One woman claims Bible study made her straight in a video watched over 1.5 million times on Facebook alone.
In the beginning of the video, she seems to be an LGBT advocate, speaking frankly about her relationships with women, including getting engaged to another woman when she was in nursing school. But as the video continues, Emily Thomes talks about attending Bible study classes that led to her renouncing her lesbian "lifestyle" because, as she says: "It's not gay to straight. It's lost to saved."
"I could not stop thinking, 'What if it is all true?'" Thomes said. "Are you sure this is who you are?"
"People say to me all the time, 'I was born this way.' I say, 'OK, me, too.' You're not born with right affections," Thomes said in a video titled "Love Is Love" that was posted to Facebook by the Christian group Anchored North. "That's why Jesus had to come. You feeling a desire for sin just proves you need grace like me."
The idea that an LGBT person can "pray the gay away" is nothing new. Even Katy Perry said at one point she, too, attempted to pray the gay away before becoming an LGBT advocate. But this video, with its viral reach, has begun the discussion again. And many on social media didn't appreciate Thomes's video.
"This little video is enough to push gay kids over the edge to suicide. If God changed her, why didn't the prayers of my daughter count? So so wrong," one Facebook user wrote. "Let me tell anyone who is gay and watching this video that God created you just exactly as you are."
"This is Christians using a fear tactic to make this girl question everything and become brainwashed into their thinking and it sickens me to no end," another user commented. "I had to break free from the toxicity of the church to be able to be who I am today. I'm not perfect but I know I'm a lot happier than I was before and I feel free. Being a Christian was living in fear and always feeling bound and a slave to a deity."
Some users, however, found solace in her story. "Love seeing these stories," one Facebook user wrote. "I have a similar testimony of God rescuing me from the lifestyle that I was trapped in."
