, you know, like I’m going to fight for this person.
00:29:34:23 – 00:29:57:08
Justin Greenfield
The reality is you may be fighting for something that’s actually destroying them, and it’s it. That’s what it does. But if we can bring in little insights and that you mentioned the the Tucker Carlson, Milo interview and Milo hits it on the head, he starts talking about it. The, the etiologies of where these things come from in a person’s life.
00:29:57:08 – 00:30:40:10
Justin Greenfield
The same sex attractions and the mechanisms by which you, you end up living your life. A lot of them come from defensive strategies, and they come from a lot of things that you take a look at the adverse childhood experiences that people have had. Vanderbilt University researchers put together a study of CDC, statistics over over 60,000 respondents to the CDC survey, and they found things like 21% of homosexual people, adults, grew up in a home where there was an incarcerated person versus 8% of heterosexuals, 21%.
00:30:40:12 – 00:30:56:16
Justin Greenfield
And so you look at these things that it’s like, can are these things really causes or effects, you know, and and you start realizing, holy smokes. So many of what they said are adverse childhood experiences can only be causal. It’s it’s.
00:30:56:16 – 00:30:57:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right.
00:30:57:06 – 00:30:58:02
Justin Greenfield
It’s amazing.
00:30:58:02 – 00:31:20:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes. Another piece of how to frame this issue is to say, look, there are a series of contributing factors. No, one of these contributing factors is an absolute guarantee you will be gay. That’s not how it works. It’s like a lot of personality traits and behavior traits. There’s contributing factors. Each person puts them together a little bit differently.
00:31:20:21 – 00:31:44:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But here’s the thing. If you look at the list of contributing factors, there’s not a single one of them that the individual would choose. So you didn’t choose to have a father who was a the way he was, you know, let’s not even put adjectives on it. But, you know, the absent father, the unavailable father, the unattractive father, the mother who is, mean or overbearing or smothering.
00:31:44:06 – 00:32:08:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
The, and another point we haven’t mentioned is the high percentage of childhood sexual abuse, the you know, if you look at the aces, you know, you’ve got that particular study. There are other studies and, you know, pretty much all the anybody who asked this question, you know, is there a difference between the likelihood of childhood sexual abuse between people who currently identify as LGBT versus those who do not?
00:32:09:00 – 00:32:33:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. There’s no question it’s always greater. It’s, oh, you know, there’s always a larger percentage of so-called sexual minorities who have had this experience, you know? Well, no child chooses that experience, right? So to say either either I was born this way or I chose it, that is just branded stupid. And Christians talk like that sometimes. That’s wrong.
00:32:33:01 – 00:32:52:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I can guarantee you Christians in the comments on this video, I yeah, I’ll bet you, you know, if we can’t write down ten views, there will be somebody in there saying you just chose it. Stop. You know, this type of theology comes in there. You know, it’s like, you know, come on, come on. You know, this is this it’s a different sort of thing.
00:32:52:18 – 00:33:16:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And in my mind, the born gay theory that and the amount of money that has gone into. That’s right. Going up the, agreement with born gay, born gay, born that way, born that way. You can hope that has distorted the conversation and our ability to look objectively at the facts in people’s lives, you know? So, that’s the way that’s the way I would put it.
00:33:16:10 – 00:33:26:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And the way you just put it was, was also helpful. And I want I want to give you back the floor, you know, but I couldn’t control myself. I had I had to,
00:33:26:18 – 00:33:46:02
Justin Greenfield
We all get on our soapboxes. And it’s because we care. We we actually believe that the church can be different. We actually believe that people can be helped by by the facts. You know, this isn’t some I’m going to, like, take you in here and I’m going to beat you with the Bible, or I’m going to do some strange spiritual thing on you.
00:33:46:04 – 00:34:14:16
Justin Greenfield
Let’s talk about facts and and right, let’s, let’s, let’s do normal. Either therapeutic techniques or I, I did end up going to therapy as a student at, I went to the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Baylor University, and so I was required to get therapy, but I didn’t really deal with homosexuality. I mean, sort of because you’re you’re like, dealing with root issues because that’s what you went through as a kid.
00:34:14:16 – 00:34:32:20
Justin Greenfield
Like it’s all it plays into it. So I dealt with mom issues at that point, but it was it was because I needed healing, you know? So it wasn’t like, I want to, you know, I want to be not gay. So, you know, do your thing. It was like, no, I’ve got this stuff and I want to work on it.
00:34:33:00 – 00:34:56:12
Justin Greenfield
My healing started number one by forgiving my father. Number two, by stopping holding men to low social expectations, getting in relationships with men, other guys my age who did not face same sex attractions to realize I wasn’t so different. For them to embrace me and love me and give me hugs. And then I was a part of a group called Overcoming Obstacles.
00:34:56:14 – 00:35:41:18
Justin Greenfield
And it wasn’t just for those who face same sex attraction, it’s actually, curriculum from a place in, it’s called Dunklin Memorial. It’s in the center of Florida, and they deal with alcoholism mostly, but there are people, students who had all these different sort of issues in life, and we came together and we would overcome obstacles. And so we dealt with the underlying issues without me having to say necessarily, hey, you know, like, like the gay thing is what I want to deal with, but I could pick out certain aspects of it where somebody else’s story might have a little bit thing here where they talk about, oh, that is a wound I
00:35:41:18 – 00:36:06:09
Justin Greenfield
probably have. Maybe I should check that out. That’s what it did for me. And then it gave me roots to deal with and renounce lies, renounce vows, these kinds of things. So it wasn’t necessarily I mean, gay advocates would still call that conversion therapy, even though it wasn’t therapy. It was just a ministry dealing with stuff. Yeah.
00:36:06:11 – 00:36:33:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are a couple of points about what you’re saying here. I’m aware of several ministries that deal with with stuff. Right. And what they find is that the people who come in with same sex attraction and the people who come in with pornography addiction, and the people who come in with sex addiction, the same set of methods is, broadly speaking, the same methods are helpful for all of those things, because they’re the similar set of underlying issues that need to be addressed.
00:36:33:19 – 00:36:52:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And I’ve also heard from people, and maybe this is part of your experience, too. Justin, I want to hear about this part of it. But, several different people and I’m thinking the people I’m thinking of happened to all be women, but I don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s dispositive. You know, they would say, I’ve been trying this so long.
00:36:52:04 – 00:37:13:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Oh, I’ve been dealing with this so long. Jesus, you you know, Jesus, I guess you’re not going to take this feeling away from me, but. But I want to follow you. I want to follow you. So I’m going to follow you and we’ll see what happens with this other stuff, you know, so that’s that’s they released the other stuff in a different way.
