Biblical Womanhood In a Godless Culture | Rosaria Butterfield

All right, we are back with another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean, we are here with our guest.

Rosaria.

Butterfield, yes. Not the third or anything like that. Sister, thank you so much for joining us. We're honored that you're on the show. Would you mind asking the Lord's help, opening us in prayer?

Justifying Grace and the Christian Life

Oh, I would be honored, Sean.

All right.

Let's pray. Our gracious God and our heavenly Father, how we thank you for your justifying imputation of Christ's power to forgive us. And how we thank you, Lord, that Christ our Lord indeed died and rose and now sits at the right hand of the Father and that we even have the opportunity to shore up our sufferings in his.

We thank you, Lord, that the Christian life is a life of meaning and purpose and grace, even in suffering. And we thank you, Lord, that that imputation of forgiveness has launched us into a life where we can truly live in victory in the power of the resurrected Christ.

We thank you, God, for that. We pray, Lord, that everyone listening, ourselves included here at this table, that we would know that deeply and well and that we would have greater faith. So, Lord, we pray that you would continue to grow us in sanctification and we pray that our faith would fail us not.

And we pray all of this in the matchless name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you, sister.

Yeah.

So we are here at the Cross Conference.

We are.

Last night, I shared my testimony and I went through a phase. I kind of have a, like you, an, I think, extraordinary testimony, at least to a lot of people. I pray for my kids that they have the most boring testimony.

Right.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yes, yes.

I went through a phase when I was younger after kind of going on the circuit, you know, come tell your story, come tell your story, where I kind of got tired of it. And I was like, I just want to preach the gospel, not saying that you can't do both at the same time.

I think I've sort of come out of the other side of that, understanding how the Lord uses our testimonies in really incredible ways. And I'm saying all this because I think it's your testimony that kind of puts you on the map, that really introduced you to a lot of people.

So I think most of our listeners will probably be familiar with it, but can you give us like a five minute version of your testimony in case someone doesn't know your story?

Yeah, absolutely.

And then speak to maybe if you went through any of that.

Oh, I did. I completely resonated with that. So I was converted by our gracious Lord and Savior to faith in Christ in 1999. At that point, I was a newly minted, tenured radical. My field was English, women's studies, and queer theory.

And I was hired by Syracuse University in some ways to make homosexuality look wholesome. Now, I hadn't always been a lesbian. So I'm 61 years old. In my generation

You're 61?

You did not know that.

I didn't know that. You don't look 61 at all.

But I feel it.

Wow, okay.

In my generation, it wasn't like it was cool or popular to be gay. So I didn't come out as a lesbian until a whole lot of other people said, you know you're gay, you know you're a lesbian. And so when I came out, I just felt like I had found my authentic self.

And I immediately threw myself more deeply into gay rights activism. I had been a feminist and a gay rights activist before I had met my first lesbian lover.

Yeah.

So life just felt normal to me because that's when you're not a Christian, your sin is, you're not at enmity with your sin. You're, it's just

At enmity with God.

Yeah, true, exactly. So the sin part wasn't, you know, but I had finished my tenure book, all to say, and I was just genuinely curious. Why do evangelical Christians, why don't they leave consenting adults alone?

This was back when the gay rights movement had that very quaint phrase. You haven't heard it in 10 years. And maybe we'll get to why, but that quaint phrase of, we just want you to leave us alone, just leave consenting adults alone.

What we do in the privacy of our own bedroom.

Is just not your business. And so, and I was just curious why evangelical Christians felt like that wasn't, you know, part of just pluralism and pragmatism. And, you know, just like being a grownup in a world with people who don't agree with you.

And so I had written an article that got a lot of play. It was about the promise keepers visit to Syracuse University. The big New York newspaper gave me a whole back page with the title promise keepers message is a danger to democracy.

So you can imagine that caused a little kerfuffle. And in that kerfuffle, I met a man who would, who would lead me to Jesus.

Pastor Ken Smith.

Pastor Ken Smith. He's still alive. He's 96 years old.

Whoa.

Yeah, no, he's, and he doesn't look like he's 96 either. So just, or, you know, act like it. But he and his dear wife, Floy, who went to be with the Lord a few years ago, they just entered my world. Now, the way they did that was he wrote me a letter and he said, you know, I'd like to talk to you about some of the ideas in your article, which is great.

I love talking about ideas, but I also was excited when I saw his pedigree because I thought, wow, this is great. This is my unpaid research assistant for this book. I don't read Greek and Hebrew. I don't know stuff I'm gonna.

The fundamentalist angle.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I immediately said, yes, that would be wonderful. And then he was very gracious. He's very gracious and very chivalrous. And he said, well, are you gonna be uncomfortable coming to our home?

