A Lesbian Professor of Women’s Studies’ Conversion to Orthodox Christianity
In Christianity Today Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a former lesbian and professor of women’s studies, describes her conversion to orthodox Christianity through interaction with a Reformed Presbyterian pastor, Ken Smith.
As a professor of English and women’s studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren’t for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right. Pat Robertson’s quip from the 1992 Republican National Convention pushed me over the edge: “Feminism,” he sneered, “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Indeed. The surround sound of Christian dogma comingling with Republican politics demanded my attention.
After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full. My partner and I shared many vital interests: aids activism, children’s health and literacy, Golden Retriever rescue, our Unitarian Universalist church, to name a few. Even if you believed the ghost stories promulgated by Robertson and his ilk, it was hard to argue that my partner and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers. The GLBT community values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice, and integrity.
Butterfield’s story is both fascinating and rare. What is particularly interesting is the way she describes how reading the Bible destroyed the assumptions on which her entire worldview was built. Unlike so many who come to the pages of Scripture with their critical deconstruction in full gear, Butterfield sought to actually read Scripture on its own terms, with respect.
You should read her whole story at Christianity Today. She has also written a book about her conversion, and Marvin Olasky interviews her here.
Posted on February 13, 2013, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Agreed. Thank you for posting this article; I’ve shared her story a number of times with others since her book was published.
Speaking as a person baptized in the United Church of Christ (the liberal denomination which is a merger of most Congregationalists and most of the former German Evangelical and Reformed Church), I think I know more than a little bit about theological liberalism and how honest liberals think. For almost half of my life, I denied the Trinity, rejected the most basic principles of evangelical Christian doctrine, and even argued that Christians have a moral imperative to work for the legalization of homosexual marriages — basically applying what were then my libertarian political principles to the church rather than letting the Bible determine my beliefs. (Side point — much of what we consider politically conservative in modern America is actually libertarianism, an older form of liberalism which may appear to be conservative but shares with liberalism an emphasis on the sovereignty of man and human freedom to choose, rather than the authority of God and man’s obligation to submit our wills to God’s will.)
Even after my conversion, because I stayed in my liberal church much longer than I should have, it took me a number of years to get my doctrine straightened out and I was still advocating serious heresy for at least a half-decade after my conversion. Let’s just say it got interesting at Calvin Seminary when professors and students made comments about people rejecting women in office because they weren’t used to the idea of women preaching and said opposition to women’s ordination would be reduced when people got more used to seeing women in the pulpit. That line of argument generally stopped when I pointed out that I had probably heard more women preaching than every person in the room combined, and at the time, my mother was working in a Congregational church with a female pastor attended mostly by lesbians and some male homosexuals.
I hope those examples are enough to point out that those of us in conservative Christian circles often do not realize just how radically different a consistent liberal worldview is from what we believe.
A closely related problem is that too many evangelical Christian teachers of apologetics argue that we shouldn’t interact too much with non-Christian or anti-Christian intellectual arguments since, in their view, those arguments are merely cover-ups for underlying refusals to accept the moral imperatives of Christianity.
The issue of rejecting the moral claims of Christ is a valid concern — but it’s mostly an issue for those raised in the church who have backslidden, or those raised around the church in predominantly evangelical communities who actually know biblical standards and see them practiced by lots of professing Christians. For someone raised in truly liberal circles, they may not even know what Christianity teaches about morality, or consider Christianity’s moral claims to be irrelevant because they believe Christians are hypocrites who don’t practice what they preach.
The intellectual objections of an honest liberal have to be addressed if those objections are their real objections to Christianity. They may not be. But let’s give people the benefit of the doubt rather than just automatically assuming that non-Christians are lying when they tell us why they oppose what they believe.
The issues involved in homosexuality are even more difficult to deal with. My home church is in Greenwich Village and for many years was the only evangelical church in that radically liberal section of New York City. It has a number of converted homosexuals in its membership. Ministry to people caught in serious sexual sin is extremely difficult, ministry to those caught in homosexuality is even more difficult, and we should not minimize the tremendously difficult work that this RPCNA pastor did in working with a woman who, at that time, was an aggressive and assertive lesbian.
It’s easy to get discouraged. Most homosexuals will not be converted and will continue to hate God and His Word no matter how nice we are to them, and no matter how calm and persuasive our arguments may be. Nevertheless, God can do miracles. We sell him short if we don’t remember that He is sovereign and we aren’t.
The following excerpt from Ms. Butterfield was especially illuminating:
I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.
The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God?