00:37:14:03 – 00:37:43:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Then you ended up releasing it. Right? And then ultimately they did come back around full circle and deal with whatever the thing was that had to be dealt with. Parents, divorce, parents, alcoholism, you know, whatever the particulars might have been, you know, or childhood sexual abuse and that kind of stuff, whatever the particulars were, they they circuit, you know, I feel like it’s like you’re you’re going around a drain, you know, and, and you, you go around the same issues and you get part of it, and then you get to another part, you go around again and you.
00:37:43:03 – 00:37:47:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, a little deeper. And that’s right. You know, you yeah. You don’t come.
00:37:47:04 – 00:37:51:23
Justin Greenfield
You hit it from a different angle. It’s it’s you know. Yeah.
00:37:52:01 – 00:38:12:22
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. It’s it’s not the sort of thing that you quote unquote cure. So, so even you know, you talk about healing but, but you don’t want to think of it like, okay, I had cancer, I removed a tumor and now I’m cured. It’s not that kind of thing, you know? And I think the more that we can help people tune in to the kind of thing it is, yeah.
00:38:12:23 – 00:38:32:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
The more likely they are to be successful at dealing with it. Tell us about the part where you forgave your father, Justin, if you don’t mind, because this is something, of course, I’ve heard from other, you know, other people in situations like yours, it doesn’t always come at the beginning. Often it’s the very last thing, the last shoe to drop kind of thing.
00:38:32:16 – 00:38:36:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What was that like for you? Because that’s so important.
00:38:36:02 – 00:39:05:07
Justin Greenfield
Yeah. That’s it. That’s a good question. You know, I, I think that I, I didn’t necessarily know all of what forgiveness was and, and what it was and, but at the very least, I, I knew that that didn’t mean that I had to expose myself to an individual that was going to hurt me. That didn’t mean that I needed to try to make that relationship work, necessarily.
00:39:05:09 – 00:39:12:21
Justin Greenfield
But it meant that I released him from the debt that he owed me and so.
00:39:12:21 – 00:39:21:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
000. Whoa whoa, whoa. Don’t say any more. Let’s pause on that. Say that again. That’s really.
00:39:21:06 – 00:39:47:08
Justin Greenfield
I released him from the debt that he owed me. So is the past, where he had done things to me that really hurt me. It was the debt that I was canceling for him. And as as much as I wanted to get that back, it wasn’t coming from him. And I could never get my childhood back, per se.
00:39:47:09 – 00:40:10:06
Justin Greenfield
I could change, I could heal, but it was preventing my healing. You know, God showed me the wall that I had put up, and it wasn’t going away. Unless I let him go. And so I think a lot of it was, was mercenary. I had to forgive him in order to get what I wanted. But I also it was about following Jesus.
00:40:10:06 – 00:40:31:09
Justin Greenfield
He told me to do it. So I’m going to do this thing and that, you know, as I’ve grown in understanding scripture, he’s like, if you want forgiveness yourself, then you need to be willing to forgive others. You need to cancel their debts. And so, so learning more Scripture and everything, I, I learned that what I did was you know, kind of the way that you do it.
00:40:31:11 – 00:41:06:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer. You know, there are seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, and one of them is, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Right? I mean, it’s pretty basic. Christianity 101 one of the things that makes Christianity so different from other, philosophies of life or. That’s right. And so on, you know, you know, and one thing that I’m hearing from you, that I’ve heard from others who have left pride behind, just and I’m hearing you have some peace with this.
00:41:06:10 – 00:41:15:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You have some peace in your life. I want you I want you to articulate that if you could, because this is what people don’t even know. This is possible.
00:41:15:21 – 00:41:16:13
Justin Greenfield
That’s right.
00:41:16:15 – 00:41:17:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Tell us about.
00:41:17:07 – 00:41:59:16
Justin Greenfield
That. That’s right. That’s really wonderful that you you know that. And you get that because people think, oh, well, this is all about people getting married and becoming straight. But, but you don’t like, why are you pressuring people to do that? And I’m like, no, it doesn’t matter whether I want to be married or be celibate. Neither one of those is an excuse to not deal with your stuff that’s preventing you from, really holding your identity in Christ, stopping, preventing the risk factors involved for you to end up in unattractive hell and, and doing things that are harmful to yourself and others and to be able to love God and other other
00:41:59:16 – 00:42:02:15
Justin Greenfield
people. Well.
00:42:02:17 – 00:42:24:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Hey, a quick shout out to our sponsor Real Estate for life, dawg. This is the most pro-life, pro-family way to buy or sell a home. Go to Real Estate for life.org. You’ll be connected with a Christian realtor. Part of their commission will go to the pro-family charity of your choice, the Roots Institute, for example, and it costs you nothing at all.
00:42:24:20 – 00:42:31:07
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s the most pro-life, pro-family way to buy or sell a home. Go to real estate for life, dawg.
00:42:31:09 – 00:42:57:15
Justin Greenfield
Yeah, so? So I have not ended up in a marriage. I’m still celibate and but I’ve dealt with a lot of my stuff. And so my character has changed. And then the other thing is, people don’t realize this. Like you said, I am so much more comfortable in my own skin. You know, I didn’t need the Bible to tell me that something was off with homosexuality.
00:42:57:20 – 00:43:27:12
Justin Greenfield
Creation told me that it wasn’t because the Bible, you know, because the Bible tells me so, is because creation tells me so. Every time I stepped out of the shower, I knew that this I this is not how this is supposed to go. And and owning my own self, but being able to embrace the masculinity that God has given me even while not doing sex in a marriage, that’s not it.
00:43:27:12 – 00:43:52:20
Justin Greenfield
It’s it’s about being whole in myself, feeling good in your own skin. Nobody can put a price on that. And people don’t realize, like people in the gay life, they think, you know, you be you. Like I’m being myself. You have no idea. The peace in the transforming of power, power of Jesus to bring you that peace. But it takes a process.
00:43:53:01 – 00:44:23:12
Justin Greenfield
It takes suffering. It takes sanctification is not easy. I there’s a statue out there that somebody made, and it’s the process of sanctification in the person. It’s like their skin is peeling off. It’s it’s the old man is coming off right. You know, it’s so painful. But it I, I would do it 100 times out of 100 for me to feel good in my own skin the way that I do today.
00:44:23:13 – 00:44:43:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Do you know, I don’t know if you know Linda Siler, but, she, she’s she’s did her dissertation on people who had successfully journeyed away, and she was looking for people, I think she had like 30 people, 30 men, 30 women, something like that. And they had been they had been healed for ten years or more, I think was her criteria.
00:44:44:01 – 00:45:07:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And one of the things that literally every single one of them said was you have to face the pain one way or another. They all had to face the pain. Whatever was for them. That was the process that they had to go through in order to in order to have some peace. Okay. And the peace and the, the, the sexuality, those things moved around together.
00:45:07:23 – 00:45:26:11
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, that’s another thing I’ve heard. And it’s I’m getting the vibe that you would say the same thing for a lot of people. They don’t go in and say, I want to be straight. Well, they do that at first. I don’t want to be straight, but but in the end, what happens is they deal with the stuff I think Doctor Nicholas, you, for example, would agree with this.