Would you rather we meet you somewhere else? And, you know, at that point, gay activism was all in the home. The 90s in New York, AIDS was just devastating the community, so all kinds of things were going on in the home.

And I said, no, home is great, you know? And then I discovered that his address was right around the corner from my house. So he was a neighbor as well as what I thought was going to be my unpaid research assistant.

Well, he immediately was excited about my research project, which I thought was crazy. I said to him, look, here's my problem. I'm gonna have to read the Bible. Oh, no problem.

Yeah, right. Oh no.

Oh no, exactly. So in some ways, he put me on a reading program and we were gonna get together once a week and talk about, you know, what we were reading. And I had a, just providentially, I had a research leave.

I had a sabbatical. Thank you, coffee is coming.

Coffee is good.

Coffee is good. And I found myself reading the Bible for five hours a day because I'm a reader, first of all, but I'm on a sabbatical and I'm working on a book.

Well, you know what?

If you read, if I could read the Bible five hours a day and if you could read the Bible five hours a day right now, you know, can you imagine? That gives the Holy Spirit some pretty wide angles in your life.

So I read the Bible, met with Ken and Floy. And I think sometimes people got a really strange notion of, well, it's not that he was just like, oh, tell me what it's like to be gay. How can we help you be gay?

How can we help?

How can you help our church be gay?

Yeah. None of that.

He was just loving you.

He was just like, hey, let's read the Bible and let's see what God says. And he made something very clear the first time he met me. He said, look, I can accept you as a lesbian. I just don't approve.

Yeah.

Well, we say that, but we are now, 2023, post-Obergefell. One of the clauses in the Obergefell decision in 2015 that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states was the dignitary harm clause, which means that it is considered now, legally speaking, a harm to fail to affirm someone's LGBTQ plus dignity.

Well, so I read the Bible. I met with Ken and Floy. I probably had 500 meals at their house before I ever walked through the door of the church or committed my life to Jesus. But there are a couple of things along the way that were significant.

One was very quickly, I could see why this was called the good news, the gospel, but not for me. But I could see why for you all, it would be the good news.

On paper, it's great.

Yeah, and for people who aren't gay.

Like, if you don't have to give up like the core of who you are, it was a grand story. I'm a lit professor. I love a good story. And it's hermeneutically interesting. And I could totally see why. If I wasn't me, I would be like, yeah, this is good news.

It's the kind of story you wish would be true.

Yeah, yeah. But at a certain point, then I got to the point where I believed, you know what? Actually, I think it is true. I actually think that the Lord Jesus Christ is risen and real. And I actually think that that's a truth over which I have no interpretive power.

And then I thought, okay, but I still don't know how that's gonna work for me. I mean, like, how can I repent of something that I think is who I am? And so I was talking with Ken and Floyd about this because I also found something else because, you know, that was back in the days of the Franklin planners, you know, those big, like, you see, you're too young to even know this.

Okay, okay, sorry, sorry, okay.

Okay, it was these planners, everybody, all professionals had them. They was like the size of a phone book. You probably don't even know what that is.

I know what a phone book is.

Okay, okay.

And you would record every, you know, like it was just about productivity.

Yeah, that's right.

And I realized, you know, this is after my research leave was done. I was spending hours in the morning reading the Bible. And I thought, why am I doing that? And I realized that I did it because I was amazed that there might be a God out there who loved me and knew me.

And it might just maybe be possible that this word was different than any book I had ever read, that it's alive and it's dissecting my heart. And so at that point, I just said to Ken, what is going on?

And Ken said, well, I've got, let me, I'd like to give a lecture to your students about why the Bible is true. I'm like, you're not getting to my students, buddy, but you give me that lecture.

And so he called you over, you had a one-on-one.

We did, actually, he came to my house that night. He came to my house that night and he gave this lecture and, you know, I take, I'm a note taker, so, but quickly I realized I was gonna have to do the, you know, draw the line down the middle, what he says and why I think it's not true, right?

So like, I'm arguing back and forth. And that was a, just a watershed night. And I said to him, but what, I basically said to him, but what do you do with your sin? And

And isn't that really the question that everyone has to answer?

Isn't that the question?

And he gave me a little book by Chris Lundgaard called The Enemy Within, and it's on John Owen and indwelling sin. And what, what. That, that book was really transformative because it made me do something that Thomas Watson will call the first step of repentance.

He has six ingredients for repentance. And the first ingredient is recognizing your sin, like as sin, not calling it something else.

And not an oopsie daisy.

