00:00:00.000Rosaria Butterfield is a former feminist left-wing lesbian activist professor who was saved by Christ a couple decades ago and has since been sharing her testimony and the freedom that she has found in Christ.
00:00:16.980She recently just published an article talking about the sin of using quote-unquote preferred pronouns for people who identify as transgender. This was a practice that she once took part in, in the name of Christian empathy, but now has realized that it's a sin.
00:00:33.780Wow, she has so much to teach us today, not just about her own testimony, her story of how Christ saved her and the kind of evangelism that was so effective for her in her own life, but also how we as Christians can stand really strong in the spiritual battle of this age.
00:00:53.980Oh my goodness, you are going to love this conversation and be so encouraged and empowered. That's just what the gospel does. And she is an amazing vessel of that gospel.
00:01:05.340This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com. Code Allie.
00:01:12.900Rosaria, thank you so much for joining us. I think most people listening to this have read your books, they know your story, or they've read your articles, they've at least familiarized themselves with your testimony.
00:01:35.680But there are some people out there who don't know. So if we could kind of start from the beginning, and you could at least give us a refresher on your testimony, and how you came to do what you do now.
00:01:50.220Okay, great. Well, you don't want me to start from the beginning, because I'm 61 years old, and we would be here for a lot longer than 45 minutes.
00:01:58.260Oh, that's perfectly fine. I'm sure it's all very interesting.
00:02:00.700Well, I'll get to the good stuff. When I was 28 years old, I came out as a lesbian feminist activist. I had been really struggling with, I guess what we would call same-sex attraction for at least, I guess, a decade before that.
00:02:21.320Although I had dated men and was just sort of waiting to get zapped and find my balance. But that never did happen. So I became pretty radicalized in college and then graduate school and decided at 28 that I should just come clean and call myself a lesbian.
00:02:40.800And so the next decade was filled really with serially monogamous lesbian relationships. But in addition to that, I was a professor. I was a professor at Syracuse University of English and Women's Studies.
00:02:53.580I was recruited and mentored and then tenured to launch a queer theory program. And I became one of the first crop of Tier One Research University's gathering of tenured radicals. So I wasn't just a lesbian next door. It was my job to really make homosexuality look wholesome. And I did my best to do that.
00:03:18.300Right. And then in the process of writing my post-tenure book, which was basically on the religious right, and my genuine question was, why do people like you hate people like me? Or the person I used to be. That was the genuine question.
00:03:35.880And so I started working on that book. And in the process of working on that book, I met a pastor and a neighbor. His name is Ken Smith. He is still alive. He's in his 90s. And he and his wife just shared the gospel with me. Not once, not twice, but probably over 500 meals.
00:03:57.080And I genuinely wanted to know why they believed what they did. And so I'm an English professor. I needed to read the Bible. And I knew that. And so under Ken Smith tutelage, I read the Bible. I read it through seven times. And that's a lot of times.
00:04:16.580That gives the Holy Spirit a lot of bandwidth in a person's life. And so during the two years that I was really studying and reading, I came to the conclusion that I could not write this book and that Jesus was real and true and risen, and that that would be true whether I believed it or not.
00:04:41.220And so that was really the beginning of my undoing as a lesbian activist, activist professor, but also my remaking as a godly woman and a Christian. And so I wasn't zapped. You know, I don't know what to say. I mean, it wasn't like I committed my life to Christ and then woke up the next day and said, oh, I should have had a V8. Everything's different. No, I mean, sanctification is slow and hard and painful.
00:05:11.220But it's also real and true. And so I am one of that earlier generation of Christians who can tell you that I came to Christ and praise be to God, I'm no longer gay. And those seem to be hate words these days or hate some kind of a hateful speech these days. But it's simply true.
00:05:35.960Yes. And there's a lot that I want to ask you about that period of sanctification, because I know there are people who are listening to this who are either in your generation, my generation or younger, who do they hear that and maybe they're even Christians and they're thinking, that's impossible. You can't ever stop being gay.
00:05:55.520That's just authentic to who you are. Your attractions cannot change. The best that you can do is just kind of be celibate. And so they're listening to you. They want to believe what you have to say, but they're having a hard time wrapping their minds around it.
00:06:10.320So before we kind of get into that, because I know this is going to be relatable for so many people and we joked about not going to the very beginning, but I am interested in kind of just a little bit about your upbringing, how you came to it.
00:06:24.480You know, at 28 years old, you know, at 28 years old, say, I'm not just a lesbian, but I'm basically a queer theory activist. I'm going to live my life this way in a time when that wasn't quite as mainstream and rewarded by the mainstream as it is today.
00:06:41.420I mean, did you grow up in a religious background? What was that like? What set the stage for that?
