Amber Wylde grew up in a tight-knit family that strictly followed the “tough love” teachings of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, the $133 million conservative Christian nonprofit where Amber’s father is a broadcast executive.
“Amber, friends will come and go, but your family will always be there for you,” was the promise she heard growing up. But as she writes in a memoir published today, she learned that promise of family faithfulness was void after she came out as a lesbian.
Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism is a revised, updated and more analytically minded version of her 2017 memoir. Among the changes since then: a divorce from her wife, a return to Colorado Springs, and a diagnosis of a chronic illness.
Amber Wylde
Wylde, a regular BNG columnist, will discuss the book at a Nov. 4 event in Colorado Springs that honors the five people killed in the Nov. 2022 shooting at Club Q, a local gay and lesbian bar.
The book features a new foreword by Matthew Paul Turner, who had a long career as an evangelical writer and editor until he finally came out as gay at age 46. His experience in some ways mirrors Wylde’s: “When I first began to fear that I wasn’t straight at age 17, the loathing my church and family had long expressed for gay people became internalized as self-loathing.”
‘We love you, but … ‘
From childhood at home and at church, Wylde learned God and her parents loved her unconditionally. Yet experience indicated otherwise.
“My church and family proclaimed the unconditional love of God with their lips, but then taught me with their actions that God only loves you if you’re good and follow the rules with complete devotion,” she said. “If you make a mistake (especially a mistake as bad as mine), then you are bad and God is mad at you and abhors your behavior. This wasn’t the God I knew in my teen years.”
“I’m afraid you’re damning yourself to hell,” he said.
When she came out as a lesbian to her parents, her father compared her to pedophiles and murderers. “I’m afraid you’re damning yourself to hell,” he said.
He also expressed concerns about how her “lifestyle choice” could impact his job at Focus. “I am troubled by the message this sends to hundreds of thousands of fans,” he told her.
Mom was no more helpful. When Wylde told her mother she was considering suicide, her mother responded, “You are not the victim here. If anyone has reason to feel desperate, it’s me.”
When family values don’t succeed
“I was programmed to believe that if I followed a certain formula, my life would be blessed by God and I would be used for greatness,” Wylde wrote. “I did everything I was taught to do.
“But instead of leading to a life of happiness and ‘blessed-ness,’ it deteriorated my mental health, chipped away at my confidence and self-worth, and led me into a downward spiral of self-hatred, self-harm and suicidal ideations.”
When she married a woman, she says her parents followed Dobson’s guidance on same-sex weddings: Don’t acknowledge, bless or attend them. Most importantly, communicate to your loved one that God condemns what they are doing.
(In recent years, a Focus-aligned legal organizations has won Supreme Court cases against same-sex weddings, while Focus-aligned legal organizations have helped enact anti-gay and anti-trans legislation in more than 20 states.)
Wylde says she hasn’t spoken to her parent in nine years.
“The teachings of Focus on the Family value and elevate certain families while simultaneously tearing others apart.”
“The teachings of Focus on the Family value and elevate certain families while simultaneously tearing others apart — teaching tough love, shunning into submission and reparative therapy in order to fix, change or heal queer people of their detestable desires. When it doesn’t work (because it doesn’t actually work), parents are instructed to kick queer children out of the family unless they change, in an effort to save their own souls from damnation by association,” she said
“That’s why 40% of homeless youth are queer,” Wylde said in an interview. “They are kicked out of their families.”
Life in the ‘pro-family’ silo
Wylde writes of growing up “in a silo of white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, privileged, evangelical Christians who all thought and believed exactly alike.”
She learned early to embrace a black-and-white understanding of “us” and “them.”
“Rather than seeing everyone as equal, it ranked us above everybody else,” she said. “It made us better than them, more knowledgeable than them, more spiritual than them, more saved than them.”
Separation from “them” was enforced in every area of life.
“It made us better than them, more knowledgeable than them, more spiritual than them, more saved than them.”
Her family and those around her “embraced and implemented the Focus on the Family ideal of creating a completely Christian-packaged environment. Homeschooling in place of public school, church programs instead of school clubs, vacation Bible school instead of sports camp, Awana in lieu of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, mission trips in exchange for humanitarian projects — all to protect us from the ‘outside world’ and mold us into advocates and defenders of the movement who would replicate the system for the generation to come.”
The goal of life in the silo was simple reproduction, she said: It “molded children from infancy into exactly what evangelicals wanted them to be — sexually pure, patriarchal, homophobic Christian nationalists, who use their strong beliefs and voting power to fight the culture wars at hand — from integration in the mid-20th century, to abortion and LGBTQ rights, and most recently, Critical Race Theory in schools.”
Seeking change and healing
Wylde says she wants to be a voice for change in the crusade against LGBTQ people as well as a healing hand for those victimized by it.
The change she seeks is an abandonment of the “toxic evangelicalism” promoted by Focus and other crusaders. She doesn’t blame Focus for last year’s attack at Club Q, but the 2023 version of her memoir does blame the ministry for “the deep level of oppression, disempowerment, anger, fear, and grief that LGBTQ people have experienced for years as a byproduct of (its) exclusionary teachings.”
“Focused so intently on power, they completely lose sight of the fact that they are dehumanizing the very people they claim to love, stripping them of their most basic human rights,” she wrote.
She says such tactics have driven many — including her — away from evangelical churches.
A close friend helped her heal from some of her religious trauma. Now she wants to give others the same help. Her healing work comes through the Unashamed Love Collective, an online support group she leads.
Related articles:
Repressing my sexual orientation cost me my health — permanently | Opinion by Amber Wylde
Undoing the conservative evangelical in me | Opinion by Amber Wylde