Conservative Evangelical Christianity taught me that you could identify a true Christian by their fruit.
It’s right there in Galatians 5:22-23 — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Simple enough. A checklist almost. The kind of thing you could cross-stitch on a pillow and hang in a Sunday school classroom.
What nobody told me was that the same list would eventually become the thing that blew my entire world apart.
For years I worked inside Exodus International — the largest exgay ministry in the world. I was the Executive Vice President. I was a true believer, a public face, a spokesman for the cause. I was also, quietly and privately, a man who couldn’t reconcile what I was preaching with what I was living more and more the longer I was in that world.
But it wasn’t my sexuality that first cracked the foundation. It was the fruit.
Or rather — the absence of it.
The higher I climbed inside that organization, the more I saw what lived behind the curtain. The fear. The control. The people who had been promised (or were promising) healing and instead received shame repackaged as discipleship. The cruelty that dressed itself in the language of love. The harm done — real, measurable, life-altering harm — by people who were absolutely certain God was on their side.
I was on their side for far too long.
I kept waiting for the fruit to truly match the beliefs, the actions. I kept looking for it. And what I found instead, over and over, was its opposite.
That’s what started moving me toward the exit door. Not a theological argument. Not a political awakening. Fruit inspection.
When Exodus finally closed in 2013, I thought I’d find what I was looking for back in the church. I tried. I genuinely tried.
But the pattern held. Judgment dressed as pastoral care. Exclusion dressed as doctrine. People wielding scripture like a weapon and calling it loving and gracious.
The fruit wasn’t there. And I had learned, by then, to trust the fruit.
Here’s the part that surprised me most:
When I came out — really came out, fully and finally — I started finding it everywhere I hadn’t expected to look.
In LGBTQ+ community spaces. In secular organizations built around dignity and inclusion. In friends who had never set foot inside a church but who showed up for people with a consistency and tenderness that shamed what I had witnessed from lifelong believers.
Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness.
It was there. Just not where I’d been told to look.
I didn’t abandon the concept — I expanded where I was willing to find it. And that shift changed everything.
I still use the fruit of the Spirit as my compass. Not as a litmus test for who’s a “real Christian” — I’ve long since lost patience for that game. But as a genuine measure of whether a person, a community, or a relationship is safe. Whether it’s good. Whether it’s true.
When someone wants to speak as an authority in my life, I’m watching the fruit. When I’m deciding whether a friendship is worth investing in, I’m watching the fruit. When a community or an organization asks for my trust, my loyalty, my presence — I’m watching the fruit.
I don’t care if the tree calls itself Christian or secular or spiritual-but-not-religious or nothing at all. What I care about is what it produces.
Because the fruit doesn’t lie.
It never did. I just had to be brave enough to believe what I was seeing.
What about you? Where have you found the fruit of the Spirit showing up in unexpected places? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.
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