00:06:45.680Sure. Well, my name is Rosaria, so I'm named after the rosary. So I was raised in a secular Roman Catholic family. And I went to Catholic schools throughout. My dad would drop me off at school and he'd say, remember two things. Do not get in trouble with the nuns. Do everything they say and don't believe a word they say.
00:07:11.340Wow. So I was raised by secular rationalists. My parents were strong defenders of Planned Parenthood. And I talk a little bit about that in all of my books, but especially the book that's coming out in September.
00:07:29.360So definitely I was a religious skeptic who had enough, I guess, Catholic training to understand some of the vocabulary.
00:07:44.440But I guess the secularism kind of won itself over. Ultimately, you didn't really have any kind of theological foundation.
00:07:51.760So when you decided that you, you know, were going to come out as a lesbian, was there any kind of moral wrestling that you had? Were you worried about telling your parents or if you would be accepted or anything like that?
00:08:06.820Well, you know, I probably should have been. I probably should have been. But actually, when I came out as a lesbian to my family, that was less threatening than when I came out as a Christian.
00:08:24.420And so I think that might be a little hard to really track with. But my family's liberal and feminist worldviews and commitments made it so that they weren't a blank slate and I wasn't a blank slate.
00:08:42.580I believed what I believed because I believed that that was morally right, not because it was some kind of an affliction and I just couldn't help myself.
00:08:54.360No, I actually believed that what I was proclaiming was true and right and good and virtuous.
00:09:12.580So you told your parents, your parents kind of were just like, OK, not that big of a deal.
00:09:21.220And so you quickly found acceptance and celebration within the academic community, correct?
00:09:28.200Do you think that was part of what made you or what motivated you to be so public and so activist minded that there were kind of rewards and accolades that accompanied this identity?
00:09:38.780Well, that could be. I'm not sure that in the 90s, there are quite as many accolades.
00:09:47.820But, you know, I mean, you know, my undoing has always been that I'm a truth speaker. Right.
00:09:53.640I mean, so that's that's how I always get myself into these pickles.
00:09:57.720You know, you know, I had a little stick on my desk that said I'd rather be, you know, wrong on an important point than right on a trivial one.
00:10:07.240And in some ways, I just always really lived my life like that.
00:10:12.600But there is no question that in the 90s, especially at the universities where I was at, there was a strong core of feminist activists.
00:10:23.800And and I was one of those. And it really did give me, you know, a team and a cause, if you will.
00:10:31.340Right. So let's fast forward to you kind of explained the in between and then sanctification as you described it.
00:10:38.660It's not like you woke up one day and you were fully sanctified and you decided, great, I'm not a lesbian anymore.
00:10:44.040I'm going to just move forward in this life with Christ.
00:11:42.340I mean, can you imagine how horrific it would be to be one of my lesbian, feminist graduate students writing a dissertation in queer theory?
00:11:49.960And I become a committed Christian, you know, that that truly would ruin your life and your career.
00:12:02.620And tell me about that specific point of sanctification.
00:12:05.540You've written about this before, actually, in a response article to Jen Hatmaker a few years ago, saying that, sure, you can be gay and be a Christian.
00:12:15.480And you talk about how you kind of wrestled with that after you became a Christian, after you believed in the gospel.
00:12:21.640You wanted to think, yes, I can be a gay Christian.
00:12:25.060Yes, I can have my partner and have Christ, too.
00:12:30.020You know, well, first of all, the wrestling should be really obvious to anybody that that whatever it is we like and we do and is so normal and natural to us that we can't really separate ourselves from it.
00:12:46.060It's really hard to see that through the lens of Christ.
00:12:49.520It's hard to see that as a vestige of original sin because we can we normalize it and we can think of all the ways that we've done good in the world and all those kinds of things.
00:13:02.560And so I think the first challenge for every single Christian is to use the Bible as our lens for to separate out what is part of our image bearing of a holy God, part of our creational design and what is part of the world, the flesh and the devil.
00:13:19.520So the only way to distinguish those two is to use the Bible.
00:13:23.900If I use my feelings, I'm going to get messed up on all kinds of things, not just homosexuality.
00:13:28.680So that's the first order of business.
00:13:31.180The second order of business, then, is to actually believe that the Bible knows me better than I know myself and that that Jesus has something better for me than what I think is true.
00:13:46.400And then the third part is to learn, and this is, again, not specific to homosexuality.
00:13:54.840This is for every single Christian on planet Earth, to learn how to hate your sin without hating yourself.
00:14:01.260And every Christian I know has to get up every morning and drive a new nail, fresh nail, into our choice sin every day.
00:14:13.260And if you actually do that, the power of the resurrection is yours to have victory over your sin.
00:14:29.980And at any moment, any of us could backslide and fall into whatever sins are, you know, that know us really well and that we know really well.