00:45:26:11 – 00:45:44:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I think a lot of the therapist would, would would agree with this. I will help you deal with your unwanted same sex attraction, but we don’t deal with it by zeroing in and staring at that thing. That’s right. Do we deal with it by addressing the underlying contributing factors that may have been operative and help you process those things in that case?
00:45:44:08 – 00:45:47:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That’s right. That’s the yeah, that yeah.
00:45:47:08 – 00:46:36:14
Justin Greenfield
I mean, Nicholas, he says that it’s it’s a real threat to militant homosexuals, that people’s attractions can spontaneously change without any ideology at all. By dealing with the root issues. Now, I would say that there’s for for me, I’ve seen that there is some reframing that I’ve needed to do. For instance, when I was a kid, I had codependent relationships with females in high school, and as an adult, learning how relationships are supposed to go with women, the things that I was participating with in their soul, emotionally, there is only one place where some of that, not all of it, because there were, you know, codependency can go beyond.
00:46:36:14 – 00:46:59:09
Justin Greenfield
But it was there were places emotionally that I went with a woman and I liked it. And, and so reframing that from just, oh, that’s like, you know, that’s a thing you do with, oh, you like your girlfriend, you know, you do it with actual girlfriend, you know, like that’s the place you do it in actual marriage.
00:46:59:09 – 00:47:37:14
Justin Greenfield
You have those emotional connections really deep with women. And so part of it has been a reframing, but part of it has been this been spontaneous. Oh my goodness. I don’t need sex with a dude I really like. I love being friends with dudes. You know I right? Right. I’m not. Even if it’s just a a reduction from, you know, hey, I need to go to the club and do some stuff afterwards to it’s so good for me to like go to a sporting event or go to church in a men’s group and then come home.
00:47:37:14 – 00:48:03:11
Justin Greenfield
And I’ve had my fill of of of man love, you know, that’s a, that’s a huge a change in attractions. Even if you can’t say, well, now I have, you know, raging attractions towards women, heterosexual people all the time need help from therapists to work through physical things that can come up in a relationship, sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex.
00:48:03:12 – 00:48:25:10
Justin Greenfield
And so I’m not saying that that always happens for people facing same sex attractions, but why do we give the right to some people, but not to others who, you know, like my mom? A woman’s physical body meant pain and suffering, and it was scary, you know, and so I there’s there’s a lot to there. There’s a lot that goes with it.
00:48:25:12 – 00:48:52:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. There’s, there’s so many distortions that a person can get into. Especially in our sex saturated culture, you know, we have this whole ideology around sexual activity and sexual feelings and stuff like that. And most of it is extremely misleading. You know, it’s not it’s not guiding you towards lifelong married love that grows over time. And it’s and is truly self-giving, you know, and truly receptive to the other person.
00:48:52:13 – 00:49:17:02
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so on. Very little of our modern culture is steering you in that direction. And so what we have are some impulses that are those that are wholesome impulses, but they’re misdirected or they’re distorted or all that kind of thing, and everybody’s got this kind of stuff to deal with, you know? So, yeah, I like it that we’re coming to the conclusion that gay men are not so stinking special in their problems.
00:49:17:07 – 00:49:19:12
Justin Greenfield
That’s right, that’s right.
00:49:19:15 – 00:49:27:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I mean, and women, we are not so stinking special in our problems. We’re just that this is a human thing. That’s right. You know?
00:49:27:14 – 00:49:54:15
Justin Greenfield
Yeah. I mean, I have a therapist, too. Who? He says, you know, I don’t see him personally, but he’s a friend. He’s a professor. And he’s like the whole, like, homosexuality thing. It’s it’s like the same stuff. He’s like, yeah, it’s a bit trickier. Maybe it’s a bit stickier, but it’s the same stuff. You know, you you work your process, you keep working through, like you said, you know, sometimes I hit you in a different way and but you get sanctified.
00:49:54:15 – 00:50:12:00
Justin Greenfield
You become like Jesus to to work through it. It it’s just so different than the concept out there of, of what it takes to be human that we’re we’re so different. It’s the same stuff.
00:50:12:02 – 00:50:28:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, did you you had this, experience in your college program that was a it sounds like a peer support group type of type of setting. Did you ever go to licensed therapist for therapy counseling per se?
00:50:28:20 – 00:50:48:16
Justin Greenfield
I did in graduate school. We were required to do it as part of, spiritual formation. And so we personally were dealing with, hey, what happened in your life by the time you were ten years old? Because we wanted to see you were formed because a lot of those things are I mean, there’s so much that can be unconscious, unconscious beliefs.
00:50:48:16 – 00:51:10:02
Justin Greenfield
Right? But there is so much from the way that you’re formed initially that you carry throughout your life. And you need to look at your foundation. And so that was a part of, working through our stuff and becoming like, Jesus, I wasn’t told to do it because I suffer with same sex attractions. I was told to do it because everybody needed it.
00:51:10:04 – 00:51:31:11
Justin Greenfield
And we also learned a part of the program was, you know, if we see something in individual and they present with, a psychological issue that we think that a therapist can actually help with, that’s something that we want to be able to point in a therapist direction. And so I think part of it was getting comfortable with the way that therapists work.
00:51:31:13 – 00:51:38:12
Justin Greenfield
And all of that. But that was I think I had to do that for two years, go to go to therapy.
00:51:38:18 – 00:52:00:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so, so the reason I frequently ask this type of question is that in your particular case, the therapy that you went to was not particularly gay conversion therapy, nor was it particularly gay affirming therapy. Because as you can imagine, in the group of people that I’ve been interviewing, they’re all over the place with that question. Right.
00:52:00:14 – 00:52:05:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, some of them have, there’s just a variety of experiences I have.
00:52:05:05 – 00:52:27:23
Justin Greenfield
That I had to be careful when I found the therapist. I wanted a therapist because I was probably going to talk about that. I’m just going to talk about my life with you. So it’s going to come up that I face same sex attractions. What’s your perspective on that? Because I because typically, whether they say it or not, they’re not interested in what the client’s goals are.
00:52:27:23 – 00:52:45:04
Justin Greenfield
If they’re pro-gay, they they want you to go a certain direction. And so I’m like, I’m not going to sit with somebody who’s going to tell me that I just need to get rid of anxiety. I’m doing this. So I was very clear. What’s your position on homosexuality? You understand that I’m coming in to deal with it this way.
00:52:45:04 – 00:53:07:08
Justin Greenfield
And so I found a Christian therapist who was a huge blessing for me, took away so much of my mom issues where I just didn’t need my mom to be. Well, I didn’t need her to respond to me a certain way. You know, I if she sees herself, she can do her thing. I don’t need to fix her.
