July 11, 2016 Show with Rosaria Butterfield on “The Leftist Lesbian Professor Who Despised Christians… Then Became One!”

The Iron Sharpens Iron Introduction and Rosaria Butterfield’s Testimony

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland County,.

Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 11th day of July 2016.

And yes, I know I get very repetitive with this opening, but I am very excited about today's program. I have been trying to arrange this program for probably a year now, and finally, by God's providence, we have on the program for the very first time ever, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

Rosaria is a former tenured professor of English and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. She converted to Christ in 1999 in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, chronicles that difficult journey.

Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina, and is a homeschool mother, author, and speaker. And today we are going to be discussing the very controversial theme, the leftist lesbian professor who despised Christians, then somehow became one.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. Well, thank you. That was quite an introduction. I'm very happy to be with you today.

And before we even go into the topic at all, first of all, let me introduce you on air to my co-host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. Rosaria,.

It's very good to talk with you. Oh, good to talk with you, Buzz, as well. Thank you. And once again,.

Now the Presbyterians outnumber the Baptists on the program. I happen to be a Reformed Baptist, and my co-host, Reverend Buzz Taylor, is a Presbyterian. So we go back and forth with this.

Who outnumbers. Who. I'm usually outnumbered, but so I'm glad you're on today especially.

Don't get used to it, Buzz.

Maybe by the end of the program, Chris will be a Presbyterian. Who knows?

That is unlikely to happen. That will be definitely a mark of the apocalypse.

An unlikely convert.

That's right. Well, before we even go into this very fascinating subject, if you could, I would love for you to tell our listeners something about the First Reformed Presbyterian.

Church of Durham, North Carolina. Oh, boy, you know, I get interviewed a lot, and I don't get asked that question nearly enough. Well, my husband's a pastor. We seek to faithfully proclaim the Gospel.

We are committed to a worship that is centered in the Word, because we know that is the only means by which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, anyone is saved. We welcome visitors. We'd love for you to come visit us.

Now, this might actually sound more like a Baptist church right now than a Presbyterian church, but I'm going to say it anyway. We have a fellowship meal every week, and the food is really good, so we might convert you.

After all. We did that too. Every week? My church in Maine, yes. Oh, okay. Yes.

And we'd love for you to come visit us. Well, I will definitely make it a point to try, because I actually, North Carolina is near and dear to my heart, because, not that this interview is going to be about me, and I don't want to go on too big of a detour, but I, years ago, after experiencing 18 years of sobriety after my conversion to Christ, I unfortunately lapsed into the sin of unrepentant drunkenness, and I went to North Carolina, to Boone, North Carolina, to a wonderful ministry there called Hebron Colony Ministries.

Oh, wonderful. I spent three months there and have not been interested in touching a drop of alcohol ever since I emerged from there, and obviously, this is not in any way a dig against my brethren in Christ who responsibly enjoy a liberty to drink moderately.

I just personally cannot go near it, but anyway, I have fallen in love with your state, though, as a result of that. So, I plan to return there. They have invited me to return there, this time as a speaker, not as a student there, or a resident, and hopefully that will happen, and I'll be able to pass through Durham.

Wonderful. Really good. Stop by. And the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, it is known as the Covenanters, correct? And they are exclusive psalm singers and acapella music. Yes. And one thing that our listeners may be interested to know is that the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America was one of the very first Christian denominations in the South, if not the first, to oppose slavery.

That is absolutely right.

So that's just one of the major contributions to not only the body of Christ that this denomination has made, but the church at large, and in fact the country, for that matter.

Yes.

Original Sin, Same-Sex Desire, and the Meaning of Conversion

Well, you were, before becoming someone who was involved in lesbian or homosexual activity, you were raised in a nominal or liberal Catholic church, were you not?

I was. I mean, both of my parents, it seems, yes, they really were. And I went to a Catholic church almost exclusively, there was a year, I primarily went to liberal Catholic churches, in part because my parents, you know again, I see this looking back as God's providence, they really wanted me to have some kind of Christian foundation, although they were very quick to caution me against believing it.

So my dad would drop me off at school and he would say, honey, you know, obey the nuns, they're scary, don't do anything that might cause them to wrap you over the knuckles, but you don't have to believe everything they say.

So I was raised by progressives, but yet at the same time, I was raised in a Catholic environment as well.

Now, when you say that your parents were excommunicated, were they formally excommunicated? Yes, they really were. Because that hardly ever happens unless somebody is incredibly famous or infamous.

Right, right. No, no, no, that was just part of our history.

