Meg Baatz

Meg Baatz gave her life to Christ in 2004, at age 12, and her faith has been the center of everything since. She grew up in the suburbs of Denver and now lives on the East Coast, and for the past decade she has worked in ministry with LGBTQ communities: training pastors, supporting Christian parents of LGBTQ kids, and walking alongside young adults trying to hold their faith, sexuality, and gender together.

She comes to the subject of conversion therapy honestly about her own place in it. "I myself experience attraction to the same gender," she says. As a young adult first navigating that, she explored ex-gay resources on her own. "I never went through formal conversion therapy, but I've spent a decade watching its legacy take shape in the lives of the people that I love."

That vantage, close enough to feel it but standing as a minister rather than a patient, gives Meg's testimony an unusual clarity. She does not argue against conversion therapy on clinical grounds first. She argues that it gets the gospel wrong.

Snapshot of This True Story:

• Meg Baatz is a Christian who has worked in LGBTQ ministry for ten years, training pastors, supporting Christian parents, and walking alongside LGBTQ young adults.

• She experiences same-gender attraction and, as a young adult, explored ex-gay resources on her own. She did not go through formal conversion therapy.

• She calls conversion therapy a "false gospel" because no one can mature in Christ without first being, in her words, thoroughly known and completely loved.

• She argues the practice treats closeness to God and others as something to be analyzed and distrusted, when closeness is exactly what maturity requires.

• She sees much of the pain in LGBTQ people's lives as coming from faith communities, not from being different, and says conversion therapy has left a baseline of mistrust that hurts everyone.

• Even having done what a traditional sexual ethic asks, she still cannot speak fully honestly with her own Christian family, which she attributes to that legacy.

• Her hope is that Christians build better resources, ones that help people discern with God from a place of their own agency rather than chasing a predetermined outcome.

"A False Gospel"

Meg's central claim is not that conversion therapy is bad theology tacked onto good intentions. It is that the practice inverts the gospel it claims to serve.

"What I wish people understood about conversion therapy is that it actually offers a false gospel," she says, "not because same-sex marriage is the gospel, but because nobody can access maturity and interdependence in Christ without the foundation of being thoroughly known and completely loved."

Her critique is precise. The gospel, as she describes it, is God extending love to people where they are and as they are. Conversion therapy cannot do that. "Conversion therapy can't and will not see us for where we actually are," she says. "It sees people through a limited framework, one that focuses on behavioral outcomes, and one that creates extra-biblical requirements on people." That outcome-first design is exactly what conversion therapy is, and it is why every major health authority has found it ineffective and damaging. Meg puts the theological version of the same point more bluntly: "A mode of therapy cannot love anyone or anything."

Closeness Is the Path, Not the Obstacle

If the gospel begins with being known and loved, Meg argues, then conversion therapy fails at the first step, because it treats intimacy itself as the problem.

"The gospel says that you and I are already seen, known, and loved by a God who is not afraid to be close to us," she says, "and that is the foundation of maturing in life, relationships, and sexual stewardship." Conversion therapy, in her telling, says the opposite: that closeness "is something to be analyzed, to be skeptical of, and that mature sexuality can occur in the absence of closeness."

She has a memorable way of naming the contradiction. "To me, that's kind of like saying someone can become a good driver by becoming really good at avoiding driving. We need closeness in our lives to mature in closeness." The result, she says, is that the practice hands LGBTQ people a different and harder gospel than the one offered to everyone else, "a path full of uncrossable chasms, a path opposite the one that Jesus has laid before you and me."

The Pain the Church Has to Acknowledge First

Before any conversation about faith can happen, Meg says, there is a wound that has to be named. And she is direct about where it comes from.

"Before we can even talk about the gospel with the LGBTQ community, there's just this chasm of deep pain and hurt from the people of God that needs to be acknowledged first." That pain, she is careful to say, is not simply the pain of being different. "It's most often because faith communities pick apart, piece by piece, the way that the people that I've served experience desire for connection and for wholeness, seeing these desires as inherently dangerous rather than as a gift at their core."

The damage, she argues, is relational and lasting, and it reaches well beyond any one person. Rejection from family and faith community is among the most powerful predictors of harm, which is part of why the medical consensus runs so firmly against the practice and why its documented harms are so serious. Meg frames the fallout in terms of trust. "There's a baseline of mistrust now," she says, "and it's removing it that will help all of us start on better footing."

What Its Legacy Costs, Even for Her

Meg is candid that she was spared the practice itself, and equally candid that she has not been spared its aftermath.

"I'm deeply grateful that conversion therapy has not been a part of my personal experience," she says, "but I'm deeply grieved that my experience with it has primarily been watching the people I've ministered to for ten years struggle to have a real, honest relationship with God because of its legacy."

The cost reaches her own family, too, even though she has done everything her tradition asks. "Even in doing, quote-unquote, all the right things by a traditional sexual ethic, I still struggle to have meaningful conversations with my family about my experiences, like singleness, friendship, and emotional maturity," she says, "much less things like how my relationships in the LGBTQ community have actually deepened my own relationship with God." She names the loss simply. "There are parts of myself I still feel I can't bring to the important relationships in my Christian family." When rejection and silence become the norm inside a family of faith, even someone in full compliance pays a price.

A Better Way, Built on Dignity and Agency

Meg does not end on grievance. She ends on a challenge, and it is aimed squarely at the reader.

"I want you to think back to your own rock bottom moments," she says. "Who stuck around for you? How was God present for you in that time?" Then the question that turns it: "Did you emerge from that moment because of trying to get away from what you didn't like about yourself? Or because someone considered you, in that moment, worth caring about exactly as you were, no matter what?"

From there she asks for something harder than agreement. "I want you to ask what it would mean for the LGBTQ person that you most consider to be your enemy to have grown up with the same presence that you had in your rock bottom moments." Her own posture is one of humility rather than judgment. "I've needed that grace before, and I'm going to need it again. I'm never going to stop needing it. So there's never going to be a point where I can pass judgment on someone who has never had the same access that I have."

Her prescription follows from all of it. "Conversion therapy isn't the only resource for Christians wrestling with their sexuality," she says. "If anything, we should be spending our time building better resources, ones that help people discern with God from a place of their own agency, not ones that chase a particular outcome." For families and churches looking for that, affirming ministries exist to walk with LGBTQ people and their loved ones without demanding they change.

Key Lessons from Meg's Story for Parents and Churches

Conversion therapy offers a false gospel. It cannot meet a person where they are, because it is built to chase a behavioral outcome. A practice that cannot see your child cannot love your child.

Closeness is the path to maturity, not a threat to it. Treating a young person's desire for connection as dangerous teaches them to distrust the very intimacy that helps people grow.

Much of the pain comes from the church, not from being different. Meg is direct that faith communities often inflict the wound, then wonder why LGBTQ people keep their distance.

The legacy damages even the relationships that survive. Meg did everything her tradition asks and still cannot speak honestly with her own family. The mistrust outlasts the practice.

Lead with the presence you would have wanted at your lowest. Ask whether you were saved by fleeing yourself or by being loved as you were. Offer a child that same dignity, presence, and room to choose.

Share Your Own Story

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