00:53:07:10 – 00:53:29:07
Justin Greenfield
And and I can choose based upon her behavior, how much I want to engage with that. And I’m okay with that. I mean, it still hurts, right? But I had processed a lot of the extra part of that where I needed her to be there to fix what she did in the childhood, whatever it might have been. And so that was helpful in the process of forgiving her.
00:53:29:07 – 00:53:33:21
Justin Greenfield
I mean, forgiveness is another thing that can hit you in a different way where you’re like.
00:53:33:23 – 00:53:34:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes.
00:53:34:18 – 00:53:36:06
Justin Greenfield
Yeah.
00:53:36:08 – 00:53:37:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes.
00:53:37:01 – 00:53:45:22
Justin Greenfield
Where you you’re like, oh, I need to actually forgive her for this type of thing. Whereas before I was more general I forgive you.
00:53:46:00 – 00:53:51:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And like you said about your dad and I released the debt that she owed me.
00:53:51:09 – 00:53:52:15
Justin Greenfield
That’s right.
00:53:52:17 – 00:54:18:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That idea that she owed me and that I wasn’t going to get well until she paid, you know, kind of thing. One thing I what I’d like to go back to that you said though because I’d like to give people some encouragement and, reinforcement for one of the points that you made, that it is okay for you to interview your therapist and ask them what their perspective is on the unmet needs that are important to you.
00:54:18:20 – 00:54:26:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So would you go back and kind of kind of say that again, develop that a little bit more, because I imagine there are people who are interested in. Sure.
00:54:26:00 – 00:54:52:07
Justin Greenfield
So so first of all, the Institute for Spiritual Formation, they had a list of therapists and so I had to go to one of those therapists. Supposedly I went to one and I didn’t really feel it. I didn’t really feel like God wanted me there. And also when you go to therapy, sometimes if you have same sex attractions, it’s really useful to go to somebody, a therapist of the same gender.
00:54:52:09 – 00:55:17:10
Justin Greenfield
But God just kept telling me to go to see this woman, and I was like, God, that doesn’t make any sense. I’m supposed to be dealing with, you know, whatever same sex issues at this time or. But he brought me to this woman and we really connected. And and part of that was I began the conversation and said, hey, this is this is a part of my background.
00:55:17:10 – 00:55:43:06
Justin Greenfield
Is homosexuality I facing sex attractions? Where are you at with that? And she was honest with me, actually. Now that I think of it, because I haven’t thought of it for a while, but she, I think she had been to conferences and did her own work because she had suffered with lesbianism. At a certain point, you never would have guessed meeting this woman, you never would have guessed.
00:55:43:06 – 00:56:08:18
Justin Greenfield
Which is right now I’m like, oh yeah, you know, because she was just like mom to me, you know, like she was just like a good sort of mom figure and and the, the air of, just like a loving mother presence. And she wasn’t caught up in her stuff. She didn’t need that connection. You know, it’s just very clear that she had embraced her own femininity.
00:56:08:20 – 00:56:29:05
Justin Greenfield
But, yeah, I had asked her, and and she was on the same page, and it and it worked out really well. You know, you can you can ask your therapist, you know, to try to get educated on things, but at the very least, know that they’re not going to push you in a direction that you don’t want to go.
00:56:29:07 – 00:56:51:07
Justin Greenfield
And I do think that it’s important to, like, science is really good if they can hold on to it or if they’re a Christian and they’re not, like in the pro-gay vein, even if they’re, they don’t know a ton, at least they’re not pushing you in that direction. And so I, I, you know, I wanted to get clarity on that.
00:56:51:07 – 00:56:56:14
Justin Greenfield
And she gave me a good answer. And so I was like, all right, let’s go.
00:56:56:16 – 00:57:17:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so this brings us back to, to something that we talked about at the very beginning when we were talking about, stop at theology. You know, sometimes people within the church, will say, well, what does what does it matter? What does it matter where it came from? Homosexuality is a sin. Why does it matter why he’s doing this or what caused it?
00:57:18:01 – 00:57:21:14
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It’s still a sin. How do you respond to that?
00:57:21:16 – 00:57:47:15
Justin Greenfield
Absolutely. They. You are so right that it’s a sin. Yes, but the question those are there are two very different questions that we’re dealing with. Is it a sin versus, you know, for them, how do I care for somebody who’s facing same sex attractions? And and then for the person who’s facing it, how do I deal with those same sex attractions?
00:57:47:15 – 00:58:12:03
Justin Greenfield
There’s something that, Richard Loveless was the first to describe as the sanctification gap. It’s how do I go from today as, you know, hypocenter to like sinner saying, like, at least we can do better, you know, at least, you know, like, we’re not going to arrive in this world, but what’s the trajectory to get from here to here?
00:58:12:03 – 00:58:46:18
Justin Greenfield
And and that line is missing. We know we’re supposed to where we are today and where we’re supposed to go, but stop it. Theology is where people land, where they can’t give you the information, the steps, the tools, the wisdom, the disciplines to arrive at that destination. And so that’s what I begin to talk to people about is, you know, hey, would you say the same thing to somebody who is an alcoholic or who has anorexia or has any other, life controlling sin issue?
00:58:46:19 – 00:59:12:01
Justin Greenfield
The the perspective that I can just say it’s a sin, but not know how to care for people has all been a part of sort of a backlash to society, saying, it’s okay, you’re good to go there. And so they get lost in the political conversation and we lose what we normally do when we consider other issues. Oh yeah, you need to go through a 12 step program.
00:59:12:01 – 00:59:30:21
Justin Greenfield
Oh yeah. You you need to sit with a counselor and talk about the underlying. Of course, you know, but cold turkey, does it work for those who have severe issues with an addiction or, you know, just. Right, you know, stop it. It doesn’t work that way.
00:59:30:23 – 01:00:10:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right? Right. And I do feel like there are some theological perspectives that are more inclined to make that particular error. You know, that particular type of error. And within the broadly speaking, Protestant world, you’re going to come across, you know, a whole range of, of perspectives on that type of thing. And, you know, how are you supposed to do sanctification and how much help are you and, you know, all of that kind of stuff and on the Catholic side of things, we have a we have a somewhat different approach, but the but the idea of, of of of growth and holiness is deeply embedded within the Catholic tradition.
01:00:10:23 – 01:00:32:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know, you can go you can be confessing the same sin week after week, and nobody thinks there’s anything weird about that. And I was like, okay, that’s like pretty normal, actually. That’s why we’re here every day hearing confessions, because we know, you know, that this is going to come up and, and that some of the sins are bigger and more serious and, you know, and and so on and so forth.
01:00:32:15 – 01:00:55:12
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But still the, the understanding it’s not one and done. It’s not once saved, always saved. You know, there’s a there’s a bunch of stuff out there that’s, that’s really, you know, not only is it not biblical, but it’s just not helpful. You know, it’s not it’s not a helpful perspective on on the human condition, you know, on the sinful human condition and how we overcome it and stuff.
