Homosexuality: An Open Door? By Colin Cook (Pacific Press Publishing, 1985, 48 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
A Gordon-Conwell Seminary Presbyterian professor, Richard Lovelace, calls this Seventh-day Adventist’s solution for “the person who wants to be free” from homosexuality: “an authentic theological masterpiece … a jewel … a theological pearl … a silver bullet against evil [and] the best book available for those whose sin is homosexual”. The SDA’s own television speaker, George Vandeman, can’t match that enthusiasm. In his short Foreword, Vandeman manages only to express his surprised delight that when he videotaped an interview with the author, Colin Cook, for the SDA program, “It is Writte”, the “tense and apprehensive” production staff was impressed that, unlike “confrontations about homosexuality on television, radio and on the str4eet”, the taping was not fraught with “flaring anger, charges and countercharges” so that “within moments the staff relaxed”. Did he or his staff expect “flaring anger, charges and countercharges” when both interviewer and interviewee were already in agreement about homosexuality even before the taping was scheduled? At any rate, Vandeman says nothing more than this and then asks rhetorically: “Is this [television studio] experience not a sufficient Foreword to a long-needed book?”
As with all “ex-gay” material, readers will search Cook’s book in vain for any hope of change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation. For several years, Cook has been saying that such “change is not the issue”. In the SDA Ministry magazine (September 1981), Cook said: “Many Christians, battling with a homosexual problem, hope one day in the vague future finally to arrive at heterosexuality by the gradual process of God’s righteousness working within them as they have faith”. But, he said, this “is a wistful hope” and “Biblically false”. Cook’s recipe then, as now, “focuses itself on a wholeness, a righteousness (and hence a heterosexuality) outside of itself and in the person of Another, namely Jesus Christ. This wholeness and heterosexuality of Christ the homosexual accepts as his own [and thus] ends the search for heterosexuality within himself”. In this new book, Cook says: “The focus must switch from what goes on within your feelings to what is going on outside of you, in the great drama between good and evil”. (One here sees shades of Mrs. White’s Great Controversy and her fanciful switch from an earthly to a heavenly locus for the “return of Christ” after “the Great Disappointment” of 1844.) Cook is emphatic: “This external focus is the only approach that will give you hope and courage”. The shift, Cook explains, is to be done by “the power of positive thought”. Accordingly, “God charges to your account all of Christ’s … heterosexual wholeness”. Your “heterosexuality [is by] way of faith. … God account[s] you heterosexual [even] when He knows you do not feel that way”. So homosexuals, Cook says, should stop praying, “Father, please make me heterosexual”, and should thank God every day for “completed heterosexuality” which is, as he has been saying, “our new unseen identity”. He warns: “Over and over again your mind will want to draw back into a homosexual way of thinking about your friends. Over and over again you will need to affirm your heterosexuality in Christ and beat back the illusions [?] that your feelings seem to convey”. Reasoning that one is already theologically “heterosexual”, Cook says that what the continuing homosexual “feelings are trying to do is to foist an illusion” on the “ex-gay”. But isn’t it Cook who is foisting the illusion? Misusisng the story of God’s changing “Abram’s name to ‘father of a multitude’ (Abraham) before he had a child”, Cook conveniently overlooks what he himself acknowledges, that an actual child was born – indeed, millions of actual descendants resulted. Cook analogizes: “And He changes your name from homosexual to heterosexual”, even while admitting that no actual heterosexuality results. Throughout this “masterpiece”, there are many instances of this kind of interchange between pseudo-psychological and weirdly theological language and phenomena. Such confusion of sexual identity and orientation with “new creation” theological concepts reminds one of the ancient extra-biblical idea that, after Jewish proselyte baptism, a person might even marry his own moth4er – such a “new” person was he! Cook sees the final and most complete of a six-stage “disintegration of homosexuality” to which his “ex-gays” may look forward after upt to a decade or more of positive thinking as a stopping of overt homosexual acts, though homosexual “feelings remain”. Then the “heterosexual option [of] social [!] affection” with someone of the other gender and perhaps even a legal marriage may “open up” as a possibility.
Cook’s “Open Door” is a revolving door of confusion and contradiction that eventually slamsw shut in the faces of would-be “ex-gays” just as the doors did at another “Open Door”, the now defunct “ex-gay” ministry of the same name. His argument alternates between a Quimbyesque magical thinking in which delusions are stubbornly held in spite of personally experienced evidence to the contrary and a quasi-Freudian view that simply asserts contrary to extensive psychosocial data. For Cook and his supporters, it is a priori impossible that a few Bible verses with which they seek to shore uup their assumptions should be shown to be inapplicable even by conservative biblical scholars. So long as the Lovelaces of Evangelicaland are as indiscriminately desperate as they are for a “solution” to toss at homosexuals, an outfit such as Cook’s will re4main (as it does for Lovelace): “the most developed and reliable source of help for homosexuals that I have discovered”. However, long after his evangelical supporters have retreated back into their own comfortable lives of approved convention, trying to believe that they have been helpful to homosexuals, Cook’s very last words of advice remind us of the “ex-gay’s” never ending struggle with an unapproved sexual orientation: “Never give up. Never, never, never, NEVER give up!”
[After this review was published in 1986, it was learned that Cook had been having sex with young male counselees at his “ex-gay” ministry in Pennsylvania and he was fired. His wife divorced him. He moved to Colorado where he is again engaged in counseling. His website contains a disclaimer of legal responsibility “for any negative results claimed to ensue from viewing of or use of [this service] or from counseling by Colin Cook.”]