Yeah, and not who I am and not an ontology. And so, so that book really turned me around. And, and when I committed my life to Jesus, I didn't stop feeling like a lesbian, not at first. I needed to learn what it meant to go to war.

And I needed to learn how to hate my sin without hating myself.

Yeah, to put off the old, put on the new.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's painful at first.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But the church loved me. So I should also say, I was a gay rights activist at the time. I wasn't like your lesbian next door who, you know, just led a quiet life. There's nothing quiet.

I had helped write policy that snowballed into the gay marriage decision. I testified before the legislature. I led, you know, many, many student groups on LGBTQ plus activism. And then when I came to Christ, in some ways what, it wasn't what I said that changed anything.

It was what I stopped saying. What God did was he put me out of, you know, he put me on the sidelines, right? I couldn't, I couldn't direct those dissertations. I couldn't teach those things. And that was a very hard time.

I mean, can you imagine, you know, flying here from Australia to work with the queer theory professor on a dissertation? And now she commits her life to Jesus and you don't have a dissertation director.

And this is back before there was a bunch of people you could, who were doing this.

Yeah, yeah. It was still sort of in the backwaters of academia.

Oh, it was.

It was mainstream. It really was. It was completely, yeah, no. It, I had been called a pervert many, many times. Actually recently at the Durham County School Board meeting.

Oh, wow.

So life changes. That's because I, you know, believe that transgenderism is junk science. But anyway, we might get there. So, so the church was wonderful.

Yeah, instrumental.

They walked with me gently and quietly, but then also, you know, more forcefully. I never was alone, even though I was still teaching at a university. I was, I had to go before an ethics board to explain why I wanted to teach in Christian hermeneutics and not queer theory for which, you know, the university had invested a whole lot in me doing and the church was there.

And then, you know, I, the Lord started to very much work in my heart because the seeds of the gospel are in the garden. There is no fruit of the spirit that just kind of dangles apart from the creation ordinance.

And so I really started to dig into what am I as a woman?

Yeah.

And there you go.

There you go.

No, no, that was so good, sister. Talk to us about difficulties. And so, you know, you wrote Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. Was there ever a point where you got tired of asking people to come and share the same story?

Oh my goodness. Well, first of all, you know, I'm, by God's grace, I married Kent Butterfield and that I married, Kent and I were married when I was a Christian only for about a year and a half. So I've been biblically married for almost as long as I've been a Christian.

And I was very quiet about my past. I wanted nothing to do. I wanted to live for Christ. I was done with that. I just really, and we were in, we lived in Percival, Virginia and a friend of mine, a neighbor came across the street who was a Christian and he said to me, you know, I have been praying for this Syracuse University professor, lesbian activist, her name is Rosaria Champagne.

And I think I don't have to pray for her anymore because I think that's you. And I just threw the guy off my porch. I'm like, look, I don't want to talk about that. And he said, you know, you need to, you need to write a book.

And I thought, you are a crazy man. You need to, you just need to get off my porch before I act like the Southern woman and throw something at your head, you know, right? But then Kent and I talked about it and I started writing.

And then, you know, I wrote this little book and it was just going to be a little book. And it was, you know, little press, little book, thousand copies, mostly for my church, my community and my children.

I wanted them to know that I am not cleaned up, that Christ is cleaned up for me. Yes, I need to repent of my sin. Yes, I need to drive a fresh nail through it every day and all that. I work, there is sanctification is work.

You can't just sit there on a lump, but it's Christ who measures up, not me. And so that's why I wrote the book. But then other people started reading the book and then it did become popular. And then I did start speaking and then I tanked.

It was probably those years of just sharing my testimony to an evangelical world were very dark for me. I had had all of this liberty in Christ, but then you start talking about the old stuff in the old way.

And I started dealing with body memories and it was really bad. And I, you know, my husband and I just decided, and you know how strange it is, you know, the evangelical world, you know, they, it, you know.

Because I didn't come from it either.

No, me either. No, this is wacky to me, like this idea that, you know. So we decided I was going to just back off. And so I wrote a few books and yeah, I'm a writer, I'm a scholar. I'm a homeschool mom.

I teach, you know, rhetoric literature in a co-op. It's turning into a school, you know, I love doing that. But, but yeah, those were really dark days. And I, I realized that Satan is very active and very crafty.

And that this was not, this was not, I was not going to benefit the evangelical world by doing the dog and pony show anymore. And if I was going to be of any benefit to them, maybe I could write some books that would give them tools to know what time it is and to know what it takes to defeat Satan in a world where he has set up a lot of shops, including some in broad evangelicalism.

Amen.