01:00:55:14 – 01:01:07:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So that’s, that’s another that’s another little part of the equation. I just put that out there because we have followers from across the religious spectrum, and some people will tune right in and go, oh yeah, I know what she’s talking about.
01:01:07:06 – 01:01:29:02
Justin Greenfield
Yes. So there’s a guy named Cy Rogers. I don’t know if you heard of him, but he he, he’s he is hilarious. And he would speak about sexual issues in general. And he actually was transgender until God found him and he and he was about to have the surgery at Johns Hopkins. And this was like the 80s, 70s, 80s.
01:01:29:04 – 01:01:45:14
Justin Greenfield
And he was like, God, if this is you, then you need to stop me from doing this. Johns Hopkins University shut down their entire transgender program at that point, and he was like, I guess that’s you. So he’s he’s hilarious, but he’s so.
01:01:45:17 – 01:01:58:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And he’s here and here and and and listen to me. Listen to me here. We thought it was Paul McHugh who shut down that program. Little did we know that it was Sy Rogers. And is. There you go, Angel. Doing something with God. Okay.
01:01:58:12 – 01:01:59:09
Justin Greenfield
There you go.
01:01:59:11 – 01:02:04:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Give it up for doctor the whole time. Sorry. Haha.
01:02:04:17 – 01:02:05:08
Justin Greenfield
That’s right.
01:02:05:08 – 01:02:06:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
There is. That is hilarious.
01:02:06:23 – 01:02:33:00
Justin Greenfield
So he will say, God, when you come to Jesus, he takes away your guilt, but not your memory, your, history and your humanity. Those are things you actually have to work through with him. And so there, there, there, these parts that I feel like, a lot of Protestants get right. But sanctification is something that we need more of.
01:02:33:00 – 01:03:02:09
Justin Greenfield
And I think the church has picked up, more of as we’ve talked about, spiritual formation, which has a ton of Catholic roots. And so in my, in my studies, you know, we study, Saint John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, these things that, you know, these people who talked about what it was like to transition through a process of of holiness, you know, the painful, painful process, and, and and becoming like Jesus.
01:03:02:09 – 01:03:30:21
Justin Greenfield
And I love what you said. Sometimes you can face that same sin and go and confess it week after week, but it’s not the same as the person who’s never dealing with their stuff and doing it. But if you’re dealing with your stuff, sometimes it actually gets worse before it gets better. Sometimes the suffering actually gets worse. Sometimes behaviors can actually get worse because you’re thinking about it so much, you know?
01:03:30:21 – 01:03:56:12
Justin Greenfield
And, and and so there’s a process of becoming okay with facing it and, and and processing. And then you’re like reliving a wound or something. And it doesn’t hit right to heal right away. And then all of a sudden you’re anxious and depressed and whatever, but you go through it and, and you, you move forward in sanctification. And that that’s the process, right?
01:03:56:14 – 01:04:21:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yes. Yes. And and your feelings are not the guide. This this is a very important point in the modern world, okay? You’re not always going to feel it. The Catholic sacramental system is is instructive in this regard because we believe that’s working. Even if you don’t feel anything, you know, you know, our Pentecostal brothers, I love them, you know, because they’re all about all the feeling that everything and, you know, I, I they’re very endearing.
01:04:21:00 – 01:04:24:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Right. But.
01:04:24:05 – 01:04:42:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
The sacraments are at work even when you don’t feel anything. And yet that’s a consolation to be aware of that. You know, that it’s not about how you feel and you don’t and you don’t chase your feelings. We’re we’re very tempted to chase the feelings and that that’s a big mistake to chase our feelings. Yeah. There was so.
01:04:42:16 – 01:05:05:10
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Oh, I know what I wanted to say. You you said you were quoting this fellow. Sigh. Rogers, I think. And you said, you know, Jesus can can forgive your sins and take away your sins, but he doesn’t take away your memories and the consequences. This is going to be me now talking. He doesn’t take away your habits, your memories, your, your grudges.
01:05:05:12 – 01:05:25:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You know? You know, he doesn’t take away the right stuff. The consequences, the natural consequences, let’s put it that way. He could take away the supernatural. That’s right. This is of your sins. But he cannot take away all the natural consequences. You’re still going to have to deal with it if you made a mess of your family, that’s not going to heal overnight.
01:05:25:03 – 01:05:46:03
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
You got to do something about it, you know? And and so you need some, some consolation for that journey. You need you need to kind of, be prepared to stay the course through that and not give up. You know, not throw in the towel because, well, I’m tempted again or my wife’s still mad at me, or, you know what?
01:05:46:04 – 01:06:06:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
What whatever those problems are, you know, and I think that is a place too, where the Catholic understanding of original sin, part of it is part of is is is that because of original sin, you are permanently weakened. You know, original sin weakens the will, distorts your memories. You know, clouds the intellect. Those are the big three.
01:06:06:05 – 01:06:27:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That, that that they talk about, you know, and so even though you’re forgiven for your sins, that stuff is still going on and you have to work on it and progress in virtue has to do with progress in those areas, really, you know, and Jesus can kick. He can heal it all overnight. He can. But you have no right to expect that.
01:06:27:21 – 01:06:44:00
Justin Greenfield
That’s right. And I I’ve seen I’ve seen stories, you know, of people who got delivered from same sex attractions, like gone. And I’m like, Lord, like, can we can I do that one too? Know? Like, this thing is painful. I don’t want to do it.
01:06:44:00 – 01:06:44:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah.
01:06:44:18 – 01:07:13:12
Justin Greenfield
Yeah. And the other thing it was when you were talking about, When you were talking about, us, us needing to actually deal with the consequences of our behavior, the way that it’s affected the relationships around us. I was actually serving with Andy Kaminski one time, and I was on the prayer team, and he said, we want you guys to come up here and and we’re going to pray for you, and we want you to leave this stuff here.
01:07:13:14 – 01:07:35:03
Justin Greenfield
Well, he wasn’t talking about everything. Like, you still have to deal with that stuff. And I had this guy come up to me and I, I had this feeling that he picked me out because I was the youngest person there. And he didn’t. He thought that he could get away with this, but he said, I’m having an A, he’s a pastor in the pastor conference or a priest or pastor.
01:07:35:03 – 01:08:00:13
Justin Greenfield
I think it was pastor at the time. He was I don’t think he had converted to Catholicism. I think it was still, more of a vineyard guy, which is a Protestant denomination. But the guy came up and told me he was having an affair with his secretary, and I’m like, I’m, we’re going to pray for you and God will forgive you, but you’re still going to need to go back home and talk to your wife about this.
01:08:00:13 – 01:08:22:04
Justin Greenfield
You’re still going to need to work this stuff out. And he gave me the dirtiest look because it’s it’s like Andy said it, so it must be this way. But I know if Andy was standing there, he would say, that is not what I meant. You still got a different relational stuff that happened because you acted that way.