That's interesting because, you know, I know a lot of Roman Catholics who live any way they choose to and they have never been excommunicated. Right. That's interesting. So in this background of upbringing, how did you eventually come to get to know women who were involved in lesbian or homosexual activity and what endeared your heart to them and drew you toward them, etc.?

Well, you know, I don't think it was the environment that drew my heart. I would say that ever since I was pretty little, I would have considered myself somebody who just was drawn to the company of women.

And I think that, you know, original sin makes this case pretty well, that homosexuality, at least according to Romans 1, is the ethical outworking of original sin for some of us, you know, not for everyone.

Others have, as you said to the program, alcoholism. Others have other, you know, just vulnerabilities that, if left unmanaged by the Gospel, will just run amok. So, you know, I don't know. It wasn't that something strange happened.

I just was living my life and I was just living it in a way that allowed for little to no understanding, really, that there would be indeed a time in my life when I would look back on my life and say, wow, you know, I was like a beast before you.

So I thought everything was fine. And, you know, in my 20s, I dated men. The whole time I was dating men. And so by the time I came out as a lesbian at 28, I really didn't have a moral crisis over this.

I mean, someone else might have, but, you know, I felt like life finally came together.

For me and made sense. And it's interesting that you described it as a product of original sin. There are many evangelicals and conservative Christians and fundamentalists who will say that there's no way that someone could be born with a homosexual proclivity.

But then I started to hear from some Reformed brethren who started to put a little bit of a more of a complicated factor into the mix. They would say, wait a minute, if we believe in total depravity, why would we necessarily rule that sin out as a proclivity that a sinner could be born with?

Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's a really key thing. And I think one of the things that's really dividing Christians right now is what original sin really means. You know, from a Catholic and an Anglican perspective, original sin means that you have been distorted, almost like being born deaf or being born, you know, without an arm.

It's a natural problem. But from a Reformed perspective, following Augustine and taking us right to the heart of Romans, we know that original sin actually means that we are born guilty and corrupt. And there's a big difference.

You know, there's a huge chasm between admitting a sin, you know, and really perceiving yourself to be a victim of it, and confessing a sin and owning it as yours. And you know, it's very hard. We need to do that, whether it feels like sin or not.

I mean, I talk to a lot of people who struggle with unchosen homosexual desire, and to a one, people will say to me, what is in my heart to understand isn't Jesus. But how could this be sin when it feels so good?

And I don't mean this to be, you know, to be crass, but quite frankly, if your sin doesn't feel good, you're probably not doing it right. You know, there's a glitch there in what you're thinking. And obviously, as we grow in sanctification, there's a war.

There's an actual war in our spirit that feels like we're being torn apart by wild horses. But once a sin becomes an indwelling sin, you bet it feels good. And it's the gospel and the gospel alone that allows you to stand against that in a way that does not.

Fill you with shame and self-hatred. And by the way, I want to give our listeners our email address if you would like to join us on the air with a question for Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. In fact, that actually sounds like a brand of champagne, Rosaria Butterfield Champagne or Butterfield Wineries.

But if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, you can email it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's chrisarnsen, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-S-E-N at gmail .com. Please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

But we understand with a topic like this, there may be many of you who would choose to remain anonymous and we will respect your wishes. Just make sure you identify yourself that way in your email so I will know.

Actually, you just don't need to put your name in there, and so I'll be forced to keep you anonymous. But the email address again is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Now, you had heterosexual involvement, as you were saying, dating men, falling in love with men, but always had some kind of a gravitational pull towards the company of women.

When did you start to realize that it was more than just you like hanging out with women more than men? Because in fact, I think that most often men do enjoy, I'm talking about red-blooded American heterosexual men enjoy hanging out with women, and women enjoy hanging out with men more than the opposite sex.

Yeah, and I would say it was pretty early on because even as I was dating men, I was falling in love with women. So there were, you know, pretty consistently, just knowing that my friendships with women were just a little over the top.

Finding myself, you know, kind of obsessing about a particular woman. I mean, you know, at the time, I really didn't have a moral framework to, you know, to really do anything but just sort of notice it, like one might notice, you know, I don't know, something else.

So it really happened pretty early. And then, you know, certainly in graduate school, in college and then graduate school, my feminist and LGBT rights community, I was certainly in that kind of ethic that gave me words for what I felt.

But even without the words, the feelings were.

Still there. And did this, I mean, you already stated that you came from a liberal background. Did this trouble you as being something abnormal or wrong in any way? No, it really didn't.

It didn't. And I think sometimes when I speak to, especially church groups, appropriately so, you know, people want to know, how did my family feel about me coming out as a lesbian? And I had, you know, I always have to explain that actually, my coming out as a lesbian was not challenging for my family.

