By: AR MEDIA

The title is a wink, but the story behind it is anything but light.

In When All Else Fails, BLAME YOUR MOTHER! : The Untold Story of Barbara & David Johnson and the Founding of Spatula Ministries, David Johnson steps out from behind his famous mother’s shadow and tells the story that never made it into the newsletters, the conference stages, or the Christian bookstores.

Barbara Johnson was a beloved humorist in evangelical circles and the founder of Spatula Ministries, a lifeline for Christian parents of LGBTQ+ children during the culture wars and AIDS epidemic. Her trademark was laughter and grace. Her son’s reality, as this memoir makes clear, was far more complicated: a lifelong battle with PTSD, a “family curse” of homophobia, and the slow, painful work of reclaiming his own worth and faith after being both the center and the collateral damage of a high-profile ministry.

Johnson’s book is part family memoir, part clinical self-study, and part open letter to anyone trapped in the crossfire between religious conviction and queer identity. It’s raw, often darkly funny, and unflinchingly specific.

“Groundhog Day” with PTSD

Johnson opens with a cultural reference that will anchor the rest of the book: Groundhog Day (1993). He describes his life as a trauma loop, different faces, different cities, same crushing pattern. The introduction lays it out plainly: after fifty years of cycling through broken relationships, panic, rage, shame, and relational collapse, he hits what he calls a “crisis of meaning.” The old strategies have failed. The loop won’t break.

That crisis leads him to a long-overdue PTSD diagnosis. Johnson doesn’t just mention it in passing but unpacks it, walking readers through the hallmark symptoms, flashbacks, nightmares, hyper-vigilance, emotional detachment, explosive anger over minor triggers, and then maps them onto his own history.

He’s candid about trying everything: meditation, psych meds, recreational drugs, alcohol, astrology, “divinatory charlatans.” Nothing worked because nothing was getting at the underlying trauma. That honesty will resonate with anyone who’s thrown every self-help tool in the drawer at their pain and still found themselves waking up in the same story.

This is one of the book’s strengths: Johnson insists that what happened to him isn’t just “sin,” “rebellion,” or “bad choices.” It’s trauma, compounded and untreated over decades. Yet he doesn’t hide behind the diagnosis. Instead, he uses it as a lens to understand his own patterns and his family’s story with new clarity.

Homophobia as a “Family Curse”

From there, Johnson takes on what he bluntly calls “our family curse, homophobia.” He doesn’t treat it as an abstract theological disagreement but rather a generational wound.

He defines homophobia in clear, accessible terms, fear, dislike, and prejudice, and then traces how it saturated his family culture, his church environment, and eventually his mother’s ministry. He details how sermons, jokes, prayer meetings, and “concerned conversations” translated into relentless pressure, shame, and erasure for him as a gay son.

What makes this section compelling is its double vision. Johnson is not writing as an outsider throwing stones at the church but instead as someone who loved his mother deeply, who worked in ministry circles himself, and who understands why frightened parents clung to Spatula Ministries as a lifeline. He repeatedly acknowledges his mother’s compassion, her humor, and her genuine desire to help people in pain.

At the same time, he refuses to minimize the damage. He weaves in the language of psychology, internalized homophobia, trauma responses, and maladaptive coping, with the language of faith. The result is a sobering picture of what happens when sincere religious conviction and untreated mental illness collide with a son’s sexuality.

The Untold Story of Spatula Ministries

For readers who grew up with Barbara Johnson’s books on their shelves, this memoir will feel like stepping backstage after a long-running show.

Johnson recounts key moments in the rise of Spatula Ministries, how his mother’s personal suffering and quirky humor became a platform, how her newsletter “The Love Line” and her writing reached thousands of hurting families, and how she took on the role of “Mother Barbara” to a generation of Christian parents devastated by their children’s coming-out stories.

But he also documents the hidden cost. The book returns again and again to a series of devastating losses in his mother’s life. These “credentials,” as she framed them, a kind of spiritual résumé of suffering, helped lend authority to her message. For Johnson, they also formed the emotional backdrop of his own life: a house where grief and ministry were fused, and where his role as the gay son was both central and unbearable.

Some of the book’s most searing scenes involve other people naming the harm his mother’s theology caused: a grieving mother pointing at Barbara at a funeral and crying, “She’s the murderer!”; the rupture of relationships when ministry and dogma took precedence over listening and love. Johnson doesn’t sensationalize these moments, but he doesn’t look away either.

Readers from evangelical backgrounds will recognize the pattern: a ministry born in genuine compassion, slowly shaped and distorted by the currents of culture-war rhetoric, fear of the “gay agenda,” and the false promise of conversion therapy.

Cinema-Therapy, Humor, and Clinical Insight

Johnson’s professional life as a therapist and group facilitator runs parallel to his family story, and he threads those experiences through the narrative in an engaging way.

He describes leading court-ordered groups for anger management, domestic violence, parenting, and substance abuse through Action Consultant Therapies and the Orange County Probation Department. Humor, he notes, was often his most effective tool. He used films like Anger Management to create “cinema-therapy” moments, lightening the mood while gently teaching emotional regulation and insight.

Cinema is a recurring motif: Groundhog Day for PTSD; Valley of the Dolls as his mother’s attempt to warn him about sex, drugs, and Hollywood excess; later films and documentaries like Pray Away and Boy Erased to expose the harm of conversion therapy and anti-gay theology. By the final chapters, the book feels almost like a curated watchlist for anyone wanting to understand the psychological and spiritual costs of homophobia.

Redeeming a Legacy: The Crown Bearer’s Society

A moving section comes near the end, when Johnson stumbles across an unfinished study his mother dreamed of doing on the “crowns” of the Bible. She called it “The Crown Bearer’s Challenge.” She died before she and David could bring it to life.

Rather than discard it as an artifact from a painful past, he chooses to reclaim it, and out of that rediscovery comes the Crown Bearer’s Society, his attempt to honor the best of his mother’s heart while cutting ties with the fear, ignorance, and homophobia that caused so much harm.

It’s a bold and vulnerable move: the son of a woman synonymous with a certain era of Christian parenting, inviting the next generation to carry forward her commitment to hurting families, but in a way that explicitly affirms LGBTQ+ dignity and mental health.

Who Should Read This Book

When All Else Fails, BLAME YOUR MOTHER! will resonate mostly with LGBTQ+ people raised in conservative Christian environments; parents and relatives of LGBTQ+ children; survivors of religious trauma, conversion therapy, or family homophobia; mental health professionals working with clients from evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds; and longtime fans of Barbara Johnson who are ready to hear the rest of the story.

At its core, this is not a “gotcha” exposé of a Christian celebrity. It’s a son’s anguished, loving, hopeful attempt to tell the truth about his mother, his family, and himself, so that others might suffer less.

Johnson doesn’t discard faith. He doesn’t even discard his mother’s legacy. Instead, he asks: What if we could finally let go of the theology that kept so many of us in the dark, while maintaining the humor, love, and compassion?

This memoir offers an invitation to break your own loops, confront your own inherited beliefs, and join a new kind of ministry, one where laughter, love, and LGBTQ+ affirmation can finally coexist without compromise.

Faith. Family. Purpose.

Get your copy of When All Else Fails, BLAME YOUR MOTHER! by David Johnson and discover the remarkable story of Barbara & David Johnson and Spatula Ministries.

Disclosure: This editorial review was prepared by AR MEDIA.