That makes me think of the scripture about the men of Issachar who were wise to the times. Somebody just this morning sent me this from Vaughn Roberts. If you were the devil, where would you direct your attack against yourself?

Take that and apply it to evangelicalism. Pairing that with second Corinthians two 11, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan for we are not ignorant of his designs.

Yeah, exactly. There's a wonderful book or in fact, our church is going through it right now and in our book study, an old book, of course, Puritan book by Thomas Brooks called "'Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices.".

And what's fascinating is the last five pages of the book is on basically six ways to know you have a false teacher. Ooh, I'm just telling you, it would increase everyone's vocabulary, but if I could give that book away at this conference,.

I would do it.

Okay, so you kind of went through that, you went through the darkness, how'd you come out? Because your new book, which is what we're gonna be talking about today, "'Five Lies," but I mean, you basically kind of do most of your theological work through the lens of an extended version of your story.

So how did you come out of the, I don't wanna share my testimony, I don't wanna be the testimony person. What got you to the place where you were ready to do it again?

Well, repenting of a number of sins that I had committed as a Christian as I was sharing my testimony. Because here's the thing, justification is done. Sanctification is slow. And the problem with sharing the same anything over and over again, unless it's like a lecture on King Lee or something, but the problem with doing that is it locks you in a time and a place.

And especially if you're doing it at a big conference, with colleagues or people who've kind of become colleagues, they're invested in you not changing your mind on things. And I had to step away and realize I have sinned.

And so the first section of "'Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Life," starts with me repenting to you all about those sins. But that was very helpful. The Lord, the Holy Spirit kind of sloughs up the reality, but if you're so busy, you got the mic on and got the makeup on and you're the dog and pony show, how do you hear the Holy Spirit?

And so now, sinners always sin with company, don't they? And so all of the sins that I, that the Lord graciously brought to my attention that I was committing as a Christian, as I was sharing my testimony with all of you and doing interviews and other things like that, I talked with some of the friends who are committed to me not changing my mind.

And it's been a really interesting thing because nobody said, oh, if it's a sin, please repent of it. People say, well, can't you just tell people you changed your mind? Can't you just learn? And I think that's a cop-out because if it's sin, you need to repent of it.

And actually Thomas Watson in his book, The Doctrine of Repentance, talks about the difference between repentance and counterfeit repentance. Counterfeit repentance is when evangelicals with a reputation to maintain won't repent, will just course correct.

You know, we're just like, well, we're all learners. True, but if it's sin, you need to record it as sin. I mean, if you take the wrong exit on the highway, that's not sin, that's a mistake. You don't have to repent of that.

You just have to correct it. But I committed sin and I needed to repent of that. And so that was a very life, repentance, you know, our confession of faith, Westminster Confession of Faith calls it repentance unto life.

Repentance is very life-giving. So I repented of my sin. I could write this book. I could, now I don't speak often because I have to taper it. I just do. It's a very, there's a high degree of spiritual warfare when I clip on that ear mic.

So I don't do a lot, but what I do, I try to do in the power of the risen and resurrected Christ, knowing that, you know, I just, I do Psalm 103, 12, right? He puts his sin as far from us as the East is from the West.

So that means for every Christian, today's a new day.

Amen.

It's a new day. And if you want to live with, you know, if you want to live with the courage, that's real courage, not just bravado, then, you know, repent of your sins. Psalm 32 says, you want to be happy?

Repent.

Okay.

So speaking of things that you've had to repent of, I think one of the big things that has come up, it was released as an article several months ago, but it was an excerpt from your book. You have repented of the accommodation view of using wrong pronouns or the hospitality view.

Right, right.

Can I just tell you how happy I was when I saw that? I have for years, just not understood.

Right, why is she doing that?

Well, not even you, just why anyone would struggle with it.

Right.

Names can go both ways.

Right.

Pronouns are binary.

Right.

To use a pronoun that doesn't belong to a person is what the Bible calls a lie.

Yeah, yeah. And it's hating your neighbor too.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a laundry list of sins connected to it. Having said that, Grace, right, you were not trying to harm your neighbor.

No, no.

You were trying to serve them. You were trying to love them. You were trying to accommodate them for the sake of the gospel. Nevertheless, just like all of us, at some point we realized, oh, this thing that I thought was helping me in my evangelism was actually a hindrance.

And the Lord may have worked around that because he's sovereign and he can do that. And he does do that, but we don't want to put barriers in the way. We don't want to sin that grace may abound. So how did you think through that?

What was, was it a series of things or did it just kind of, was it an epiphany one day?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I am Presbyterian, so I have pastor and I'm married to the pastor.

PCUSA?

No, good night.

PCA, okay.

OPC?

No, no, RPC.