I came from a progressive family. You know, their question was, you know, are you still going to get tenure? I mean, it wasn't. I mean, like that. But when I came out as a Christian, that was another story.

That was an offense. But no, I really lacked the checks and balances. I lacked them both in my environment, but even maybe more importantly, I just lacked them in my own conscience. And I think, you know, the Bible really helps us understand this, you know.

I mean, it helps us understand everything, but, you know, sin really does deceive people. And to be deceived doesn't just mean to be wrong. You know, to be deceived is to be taken captive by an evil will to do its force.

And once, you know, once you start on that path, once a particular sin becomes an entitlement, an identity, and an indwelling sin, it's really deep in there. It's really deep in there. So, I didn't have either the internal, moral conscience to respond to this, nor did I have the external trapping of a community that might have any opposition to it either.

So, I just slid pretty easily into my life as a lesbian. And I never have called it a lifestyle. I've never thought it was a lifestyle. To me, lifestyle is like hairstyle, you know. It's pretty vulnerable.

It changes. That was a life. And I felt very sincerely that that was not only a life, but that that was a good life. I felt strongly that gay is good. I felt strongly, you know, that Rousseau was right.

Doing what is right in your own eyes, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, is a good thing. I deeply did not understand why Christians would not leave consenting adults alone. And I even authored papers on the morality of gay and lesbian lives.

And so, for me, coming to Christ really was losing a life,.

Not changing a lifestyle. Well, it's interesting you brought up papers, because your testimony is, I think it should be a lot more, maybe it's a lot more common than I think, but I found it interesting that you were reading the Bible for other purposes, and then you started to realize from the Word, as it did its job, if you will, the Holy Spirit, using the reading of the Word, convicted you of your sin.

And could you tell us a little bit about.

That journey? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was, after tenure, you know, which is a big deal, right? You're tenured and then you're there for life. Then you can do what you want, so to speak. Professors still work very hard.

But after tenure, I embarked on a book project where I was looking at the religious right from a lesbian feminist point of view. And my purpose was to critique the religious right, and specifically, because I'm an English professor by training, I needed to read the Bible in order to do that.

And I embarked on this project of reading the Bible in order to trash it and teach everybody else what was wrong with it as a guide in life. Now, in the process of doing that, I wrote a little op-ed piece in the Syracuse in protest of the Promise Keepers, the Christian men's movement gathering at the University, and received a lot of mail about that.

You know, a lot of hate mail, a lot of fan mail. But one letter that I received was from Pastor Ken Smith. He was the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church, and it was simply the kindest letter of opposition that I had ever received.

And it struck me, because I'm a very good manipulator, this might be my new unpaid research assistant for this book. Ken knew the Bible, he loved the Bible, he wanted to meet with me, he wanted to talk with me.

I was afraid he was going to evangelize me and would do things like invite me to church and share the gospel, so I thought I'd better keep him on topic. But in fact, I was delighted to meet with Ken, because quite frankly, I was a very good user.

And so Ken, in his letter, invited me to meet with him about this, and I thought about it for a week and called him up and said, okay, let's start reading the Bible together, let's start talking about it.

I was that confident that I was right.

Friendship, Scripture, and the Slow Work of Conviction

And this really began to develop from engagement with an adversary you were suspicious of to a.

Friendship. Oh yeah, and actually, even from that first night, Ken was disarming to me, and I think if there's one thing that I would want unbelievers to know about our safe time, and those are the two things that I very much felt about Ken.

I didn't feel like he was using me or manipulating me, I felt like he was very respectful of the fact that I was not a blank slate. He didn't say, well, you know, Jesus is going to solve all of your problems.

He didn't even know what my problems were or what I perceived them to be. And his wife, Floyd, was delightful. I mean, if this was the stereotypical Christian family, it didn't fit any of the boxes I had for it.

You know, Floyd was very much a helper to Ken and submitted in those helper ways, but boy, she was smart, and she was clearly... the way that she was his helper was, in fact, using her strength. And so, nothing about Ken and Floyd, you know, fit my box, and we developed a genuine friendship, a genuine friendship, so much so that we would meet weekly, and we would meet, we would talk about the Bible, because I was doing this research project on it.

We would meet sometimes at my home and sometimes at Ken's home. Ken safely met my friends in the LGBT community. It was a very challenging time, because at this time, I was reading the Bible, you know, the way kind of a glutton would look at a box of cookies or something.

I could be the chairperson of the over-readers anonymous, you know. I was reading it, and it was working in me, and it was really upsetting me in many ways, upsetting my sense of self, upsetting my presuppositions, all of it, and Ken was just hanging in there with me.