01:08:22:09 – 01:08:37:05
Justin Greenfield
God can take away your guilt in an instant, but you still have to deal with the stuff that you’ve created and and hurt people. And in our part of you, it’s a part of a pattern of behavior that now you have to face.
01:08:37:07 – 01:08:56:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. That’s right, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Now, do you know the the first thing that I learned about you, Justin, was an article that our mutual friend Brandon Showalter sent to me, and this is an article that you wrote for the Christian Post. And it was very, I think Brandon liked it because it was in your face.
01:08:56:00 – 01:09:16:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
It was a very I would call it a very in your face, no nonsense type of an article. And it was about the connection with, childhood sexual abuse. That’s right. And, and the origins of, of some of these issues that we’re talking about. Walk people through your article, if you don’t mind.
01:09:16:07 – 01:09:40:06
Justin Greenfield
Well, we went through a couple different versions of it. So first, the first verse and he was like, this is the the editors were like, this is they were like, we learned so much, but this is really academic. They were like, you need to make it less dense. And so that’s when you learn that you’ve had way too much education and cram way too much facts and, and you gotta help people understand.
01:09:40:06 – 01:10:06:18
Justin Greenfield
Right. But but then we went through a second one where they like, I just came out with that like a meet. So the title of that was, you’re a child molesters accomplice. If you support quote unquote, so-called conversion therapy bans. Here’s why. So it’s a little bit people feel it’s inflammatory. This is true. And you really need to know what you’re doing because there are consequences.
01:10:07:00 – 01:10:27:16
Justin Greenfield
And God’s going to hold you accountable to what you’re doing. I mean, it’s it’s unbelievable the steps that people take in the consequences. And they don’t even think about these things. So I talked about how the second verse and I came right out with, you know, this is what happened, child molestation, they were like, that’s like right out the gate.
01:10:27:16 – 01:10:48:13
Justin Greenfield
Like you just need to slow it down a little bit. So we buried the lead. We put it later in the article, but the the issue that I’m addressing is the fact that when you get molested by a person of the same sex, a child does, oftentimes there’s not just horror, there’s actually pleasure. There’s not just I hate this.
01:10:48:17 – 01:11:23:20
Justin Greenfield
There’s also I really like this. And that is something that there’s an FBI profile. His name is Lanning. And it’s these pedophiles. Oftentimes they pick out these children for a reason. They groom certain children who already are having clearly relational needs. And so one of the ways that you protect your children from this is get them to a place where they are more likely to say no because they’re getting those love needs met at home by the same sex in the right ways.
01:11:24:00 – 01:11:44:16
Justin Greenfield
You’re less likely to go out there and accept it from somebody giving it to you in the wrong ways. And so the child who engages in that, part of it could be that, oh, I thought I wanted that Milo talks about this where he had the one guy who was awful, and then he he found a guy who seemed more benevolent.
01:11:44:16 – 01:12:10:12
Justin Greenfield
And the way they were interacting. And, and so there’s I participated with that, you know, I made that as a kid. I made that choice, so obviously I’m gay, right? Like, that came from within me. Or they had a physical response. A boy who gets an erection, you know, and they they don’t. They end up not sharing because they’re afraid that somebody is going to say that they’re gay.
01:12:10:18 – 01:12:33:07
Justin Greenfield
And we live in a society that says the exact same thing. If you are attracted to people of the same sex, if you enjoy that, then there’s you’re gay, you’re just gay. You just need to accept it, embrace it. Stop listening to those Christian or religious morons who just want to, you know, make you who they want to make you to be.
01:12:33:07 – 01:13:00:02
Justin Greenfield
And and it’s just not true. Those things come from, experiences oftentimes of sexual ones. Now I’m attached to the male figure and the male privates and those kinds of things. That, the, the visual of a man actually becomes a portal of pleasure in your soul because that’s the reference in your soul, your brain doesn’t care where that pleasure came from.
01:13:00:02 – 01:13:31:04
Justin Greenfield
It just says, get me more of that, whatever that was. And, and so if we’re saying, child, you really, don’t have the right to go and talk to somebody about this, like, sit down in a chair, talk about what happened, and then give them the freedom to make their own sexual choices. It doesn’t matter if if it’s the day when this abuse happened or 40 years later that we tell them because you feel that way, you’re gay, you must stay that way.
01:13:31:06 – 01:13:47:01
Justin Greenfield
There’s no doubt it locks children into that abuse lifelong and there’s no hope. And that’s that’s what people add on top of the initial abuse. They become accomplices to that work.
01:13:47:03 – 01:14:14:16
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. And if you tell people that that gay is something in born, then that in a sense lessens the accountability of the of the original, predator. That’s right. Right. Because and that’s right. Honestly, there’s, there’s this one, long article that I read, in preparation for our amicus brief, father Sullins and I here at the Ruth Institute, we wrote an amicus brief in the Charles versus Salazar case.
01:14:14:16 – 01:14:41:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And so we already had done a lot of research, but we had to do even more, you know, so I read this one document from 2016, which is a semi official document of the American Psychological Association. And they went through the various theories of why people become gay and dismissed everything. You know, I mean, basically they they know it’s not inborn, but they didn’t really have an alternative theory that was really, you know, that that they were going to say, yeah, this is it.
01:14:41:20 – 01:15:08:17
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
But but in the course of it, they showed that they’re aware of the higher likelihood or the higher correlation of child abuse with same sex attraction, sexual minority status, however you want to describe I mean, they they know they know that’s there. And so they, they said they the there’s a theory that the reason people become gay is because of recruitment.
01:15:08:19 – 01:15:31:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
They called this the recruitment theory. Okay. And the first red light that went off in my mind is you. You just redefined the theory in the in the least savory way. This is you created a strawman, out of the argument by saying people become gay because somebody recruits them to be gay. That’s not exactly what you’re saying.
01:15:31:18 – 01:15:45:20
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That’s not exactly what I’m saying. We’re saying that this experience has consequences. Right? Were there any other independent of the motives of the person who molested them? That’s. Yeah, the issue. Right? Yeah. The issue is what’s the impact on the trial.
01:15:45:22 – 01:15:50:08
Justin Greenfield
Yeah. What’s happening in the child’s heart is what we’re talking about.
01:15:50:10 – 01:16:12:15
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
That’s right. It’s doing something. It’s doing some to something to the psyche. You would think the American Psychological Association might have some interest in that. But anyway, one of the the theories that they floated in and kind of left standing there was, well, it could be the children who are already gay are more vulnerable to being predated, you know.
01:16:12:20 – 01:16:19:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And I looked at that and I said, that’s sick. I mean, that’s so wrong.
01:16:19:01 – 01:16:35:09
Justin Greenfield
That’s where you have to go. That’s that’s what you’re left with. When the science no longer matters that like the the conclusion that is the most rational we have to dispose of, this is what we’re left with. It’s nuts. It’s completely crazy.
