Rosaria Butterfield is not a model for becoming un-gay

Growing up as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, I was taught that loosening any standards meant you were getting on the slippery slope toward becoming gay.

If I grew my hair out over my ears, I might eventually reject God and become gay. If I began listening to Southern Gospel music, I might eventually reject God and become gay. If I watched Mister Rogers wearing sweaters and talking about his feelings, I might eventually reject God and become gay.

When I became a conservative evangelical, we got rid of the rules but kept the fear. If I questioned prohibitions against women in leadership, I would eventually reject God and accept gay people. If I questioned young earth creationism or a global flood, I would eventually reject inerrancy and accept gay people.

Of course, we all differed on what the slippery slope involved. But despite our differences, becoming gay or accepting gay people was seen as the spiritual apocalypse of all sin. So as you can imagine, emotions tend to run high in conservative spaces during Pride Month.

Last year, Kid Rock pointed his middle finger at a camera and blasted away four boxes of Bud Light with his automatic rifle due to Anheuser-Busch’s support of the LGBTQ community. Congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green led boycotts of North Face for promoting a “nation of degenerates” and “grooming our children” due to an “Outdoors Together” campaign that encouraged people of various sexual orientations to take hikes together. Target had to remove Pride merchandise after customers were being violent or threatening to their store employees. And Russian NHL players boycotted Pride-themed game nights out of fear of retribution from Vladimir Putin.

One can only imagine what this year has in store for us.

“The divide between conservative evangelicals and progressive Christians on LGBTQ matters seems insurmountable.”

The divide between conservative evangelicals and progressive Christians on LGBTQ matters seems insurmountable. And perhaps it should be, given what both groups believe is at stake.

Conservative evangelical YouTubers Paul and Morgan, who spent 24 hours with a mixed-faith couple, released a new video recently where they spent 24 hours with Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals, which is a progressive Christian organization fully affirming of LGBTQ people.

In their time together, they learned to enjoy each other’s company more than they imagined they would at the start. But their differences about the Bible and LGBTQ people ultimately were too much for either to change.

One challenge in this conversation is that it is always evolving. Progressive Christians admit their views have changed over time. But conservative evangelicals assume they’re standing firm on what always has been true. They believe progressive Christians arrive at their affirmation as a result of a slippery slope.

But by assuming they’re standing firm on what always has been true, conservatives lack awareness of their own slippery slope or trajectory over time and promote influencers who champion their cause without realizing how extreme some of these influencers have become.

In a recent episode of the New Evangelicals podcast, Tim Whitaker sat down with Matthew Vines, founder of The Reformation Project and author of God and the Gay Christian. Vines says his focus is to help theologically conservative Christians “be able to continue to affirm and uphold the authority of the Bible … while also making space to affirm committed, monogamous, same-sex relationships.”

In their conversation, Whitaker and Vines discuss how some of the conservative evangelical leaders of the nonaffirming position have not been standing firm and unchanged but have changed their views over time and have slid down a slope toward an extremism that ends in violence.

Rosaria Butterfield’s concern over shifting views

Perhaps the most influential voice in conservative evangelicalism today for nonaffirming theology is Rosaria Butterfield, who claims to have once been a lesbian professor who got saved and stopped being a lesbian.

In a recent address to Liberty University, Butterfield laid out her concerns about other nonaffirming Christians who she thinks are on a slippery slope toward becoming affirming.

“This is a mission that leads everybody to hell.”

“You have heard that same-sex attraction is a sinless temptation and only a sin if you act on it, or that people who experience same-sex attraction are actually gay Christians called to lifelong celibacy, or that people who experience same sex attraction rarely if ever change and therefore should never pursue heterosexual marriage, or that sex and gender are different and that God doesn’t care whether men live as men and women live as women because all you need to do is grow in the fruit of the Spirit, as if the fruit of the Holy Spirit can grow from sin,” she said. “I have heard all of these lies, and just in the last year from Christian ministries.”

Then she continued: “This is where I name names. And I’m an English professor. So I call this citing my sources.” The crowd of Liberty students roared. “Revoice. Preston Sprinkle’s ‘Exiles in Babylon’ conference sponsored by his heretical Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, and Cru. I got the receipts people. … Christians do not encourage sinners to come out as gay or trans in order to be ‘missional.’ This is a mission that leads everybody to hell.”

Four views of LGBTQ relationships

While many conservatives assume you’re either affirming or nonaffirming, the reality is there are a variety of positions nonaffirming Christians hold to in an attempt to value the humanity of LGBTQ people while mitigating the harm their theology causes and maintaining their convictions.

Vines identified four main views, even though many who participate in the conversation do not like to identify with one of these four positions.

“Side A” Christians are those who affirm same-sex relationships, reject conversion therapy and support those who identify as both gay and Christian.

The nonaffirming positions exist on a spectrum of Side B, Y and X. All three of these positions reject same-sex relationships. Their differences have to do with their posture toward conversion therapy and self-identification.

According to the Pray Away documentary, conversion therapy is “the attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity by a religious leader, licensed counselor or peer support groups.” Self-identification in this context simply means Christians who consider themselves to be attracted to those of the same sex and want to refer to themselves as gay.