Yeah, well, I actually, when I discovered the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, a Reformed Theology, as an Arminian Christian, was getting angrier and angrier when I was discovering truths about the Bible that I did not know were there and that I initially didn't like at all.

In fact, I went from not believing in the doctrines of grace to acquiescing regretfully that they were true, but hating it, then to loving those teachings. And so, how long was the progression with you, when you're reading the Bible, going from anger to fascination to actually love of.

What you were reading? Right, right, right. It was at least a three-year process. I mean, it took two years just reading the Bible over and over again before I would even step foot in the church, and then it was about another six months before I went forward.

And part of what was so scary to me at this time was, and Ken was so good at this, too. Ken never looked at me and said, wow, you know, here's this famous lesbian activist. Boy, being a lesbian is the biggest sin in our life.

Ken just didn't believe that. He knew that being an unbeliever was the biggest sin in my life. So it was very helpful, because even as I'm reading the Bible and as the Lord is really convicting me of sin, I was convicted that I was in sin, but my feelings did not change immediately.

It wasn't as though the conviction of sin meant that I no longer had unholy sexual desires for women. And I really think that only Reformed theology can help somebody understand how that can be. And so I was very, very blessed.

And in fact, I sometimes, I'm not really prone to nightmares, but when I am given to fear or panic, it's about this, oh Lord, how good you were, how good you are, that when I was going through literally an identity implosion, it was 1999.

And I was doing this under the loving care of a solid Reform. How grateful I am that it wasn't 2016, when I might have been told, well, you're just a gay Christian, and here are your options, here are your options, you know, but this is just, this is who you are.

We all know this is who you are. We all know nothing, you know, we all know sexual orientation can never change, and you know, now we just have to work with this. I'm so grateful that, I can't even imagine how hard it would be for people in my position today, with the culture and the Church just losing all kinds of Gospel ground.

And it's painful to watch.

Yeah, not only the world, but the Church at large, Christendom. Has changed so much in that very short span of time.

Absolutely, and it's frightening to me as a writer and a speaker, to see the way Satan has had a foothold now, not only in culture, but also in Christian publishing, in Christian education. And, you know, part of this was inevitable after the Obergefell decision that declared it constitutionally illegal in all states.

It was, you know, the Gospel has been on a collision course with the culture since June of 2015, and that might be a little off.

The topic of what you want to talk about. No, I want you to go in any direction you feel led, because your testimony is more than just the lesbian aspect of your past, you were also a political leftist in many ways.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't just,.

You're right, I mean, this could have been the story of someone who just had deep and abiding same-sex feelings, for whom the Lord, you know, delivered grace and a bounty of Gospel conviction, who now, years later, married a man and has children and lived happily ever after.

That's not my, I mean, that's just not the story. My story was that I was an activist. I co-wrote the first domestic partnership policy at Syracuse University, and that's the blueprint for gay marriage.

Now, I never believed that I wanted to be married, you know, because that kind of takes the fun, I would say, out of being gay. You know, I mean, really, I said that, you know, why add good people to a sick institution?

But I certainly knew that it would be very,.

Very useful for the movement. Yeah, I can even remember, I can see how even the rhetoric of homosexual activism has changed radically since like the 80s and so on, because I can remember clearly seeing homosexual activists on Phil Donahue and other places that they didn't want marriage.

Why do we need a Christian or religious ceremony to justify what we do? And that kind of.

The thing. Right, right, right, absolutely. So there's a lot at stake here, that whenever you, whenever a culture changes the language, it changes the logic. And this kind of gets off the book, Secret Thoughts, really does chronicle my conversion and just the internal turmoil, really, of what repentance of a sin of identity really means, and what it means to learn that repentance is the threshold to God.

But the book that I wrote after that, Openness Unhindered, is the one where I talk a little bit more about culture and theology, which gets into some of the present issues today of, okay, now that the gospel is on a collision course with this category of sexual orientation, what does the church do about it?

And what is sexual orientation anyway? Is it really a category of personhood? I mean, is there really such a thing as a gay person? Excellent, excellent. Yeah, and I will tell you that in my own life, I mean, that was a struggle,.

That was a struggle early on. Before we go to the break, you were going to say, or what? Because I want to, we have to go to a break right now, but I don't want to cut you in mid-sentence. You said, is it an orientation or an identity?

Or is it a... Excellent. Well, we're going to be right back after these messages, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Rosaria Champagne Butterfield about her testimony of having been a leftist lesbian professor who despised Christians and yet somehow became one.

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. And we do already have several people anxiously waiting to have their questions asked and answered by you.