01:16:35:11 – 01:16:53:21
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, I guess where I wanted to go with this and I’m. And you pretty much covered it, but but I, you know, I want to say to people, if you’ve got this in your background, if this is part of your life, this is part of your family’s life, this is a serious business. And you may think you’re dealing with it.
01:16:54:03 – 01:17:12:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I interviewed one lady. She was molested by a cousin when she was like six or something like that, and she blamed her family for her whole life, you know, that they were. They didn’t do anything about it. Come to find out, they took her for counseling and she didn’t even remember it. She didn’t even remember it, you know.
01:17:12:23 – 01:17:35:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
So there’s a lot of complications here, people. You know, you just don’t want to dismiss this. You don’t want to dismiss this out of hand. You’ve really, really got to put some attention on the fact that early sexualization of children, whether it’s because somebody molested them or they discovered homosexual porn or they’re being given crazy stuff in school through their sex ed program.
01:17:35:03 – 01:17:42:19
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah, any that can derail the development process and we need to take that seriously. So yeah.
01:17:42:21 – 01:17:44:23
Justin Greenfield
Yeah, I completely agree. Absolutely.
01:17:45:01 – 01:18:11:01
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah. Yeah. Well thank you. Justin, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about. You had a you had a protocol I think I want to ask you this. It doesn’t exactly flow, but I want to I want to get this on the record somehow. You talked about, A physician that I was not familiar with who had a protocol for helping kids who had some kind of gender identity issues.
01:18:11:03 – 01:18:21:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And you had a citation to it, and there was, like a three step program that this doctor would have the parents do with the kids. Can you just walk people through that?
01:18:21:07 – 01:18:53:21
Justin Greenfield
Sure. So this was actually a researcher at Columbia University and can I just say it’s devastating that you haven’t heard of this. It’s devastating that we haven’t gotten this information out there. I’ve been asked by by parents, why didn’t I know this? It’s completely devastating because you’re here in a minute. I mean, you know, but the people who are listening, you’ll hear this study, and it’s so amazing what kind of change you can make in a child’s life if you catch it early.
01:18:53:21 – 01:19:20:11
Justin Greenfield
If you’re your parent and you know the signs and you make some little tweaks early enough, you can save yourself from a lifetime potentially of heartache of, you know, and I mean, we all want to be in our knees praying for our kids, right? But the weight of that of having a child end up, homosexual. So, so here’s this study, Columbia University, there is a researcher named Doctor Heino Meyer.
01:19:20:11 – 01:19:56:09
Justin Greenfield
Meyer Valberg. You can look this up. It was published in 2003, I believe. And he took boys with severe, gender identity disorder, which is no longer a diagnosis. They’ve they’ve gone with softer terms since 20, 2013, 2014. But gender identity disorder at that time, they had severe cross-gender behavior. They took a look at the hormones and they were like, the hormones are all the same, but these children have this this behavior over here.
01:19:56:11 – 01:20:24:19
Justin Greenfield
People want to blame hormones is why I bring that up. These children had severe gender identity disorder, and they weren’t they didn’t exclude kids because they had some sort of hormonal difference. This is just what they found. And so the kids presented with, with it was several standard deviations high on the cross gender behavior, 46 years old.
01:20:24:21 – 01:20:45:11
Justin Greenfield
They had the parents make three changes in these these children’s lives. Number one. Mother, we need you to step back some. We need you to detach some. We need you to create holy space between that, they didn’t say holy space. That’s me. They need you. You need to create some space for the father to step in. So.
01:20:45:11 – 01:21:14:15
Justin Greenfield
So the second part is, father, you need to attach to these boys. And the parents were the ones who actually saw the therapist. The kid was not coming in and out to see the therapist. All of these changes were made by the parents. The third change is that the boy needs to have five playdates a week with other boys who did not struggle with cross-gender behavior within an average of, ten weeks.
01:21:14:17 – 01:21:41:15
Justin Greenfield
I think it was between 4 and 19 weeks. Every single child, their, their gender identity disorder was, was, was gone within ten weeks on average. It’s unbelievable. 46 years old. This is what you need to do. It’s a social environment change. You change the dynamics between the parents and the child’s relationship with the peers. And and you deal with gender identity disorder.
01:21:41:15 – 01:22:14:17
Justin Greenfield
Now, let me let me say, and doctor, I know my, my, our ballpark. He notes in the study, in the precursor, that gender identity disorder as a child typically does not result in, transgenderism, but actually homosexuality and so when I talk about this, we’re not just talking about transgenderism, he admits that we’re dealing with the roots of homosexuality.
01:22:14:19 – 01:22:37:07
Justin Greenfield
So, so catching it early, catching it 4 to 6 years old. There are massive changes, that that can happen for the trajectory of that whole child’s life. Because you do these things, you know, it takes the parents, for instance, the mom has she takes him to houses where, oh, the boy only has girls to play with.
01:22:37:09 – 01:22:56:10
Justin Greenfield
Oh, no, mom, like you got to make new friends. Like the challenges and the stressors are on the parents. Dad, you got to come home early from work, which means you. You’re not going to get paid as much. There’s family stressors, you know? So. So the social environment change, that’s all it took.
01:22:56:12 – 01:23:21:08
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And in the grand scheme of things, these are harmless things to implement. You know, it might be inconvenient for the parents in some respects, but compared with medical interventions, compared with doing nothing, you know, it’s not like you’re inflicting some strange, unnatural situation, onto this child. You know it. So, that’s what was striking to me about this.
01:23:21:08 – 01:23:42:04
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And we’ll put a link to this study. In the show notes for people. So people can, you can look at it for yourself and and see how this might apply to you. Just when I want to give you a chance here. We’ve been talking a long time, and it’s been a lot of fun. I want to give you a chance to tell people a little bit about, any ministries or projects that you may have going on and how people can be involved with you.
01:23:42:06 – 01:23:47:13
Justin Greenfield
Sure. Thanks for asking. I’ve. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation as as well.
01:23:47:15 – 01:23:48:18
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Yeah.
01:23:48:20 – 01:24:19:16
Justin Greenfield
So you can go to Greenfield ministries.com and that’ll share some more about me and and what I do my, my my goal right now is to get out as much basic education on these issues, because we’re still working at such a ground level academia, Christian academia has not taken hold of these things. There’s a lot of pop culture, sort of how do we love a homosexual people into the kingdom?
01:24:19:18 – 01:24:44:06
Justin Greenfield
By being evangelists and never talking about what’s actually going on underneath because it’s offensive. But there are a number of individuals who do want the truth. And I think right now it’s a it’s the path of least resistance. It’s there. And I, I love what you’re doing. And so I’m about it too, putting out these videos, the content and everything like that.