00:14:40.820But that's where we realize that prayer doesn't mean you ask the Holy Spirit to do your job.
00:14:49.360See, prayer isn't, Lord, you know, pray the gay away.
00:15:37.000But it's probably the only one that has civil rights protection.
00:15:42.080And so for that reason, many, many evangelical Christians are really torn right now about how to proceed forward.
00:15:54.040And that's where we just have to be bold and clear and not muddled and ambiguous and really quite, you know, foolish.
00:16:02.920So as an academic who became a Christian, were you met with some of the same arguments about Christianity and homosexuality that we are today?
00:16:37.540And I think that's always been my challenge.
00:16:41.400You know, some people become fairly proficient swimmers by being thrown into the deep end and providentially slapping around in such a way that allows them to survive.
00:16:52.860That doesn't necessarily mean they should be a swim coach.
00:16:57.040And in some ways, that's a good analogy for how it's always been for me.
00:17:01.400I've really always been confronted with extremely challenging questions.
00:17:07.440But by God's grace, I've also been part of a denomination with pastors and elders who have been able to really equip me to work through these questions.
00:17:20.880Those are good questions, and they actually have good biblical answers.
00:17:27.300And so a lot of it has to do with if you believe there are any problem passages in the Bible.
00:17:32.960In other words, do you believe the Bible was actually given to us, God breathed, transcribed by chosen men, inspired by the Holy Spirit,
00:17:43.040so that we could have everything we need for faith in life?
00:17:47.860Or do you believe that there are some real problems in here?
00:17:51.960It's, you know, it's not really sufficient.
00:18:00.840If that's what you believe, which I think is a foolish way to go about, you know, why even buy it?
00:18:05.180Why even be a Christian if you're going to believe that your Bible can't see you through and your Lord's salvation is not sufficient?
00:18:14.280I mean, I don't even understand why you'd want to be a Christian at that point, but that's a different story.
00:18:19.380If you see that the Old Testament and the New Testament, in fact, are so deeply connected because our God is one God, not two gods, that there are no problem passages in the Bible.
00:18:38.740If you can see and appreciate that, then you can hold on, that you can have confidence and you can learn how to wait on the Lord as you are fighting your sin.
00:18:50.900And you can learn this fine art of Christian maturity as you grow in sanctification.
00:18:57.220And I think those are really important things.
00:18:59.660But I also was, and I guess I still am, a 19th century scholar.
00:19:04.820And these ideas about sexual orientation as a category of personhood were ideas that came of age out of German romanticism and Freudianism and were part of the 19th century.
00:19:19.880And so anybody who studies the history of ideas, as anybody with a PhD would, would know, well, these are not really ancient ideas.
00:19:28.680This idea that sexual orientation is who you are, not how you are, is about 150 years old.
00:19:42.120And so even as a gay rights activist, my community was very suspicious of some of these ideas about sexual orientation.
00:19:54.280Now, in my generation, we were suspicious about it because it was considered an illness.
00:20:00.040And we wanted you to know that gay is good.
00:20:02.560We weren't sick and we didn't need your cure.
00:20:05.040But the same, you know, the same issue is at stake here.
00:20:08.660So my generation, actually, we understood our homosexuality through the lens of a, at that point, iconic lesbian poet named Adrienne Rich, who wrote a fairly seminal article called Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.
00:20:29.700So many of us came to our lesbianism out of heterosexual relationships.
00:20:59.700There's so many things in what you said that I want to respond to and ask questions about.
00:21:05.880But one thing that you said is that really kind of some of those difficult questions and good questions that people have about what does the Bible really have to say about sexuality in marriage?
00:21:17.080They really do go back to fundamentally what you think, as you said, about the Bible, but also not just that about God himself.
00:21:25.060Do you believe that he is authoritative?
00:21:28.200Do you believe that he is trustworthy?
00:21:30.720Then that will determine how we read the Bible.
00:21:33.480We don't just read the Bible saying, well, what can we get away with?
00:21:38.380What does the Bible specifically say that we cannot do?
00:21:41.720And can we somehow exclude those verses to see how sinful we can really be and still be a Christian?
00:21:48.340We also look to the Bible because we love God and he loves us and say, but what does God say to do?
00:21:53.680What does he say is good and holy and pleasing to him?
00:21:57.020And we see only one type of sexual relationship positively defined, spiritually defined, eternally defined, and that's marriage between a man and a woman.
00:22:06.940So I think you're absolutely right that it really is about a lens.
00:22:10.360Yes, those questions are good, but they speak to something, I think, more fundamental about someone's faith and how they view God.
00:22:17.700But I guess my attachment to that or my building off of that is how then you kind of changed your mentality from one of not just skepticism, but really a dislike of Christians thinking that they hated you to realizing, oh, God is loving.