RPC, which is?

Reformed Presbyterian Church.

You know you're reformed, it's right there in the name.

Yeah, no, we have less people in our denomination than we have at the conference right now.

That's so funny.

We are exclusive Psalm singers. We came to this country and declared something, a couple of radical things. Declared that if

We'll come back to that because I want to talk about the regulative principle.

All right, all right, all right.

So how did you come around on some of that stuff?

I sit under preaching that teaches me I'm a dirty, rotten sinner and I need to repent.

So the Bible.

Well, my pastors, my elders, people really said, hey, what are you doing? Or sometimes maybe we're like, why are you still doing this? Because here's the thing about being me and being you and being anybody, we come to Christ with a history and we're not lobotomized.

And so a lot of, so we bring some bad patterns in and the point of sanctification is to repent and to turn and to be done with those. And so definitely my pastors and my elders said, what are you doing?

And I really took it to heart because that's the first step of church discipline is when your pastor, your elders come to you and say, hey, I think

Or even a fellow church member.

Yeah, yeah, but I'll tell you the difference. Your pastor and your elders have authority over you. So, and I think this is important because I'll get, well, I'll close that loop. But so I do, I answer a lot of questions with I'm a Presbyterian.

You know, why am I going to war against, you know, some big names in variety evangelicalism? I'm a Presbyterian. But

So your pastors come to you.

So they come to me like, hey, what is going on? And I'm thinking, you know, yeah, that was, I don't really believe that anymore. And did I ever, and is there any fruit that's coming from this? No, no, no, no.

In fact, what's happening, we're not seeing people from, you know, a transgender, you know, disorder, repenting and coming to Christ. We're hearing evangelicals do seminars on how to humanize the transgender experience.

Like the church is becoming more gay and more trans and I'm part of the problem. So actually the Ref 21 article to which you referred, that is not an excerpt from the book. That's a, the book was written first.

You know how books are. So the book was written first. That article is much fuller than what I have in the book.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

So I want, and that I also call people out because I don't sin alone. I'm not the only, I'm not the, you know, I'm not singing a solo here. And I also wanted to make the case that God is not blessing us in the evangelical church because we have Aiken in the camp.

Okay.

Okay, Joshua, you know.

Yeah, my mom went to Danny Aiken.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, shots fired right out the gate. Here we go.

Oh dear heavens.

No, there's compromise in the camp.

You and I are a dangerous combination here. That is, yes.

And we don't believe in editing by the way, so.

That's great, that's great. Yeah, so, so, so God is not blessing us because we are sinning, hiding the booty under the dirt and yet somehow wanting to gain credibility by not repenting. Well, look, I serve a holy God.

If my repentance is my last day in broad evangelicalism's conferences, you know what, praise be to God.

Yeah, it's not a big loss.

It's not a big loss at all. And so I, so I.

And yet here you are at a conference because not all is lost. The Lord has appointed people to hold the line.

But I think God's, true believers are here and they need to hear the unfiltered gospel. But I realized that all of this, so, you know, use the use. So anyway, use of transgender pronouns. Part of why I did it was that it was a bad habit from being a gay rights activist, okay.

Which is a terrible excuse for any Christian. But I rationalized it by saying, if I can meet people where they are and just kind of respect their, you know, their fictional self, I can at least have a second conversation and a third conversation.

And that might have been true 20 years ago, but there's no way that that is true because that is called social transitioning. When you use someone's pronouns or a name or encourage them to cross dress, that is social transitioning.

And even the APA, which pretty liberal rag, like I don't, I quoted at school boards cause like that's their team. You know, even they will acknowledge that social transitioning, hormonal transitioning and of course, surgical transitioning stand in the way of the healing of gender anxiety in children.

And so to use transgender pronouns today in 2023, fast tracks people into a social contagion that really muddies the water about all the other comorbidities that they might've had that would lead them to this disorder in the first place.

And so I think it's fair to make a distinction. I make a distinction. Not everybody in the reformed camp would agree with me and I'm happy to have pushback, but I make a distinction between the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the social contagion of transgenderism.

So there's, let's unpack some of these terms.

Sure.

In your book, you talk about gender dysphoria, gender anxiety, and the social contagion, which I assume you're pulling heavily from Priscilla Shires.

No.

No, Abigail.

Abigail Shires, sorry.

Yeah, I am. And I'm also

Was that book not fantastic?

Yeah, it was amazing. Irreversible damage.

And she's a hair on fire feminist.

Well, that's the thing that we need to realize that the people who are leading the conversation in being rational human beings who know what a logical equivalency is and isn't and don't wanna be hoodwinked by idiots, all of those people are unbelievers.