01:24:44:12 – 01:25:14:01
Justin Greenfield
And so if you want to support that, that’s something you can do on the, on the website. There’s, there’s a, a link to be a part of the prayer newsletter or to support financially. This stuff takes time. As you know. And and it’s meaningful. This really is, this really is a ministry, you know, people staying up, these kids staying up until 3 a.m. watching garbage videos on TikTok about transgender ideology.
01:25:14:03 – 01:25:34:16
Justin Greenfield
How can we slip into that algorithm some some truth, and get them on a little bit of a different page? Give them a key that that brings them back. Holy smokes. God was loving me. He always had the answer. This is more compassionate than what the the world’s telling me to do. Just embrace the wounds and live out of it.
01:25:34:16 – 01:26:01:17
Justin Greenfield
That’s insane. And and so we can sneak those in. So anyways, I’m saying is if you value these kinds of things, I encourage you, to to pray for us and to support these ministries financially. So you can do that there on that website. I also have God Loves homosexuals.com. That’s a basic education website for those who are, they just want the, the, the quick on it.
01:26:01:22 – 01:26:34:00
Justin Greenfield
So there’s, there’s a presentation on the development of same sex attractions. The, the main route that, based upon Nicholas’s research and, different studies out there, I would say that the average puts it about 80% of male homosexuals. Take a track. That we can talk about has to do with that. You know, the three things that they changed in that in the study that Columbia did, you know, detach some from the mom attached to the father, playdates with other, other boys.
01:26:34:00 – 01:26:58:03
Justin Greenfield
So, so this, you know, the the the, information on God loves homosexuals goes into it a bit, more in depth. And then there’s some testimonies, and then there’s resource links. So those are, those are quick sort of if you’re like, I don’t want to talk a ton about this. And I don’t know if this person’s actually interested, but I’m going to give them this website.
01:26:58:05 – 01:27:20:08
Justin Greenfield
And they can go back home in the privacy of you not knowing that they’re going to investigate. And here’s some truth. So I that the name God loves homosexuals. I think sticks in, in people’s brain. So, you know, the biggest thing is, is to pray for us. We really need prayer. There’s so much spiritual warfare. I’ve had people say the nasty things about me.
01:27:20:08 – 01:27:31:00
Justin Greenfield
I’m sure you have to. And we live in a crazy thing right now, so, Yeah. Yeah. Please keep us in your prayers.
01:27:31:02 – 01:27:56:00
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And, you know, I always ask people to say something to give people hope. To the to the people who are struggling to their parents, their families, their loved ones. But honestly, Justin, I feel like this whole video is giving people hope, you know, to give people alternative explanations for what you’re being fed, and a possibility that you and your family can change for the better.
01:27:56:02 – 01:27:59:23
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I feel like we just spent all this time. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.
01:27:59:23 – 01:28:18:03
Justin Greenfield
So let me share one last thing, because I think the the biggest issue this is this was where I’ll leave it at the biggest issue that a lot of us are facing in the church is the people who are dealing with this are not raising their hand and saying, here I am, you know, like I’m struggling with this.
01:28:18:05 – 01:28:34:20
Justin Greenfield
So the way that you get around this, this is just Satan’s tactic. We know the game. He is keeping those people silent. They’re not coming to us. So what we have to do is we have to share some of this information on a more broad scale with the people that we have, or in our circles of influence.
01:28:34:22 – 01:29:05:18
Justin Greenfield
And so I would encourage people who’ve seen this today to ask yourself, what is one thing? What is one thing I can do? One person, one dinner table, one whatever to to speak wild truth, to speak truth that opens doors. These are some of the facts, some of the concepts. Because you may hit somebody and you don’t even realize it because they’re not raising their hand.
01:29:05:20 – 01:29:28:17
Justin Greenfield
You may hit a parent who has been silent about this, and they are suffering in silence with no information. And so I that was really important for me to say and to get out there if we stay silent in our circles of influence, the enemy wins. It’s not the same out there for alcoholism and anorexia and so many other things.
01:29:28:17 – 01:29:46:02
Justin Greenfield
I know I’ve used that example a lot, but the point is, if we don’t do it, the world isn’t going to do it. Nobody is going to do it. And so what is one thing? Just one pick. Pick one thing one way, today or tomorrow or this week where you can make that happen.
01:29:46:04 – 01:29:57:06
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
And one way to make that happen is to share videos. That’s right from the doctor J show, just like this one. Justin Greenfield, thank you so much for being my guest today.
01:29:57:08 – 01:29:58:15
Justin Greenfield
God bless you.
01:29:58:17 – 01:30:19:13
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Hey, thanks for watching. Since you’re a fan of the Ruth Institute, you should really sign up for our free newsletter. We’ll send you a free download of our report refuting the top five K myths. It’s filled with our unique combination of personal stories and nerdy data. You can click on the footnotes and be taken directly to the references.
01:30:19:19 – 01:30:35:05
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse It’s totally free, so sign up at the link below. Today.
👉 Watch the full uncensored video on Rumble or on Locals
Know someone who needs to hear this? Share this post. The truth heals.
Have a question or a comment? Leave it in the comments, and we’ll get back to you!
Subscribe to our YouTube playlist: @RuthInstitute
Follow us on Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/theruthinstitute
https://www.facebook.com/TheRuthInstitute
https://theruthinstitute.locals.com/newsfeed
Press:
NC Register: https://www.ncregister.com/author/jennifer-roback-morse
Catholic Answers: https://www.catholic.com/profile/jennifer-roback-morse
The Stream: https://stream.org/author/jennifer-roback-morse/
Crisis Magazine: https://crisismagazine.com/author/jennifer-roeback-morse
Father Sullins’ Reports on Clergy Sexual Abuse: https://ruthinstitute.org/resource-centers/father-sullins-research/
Buy Dr. Morse’s Books:
The Sexual State: https://ruthinstitute.org/product/the-sexual-state-2/
Love and Economics: https://ruthinstitute.org/product/love-and-economics-it-takes-a-family-to-raise-a-village/
Smart Sex: https://ruthinstitute.org/product/smart-sex-finding-life-long-love-in-a-hook-up-world/
101 Tips for a Happier Marriage: https://ruthinstitute.org/product/101-tips-for-a-happier-marriage/
101 Tips for Marrying the Right Person: https://ruthinstitute.org/product/101-tips-for-marrying-the-right-person/
Listen to our podcast:
Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ruth-institute-podcast/id309797947
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/1t7mWLRHjrCqNjsbH7zXv1
Subscribe to our newsletter to get this amazing report: Refute the Top 5 Gay Myths https://ruthinstitute.org/refute-the-top-five-myths/
Get the full interview by joining us for exclusive, uncensored content on Locals: https://theruthinstitute.locals.com/support
About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
Refute the top 5 Gay Myths With Our Ebook & Get Our Newsletter
Join us on Locals for exclusive content*!
*Censorship free!
Get all of our video content on Rumble*
*Also censorship free