00:22:47.140How did you go from that skepticism and maybe antipathy towards Christianity towards realizing, wow, God actually wants what is good for me?
00:23:55.140And I remember, you know, I was sitting there thinking, you know, oh, poor me, I am, I am the only lesbian here.
00:24:02.100You know, I am all alone, and these, these, these people are my enemies, and they don't believe in gay rights, and they don't, you know, you know, and, you know, we're singing through the psalm, and I'm, I'm doing this kind of pity party.
00:24:18.740And then we get to this line, you know, about dining in the presence of my enemies.
00:24:23.700And I don't know, it was, it was really a, it was a scary moment for an English professor.
00:24:28.820English professors like to be right about reading things, right?
00:24:31.400We like to think we know how to read books.
00:24:32.980So it was a really bizarre moment for me to realize, I actually was reading this whole psalm from the entirely wrong point of view.
00:24:44.740These people were not my enemy, I was theirs.
00:24:50.000And furthermore, I was Christ's enemy.
00:24:54.200But then to make it all the more disarming, these people love me.
00:25:02.560And I think that was the real turning point for me.
00:25:05.960Now, I'd love to tell you that I just dropped to my knees and committed my life to Christ, and it was all, that's not what happened.
00:25:30.520And so I would say, I came of age under a discipling ministry that understood, you're not actually supposed to pretend that your enemies are your friends.
00:25:41.500You're supposed to do something harder, you're to love them.
00:25:45.460And I was a recipient of that kind of radical Christian love.
00:25:53.080And how did these people kind of balance with you truth-telling about sin and salvation and just friendship and kindness and hospitality?
00:26:12.340So I think that we need to understand that a post-Abergefell world has different rules attached to it.
00:26:19.880Because the Obergefell decision, 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, had embedded in it something called the dignitary harm clause.
00:26:30.680And the dignitary harm clause says, if you deny my LGBTQ plus, minus, et cetera, et cetera, dignity, that's, you know, that's harm.
00:26:41.980Now, in my generation, you know, if you didn't sell me a pizza, that was harm.
00:26:46.840If I go in and you're, you know, you're a pizza owner and you're supposed to sell me a pizza and you don't sell me a pizza because I'm queer.
00:26:53.680Well, I just want my pizza, well, I just want my pizza.
00:28:00.840And the more that a society offers laws and values and ideas that are further and further away from biblical truth, the more foolish and immature we are going to create a citizenship.
00:28:19.240And so it is never in a Christian's interest, as someone who is to love your neighbor as yourself, to put a law between a fellow image bearer and a holy God that would prevent her from coming to Christ.
00:28:38.680And so something like the Obergefell decision is a terrible sin.
00:28:46.340You know, and you certainly should not be, you know, sort of a la David French trying up, trying to come up with some bizarre way that you're going to import, you know, pluralism as some kind of a gospel defense.
00:29:14.640I've never, I actually have not, I have not heard it explained that way.
00:29:20.180Of course, I agree with you on the Obergefell decision and the kinds of laws that affirm what we know is sin is just not a definition of marriage that has ever legitimately existed.
00:29:33.100Two men, two women now are seeing more than just two because why not?
00:29:38.280But I've never heard it explained that supporting a law that legalizes gay marriage is actually an inhibition to someone repenting and believing in the gospel.
00:29:50.880Can you explain that a little bit further?
00:30:03.860The job of the civil magistrate is to punish evil and to allow good to flourish.
00:30:12.060And if it flips that around, if it starts to punish the, if it starts to allow evil to flourish, then it by necessity, it will have to punish the good.
00:30:24.920But just for a minute, think about how powerful this is.
00:30:28.580There's only one entity that wants you, that prohibits repentance, wants you to not, not repent.
00:30:40.200So any law that would make it hard for someone to repent of a sin is itself sin.
00:30:49.620And any person who in any way supports that or even kind of muddies the waters on that is in gross violation of God's love for lost people.
00:31:05.480I mean, I felt like I was being torn apart by wild horses when I came to Christ.
00:31:14.280Now, I was obviously not, quote unquote, legally married, but I had co-authored the university's domestic partnership policy, which was actually a forerunner to gay marriage in the 90s.
00:31:27.980That, you know, just getting my lesbian partner off my health insurance was really hard.
00:32:22.740But if you repent and believe, you have the power of the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:32:27.720And so what you see among all of these, I don't know what to call them.
00:32:32.520At this point, you have to make the distinction between Christians who want to go to heaven and Christians who want to have, I don't know, New York Times, you know, columns.
00:32:40.060But the Christians who are very, very concerned about, you know, how difficult it would be for people to leave their, you know, their lives.
00:32:52.620Do you not believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, who created the mountains and told them where to stand, who created man and woman in his image, not as his image, but in his image.