And we, obviously, if any of you need to remain anonymous or feel more comfortable remaining anonymous, we will certainly respect your wishes. And we're going to be right back after these messages, so do not go away.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. She is the wife of Pastor Kent Butterfield of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham, North Carolina, and she is the author of several books, including her first, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, or at least I think that was the first you wrote when you became a Christian, am I right?

Yes, yes, that is not the first,.

But that is the first one I would want your listeners to read. Right. And we want to thank.

Crown and Covenant Publishing for helping us arrange this interview. Danielle, very sweet woman over there, has been trying very hard to get this arranged for almost a year now, it seems, and we finally, by God's good grace and mercy and providence, have gotten this arranged today.

If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Before I go to a couple of the listeners who are already waiting, I wanted to just, so we kind of get an idea of this transformation and the setting behind it.

When you became a Christian, were you a monogamous lesbian with a specific person that was your partner at this point in your life, or were you more promiscuous and having a free lifestyle in that regard?

Well I certainly valued promiscuity.

I mean, there's nothing in my moral framework that spoke against promiscuity, but I practiced what was fairly common for most of the folks in my lesbian community at the time, and that's serial monogamy.

And if you could kind of explain that. Yeah, that, you know, one partner at a time, right, and you know, the longevity of most of, you know, my relationships for about five years. And so back to the, you know, if what you value is sexual autonomy and freedom, then you have to, you know, you have to modify monogamy in some way.

Mm-hmm. And we do have a listener who actually I know, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me giving her full name, she is a published author herself, quite a brilliant Christian woman, Latane C. Scott. She is a former Mormon who came to Christ by God's mercy and grace, and is a Bible-believing Christian, and believes in the biblical gospel and God of the scriptures.

And I have had her on this program a number of times since we first launched in 2006, and I'm very happy to let our listeners know that you could go to her website if you ever want to find out more about her writings, latane .com, that's l-a-t-a-y-n-e dot com.

But she asks, Rosaria, I've made a commitment to start inviting people who are involved in, quote-unquote, alternative lifestyles to my home. Recently I invited a family, long-time friends, that included a teenager who is, quote-unquote, transitioning from male to female.

I wanted to show the kind of love of a friend that welcomed you when you were a practicing lesbian, but what is the best advice for showing acceptance of people in my home without seeming to advocate such choices?

Hospitality, Boundaries, and Gospel Witness in the Home

Right, oh, first of all, I just love Latane, and I wish, you know, she was actually asking the question, no offense to you, but you know Latane. Yeah, well, only as fellow published authors who have written to each other and pray for each other.

Oh, wow. So yeah, yeah, and I love what she does and her courage and her kindness. And so what I would say, and this is the last chapter of the book, Openness Unhindered, that came out last year. I talked, you know, pretty intensely in that chapter on this.

Inviting people into your home is the best way, because we are now in a world where you cannot ask hard, you can't, well, let me put it this way, where the best defense of the Gospel is one where the strength of your relationship mirrors the intensity of the concern or question you have.

So the best way to prepare to live the Gospel in front of people is not by making sneaky little in-rates into culture by standing behind a placard at a gay pride march. It's really not. It's by having your neighbors in your home and having an ongoing, genuine relationship with them, where you know their allergy, you know their fears, you know what kind of, you know, when to help them by picking up their children at the bus stop, you know how to return their lost dog to the back gate.

You know that. And that context that you share the Gospel. Now let me say, it isn't one after the other. So it's not that, oh, I'm going to spend six months really getting to know these people, and then I'm going to spring the Gospel on them.

No, no, no, no, no. If they're in your home, then they're going to be part of family devotions, because that's what you do after you have a meal. You include them in prayer time. You include them in your need to bring Jesus into the conversation.

Not to, not to, you know, grandstand, but because you need Jesus to be part of this conversation. You make yourself a trusted friend. But you don't make, you're not sneaky about this. You're transparent.

Remembering that, you know, beautiful verse in Ephesians, that you are to speak grace into the situation for the hearer. You don't actually need to say every single thing you're thinking at that dinner gathering.

I mean, and really, let's just think about it. If we all go to church this Lord's Day, and we say everything that's on our mind about everybody there, how is that going to work for us? I mean, I'll tell you, as the pastor's wife, that's not going to work very well.

It's just not going to work very well. So, you know, we can use the same, you know, moderation of speech with our neighbors who have much to lose. And, you know, people who are struggling under the weight of sexual sin or a sin of, you know, of other things that are just deep like that.

You know, there are a couple of things that we need to understand. We Christians, we need to understand that for the most part, you know, people don't choose that. I've never met somebody who has chosen gender identity dysphoria.