by John Armstrong, Spectator
According to research commissioned by Stonewall, clerics are conducting one LGBTQ+ exorcism for every two religious wedding ceremony they perform. This shocking finding is the logical conclusion of Stonewall’s ‘Culture Wars and Hate’ survey which found that 10 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in the UK have experienced an exorcism which aimed to change their gender or sexual orientation.
At first glance, this may seem to contradict the government’s National LGBT Survey which found in 2017 that only 2 per cent of LGBT people had undergone conversion practices. Perhaps there has been a recent boom in exorcisms?
Stonewall’s full data set finds that that 8.2 per cent of LGBTQ+ people in the UK have experienced an exorcism in the last five years alone. Given there are 1.5 million LGB+ people in the England and Wales, this implies that UK clergymen are performing gay exorcisms at a rate of 24,600 per year. Is it any wonder then that our time-poor priests could only manage 41,915 religious wedding ceremonies in 2022?
The more you dig into the data, the more remarkable it seems. While most of us remained at home, it seems there was no let-up for exorcists during lockdown. The number of religious wedding ceremonies halved in 2019-2020 compared with 2018-2018, but the Stonewall data reveals no drop in the number of exorcisms over the same period.