Because conversion therapy has been shown to be ineffective and harmful, Christians who don’t want to harm their neighbors have struggled with how to respond to it. Listing a number of the more influential nonaffirming Christians who identified as gay at one point in their lives, Vines said: “Christopher Yuan’s motto has been, ‘Holiness, not heterosexuality.’ Jackie Hill Perry has said that she opposes ex-gay therapy. Rosaria Butterfield called conversion therapy a heresy that she compared to the health and wealth prosperity gospel of ‘name-it, claim-it, pray the gay away.’”

While Side B rejects conversion therapy, Side Y distances itself from it and Side X promotes it. And while Side B supports identifying as gay and Christian as long as you remain celibate or marry someone of the opposite sex, Side Y and Side X reject identifying as gay at all. And as Vines points out, “Side Y was a reaction to Side X,” due to the obvious failures of conversion therapy and some desire to be kinder to LGBTQ people.

Rosaria Butterfield’s ‘unlikely conversion’

One shift that is noticed from people in all four views has been the unlikely conversion of Rosaria Butterfield. In her book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Butterfield tells the story of being a “tenured professor of English who identified as a lesbian and worked to advance the cause of LGBT equality.”

When the Promise Keepers were hosting an event nearby, Butterfield wrote an op-ed as a self-identified radical lesbian feminist to confront what they were doing. But she received a letter in response from a conservative Reformed Presbyterian pastor that seemed kind and thoughtful. She ended up becoming friends with the pastor and reading the Bible. And then she became a Christian in 1999, broke up with the woman she was in a relationship with, and married a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in 2001.

After telling her story in her book and in an article for Christianity Today, she became a hero for conservative Christians.

Political lesbianism

The reason conservative evangelical media outlets platform Butterfield is they think her story gives hope to nonaffirming evangelical parents that their kids who are processing their sexual orientation might choose to be heterosexual. But the deeper you go into Butterfield’s story, you’ll realize her journey within and out of lesbianism is one that virtually no conservative evangelical teenagers today could ever relate to.

“Her journey within and out of lesbianism is one that virtually no conservative evangelical teenagers today could ever relate to.”

“I never did call lesbianism my sexual orientation,” Butterfield said in her 2015 book, Openness Unhindered. Instead, she identified as a political lesbian.

“Of course, I had not always been a lesbian,” she says. “I’m no longer a lesbian.”

As Vines explains, being a “political lesbian” was an ideological position that started in the 1960s that said, “Women should pursue lesbian relationships and exclusively lesbian relationships, not because they are exclusively attracted to the same sex, not because they’re necessarily even same-sex attracted at all, but because they are rejecting patriarchy and therefore rejecting the idea that they need men in any way.”

In her 1996 book The Politics of Survivorship that she wrote while identifying as a lesbian, Butterfield stated: “I understand lesbianism within the psychoanalytic notion that sexuality is not an identity. … Non-identity-based notions of sexuality do not signify sexual confusion or political fear, or even function as a ‘real’ reflection of sexual practice, but instead point to the instability of identities — all identities — and establish gay and lesbian sexual acts as political practice and choice, not the apathologized consequence of apocalyptic biologism.”

In other words, Butterfield’s lesbianism was a political choice rather than a biological desire. It has virtually nothing to do with the experiences of the LGBTQ people she talks about. So conservative media platforms who promote her are either being dishonest or lack awareness of what her story really is.

Butterfield’s unexpected consistency

Ironically, despite Butterfield going from identifying as a political lesbian to marrying a conservative man in a complementarian marriage, she’s been remarkably consistent in her view of sexual orientation being a choice.

In her 2015 book Openness Unhindered, Butterfield wrote: “We claimed psychological proof that gender and sexuality were social constructs, and as such, matters of personal expression that can be changed, resisted or shaped as our own individual sense of personal integrity and desire allowed. Because we believed that ‘gay is good,’ we embraced a missionary’s zeal about political and social activism.”

Thus, her perspective today is remarkably consistent with what it was prior to conversion because she can simply choose a sexual partnership based on a new political identity. When she lived as a lesbian, she said she believed “marriage was slavery,” and thus rejected marriage and heterosexuality. But now she’d see herself as a slave to Christ, so marriage is still slavery. She simply changes her sexual political identity like changing a pair of clothes.

But underneath it all, she consistently sees sexuality as an impersonal political choice related to one’s posture toward patriarchy and consistently maintains the same extremist tendencies and missionary zeal about promoting which identity she chooses.

Butterfield’s evolution as a Christian

“All a political lesbian has to do to become an ex-lesbian is to change their political ideology,” Vines points out. “They don’t actually have to change their sexual orientation. So yes, in fact, if you are a political lesbian, you can change because all you have to do is change your political attitude. That has very little to say about whether someone can actually change their sexual orientation.”

So how has Butterfield evolved?

Earlier in her writing as a Christian, she spoke positively of the gay community’s hospitality and negatively about the Christian community’s lack of empathy.

In Openness Unhindered, she wrote: “Many people who identify as ‘gay Christian’ are desperately trying to be heard. And the church needs to listen up, because the failure to listen degrades faithful brothers and sisters.” In other words, Side B Christians were “faithful brothers and sisters.”

“I oppose invoking culture war mentality about homosexuality,” she pointed out. “It oversimplifies a complex issue and is violent, not only to Christians who experience unwanted homosexual desire, but also to the compassion of Christ and the witness of the church.”

Then she concluded, “We therefore ought to stop and make sure that we are really listening to each other. Not the ‘yes, but’ listening that pounces on every point of contention. But listening with empathy.”

However, in her latest book, The Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, she lists a number of things she’s repented of since her earlier book, including:

• Using preferred pronouns — because “during war, borders close.”
• Prioritizing LGBTQ youth over the God who made them — because it was “pride that I could be more merciful than God.”
• Giving biblical meaning to LGBTQ vocabulary — because “it is not irrational to fear sin running rampant.”
• Calling reparative therapy a “heresy” — because “people are not harmed by change-allowing therapies.”

Notice the shift in Butterfield’s language over time. She goes from considering Side B Christians as “faithful brothers and sisters” to calling them heretics. She goes from promoting hospitality toward LGBTQ people to promoting hostility, even referring to the conversation as a “war.” She goes from extending mercy to LGBTQ people to cutting off mercy due to thinking God was less merciful than she was. She excuses homophobia. She embraces conversion therapy despite its ineffectiveness and the harm it causes.

“She claims that a loving, consensual, monogamous same-sex marriage is more evil than the heterosexual non-consensual sexual assault of a child.”

Elsewhere, she calls for public schools to fire transgender swim coaches. She explicitly tells LGBTQ people: “Get back in the closet.” She tells LGBTQ people to cut off any shows, movies or books that present LGBTQ people as anything other than being morally evil. And she claims that a loving, consensual, monogamous same-sex marriage is more evil than the heterosexual nonconsensual sexual assault of a child.

If that trajectory continues, how could it not end up in violence? It’s already violence.

Penal substitutionary atonement as the slippery slope toward violence

Butterfield belongs to a group of conservative evangelicals who consider themselves to be “gospel-centered,” whose ethics are “living out the gospel.” So ultimately, one would expect that somebody as extreme as Butterfield would have parallels between their atonement theology and their ethics.

As Whitaker and Vines share quotes and clips, Butterfield says, “We look at our sin through the crosshairs of an instrument of execution, not a selfie at the Revoice Conference.” She adds that Christians need to “drive a fresh nail into sin every day.”

Executions and driving nails is violence language. And speaking of the Cross as a present event, no matter what your atonement theology is, denies Jesus’ statement that “It is finished.”

The eternal conscious torment and penal substitutionary atonement theologies Butterfield promotes are by their very definition justice as violence against human bodies. There is no way around that. It is solving what is wrong by violence against human bodies. Making that theology present through our actions today will increase violence against human bodies today.

How does that appear in Butterfield’s ethics? She says, “This is where you want to throw a stool at somebody’s head or an Easy Bake Oven, use whatever prop the Lord gives us.”

In another clip Vines shares, Butterfield says, “The first time Nate Collins met me at a conference and he asked me what it’s like to be in a mixed-orientation marriage, if I’d had a brick in my hand, I would’ve probably thrown it at him. … And I really do mean this.”

And lest we think she’s joking, she adds in her book The Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age: “Scottish Reformer Jenny Geddes was acting in submission when, one Lord’s Day, July 23, 1637, she threw a stool on which she sat at the preacher’s head after the unsuspecting preacher — James Hannay — opened the Scottish Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Jenny hurled the chair at the state-sponsored pastor because the Bible had taught her that the state doesn’t run the church, the state doesn’t sponsor the pastor, and the state-sponsored prayer book contained serious theological errors. Jenny knew her doctrine well, and she showed herself to be quite a biblically submissive woman in her historic stool-hurling. How did Jenny know to throw the stool on that fateful day in 1637, and how can we know that throwing the stool revealed Jenny’s submission to God rather than unmitigated rage and anger, or perhaps a preference, say, for a chair with a back? Because submission to church membership vows requires strength, courage and the willingness to follow the martyrs for the cause of biblical doctrine. Calling a woman to submission is calling her to be like Jenny Geddes in times of war. Jenny threw that stool at great personal risk because she was obeying her church membership vows over a government policy, which could have resulted in great personal consequences according to the law of the day. In fact, Jenny Geddes’ action launched the English Civil War.”

Choose your slippery slope

Given where our nation finds itself today with so many conservatives flirting with the idea of civil war, the last thing we need is justices of violence against human bodies forming our passions to the degree that we would promote throwing stools and bricks at people who disagree with us.

So yes, once you begin interpreting the Bible through a lens of love and wholeness, there can be a slippery slope toward accepting LGBTQ people because planting seeds of love and wholeness will produce the fruit of more love and wholeness.

But there’s also a slippery slope on the other side. And planting seeds that cause the violence of disembodiment and dehumanization will produce the fruit of more disembodiment and dehumanization. The question we must face this Pride month is toward which fruit we want to slide.

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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