It's not faithful and it's not compassionate if you don't help people know that God saves sinners just like me and he changes our lives.
He liberates the captives. That's the gospel. Rosaria Butterfield is a familiar guest here on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and her life was dramatically turned around through the loving witness of a pastor and his wife and you're going to hear her incredible story today.
I'm John Fuller. John, I'm reminded of something I heard years ago and I repeat it because it's true. There is no one beyond the reach of God and that's how he cares about each one of us.
Sinners saved, it doesn't matter. My dear friend Rosaria Butterfield was a tenured professor at Syracuse University. She was a lesbian activist who even testified in Congress on behalf of the LGBT community. She was opposed to Christianity, wrote articles, scathing articles, even about Focus on the Family, but through some unique circumstances that you're going to hear about today, God began speaking to her through this couple that you mentioned, John, and it was quite a journey and here's the point.
I just want to say it again. No one, even this tenured professor at Syracuse teaching queer studies, women's studies, all of that was beyond God's reach and we as the Christian community need to realize that. These are people that God loves. Indeed and Rosaria Butterfield, as you said, was at the university. She also taught at Geneva College and is a well-known author.
She's written a number of books including the one we're going to draw from today called Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age and Jim, he visited with her recently in Durham, North Carolina. Let's go ahead and listen in on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Well Dr. Butterfield, it's great to have you here on Focus on the Family. It is wonderful to be here, but you must call me Rosaria, you know that. Okay, Rosaria, it's so nice.
Let's start with background. Some people have not heard your story. I'm sure the team here at Focus will link to that so people can hear that program we taped long ago. It was probably seven years ago or so.
Or longer. And it was a powerful, powerful story. So let's start there. When you were a professor at Syracuse, what was your world like? What were you doing?
What was going on? Yeah, I was a professor of English and Women's Studies at Syracuse University, tenured, and I was one of the first crop of tenured radicals. And while I was there, I was a true believer, just not in the things of the Lord. I truly believed that I was a lesbian, and I truly believed that especially the religious right, or pretty much anybody that didn't understand the importance of pluralism and leaving consenting adults alone was a fascist, was just a dangerous figure to me. And so after my tenure book was secure and I was a shoe-in, I started working on a book on the religious right. Basically just trying to figure out why people like you wouldn't affirm the person that I used to be. And in the process, I met a neighbor and a pastor, Ken Smith, and his dear wife, Floy.
And they probably had me over to their house for 500 meals. I don't know. I'm not a math major.
Maybe I wasn't. But a lot. A lot, weekly. You know, I remember from our previous discussion, you described it as you received all kinds of mail, the love mail from the LGBT community and then the hate mail from the Christians. And frankly, some of that hate mail was very vicious.
You know, I'm going to tell you, the hate mail from Christians wasn't quite as vicious as the hate mail from just non-religious conservatives. Okay. And so, yeah. But anyway, yeah, so... And in that context, that's where you received a note from Ken and his wife saying what? Well, basically, it just said, look, we don't agree with you, but we would love to have a conversation with you. And at that point, I really thought, this is terrific, because I'm trying to write a book, and the only way I'm going to be able to do it is to actually understand from your point of view why you don't agree with me. So you saw this as a research opportunity. Yeah, I saw them as my unpaid research assistant.
I thought that would be work just great. And the fact that they were in my neighborhood and I could get there pretty easily. And when I walked through the door of the house, they greeted me warmly, they gave me a hug, and they said, if you want to understand this question, you're going to have to be reading this thing, this Bible.
Ken said, and I want you to understand that this is a holy book, and I just want you to know, here is what your problem is. And I thought, well, this is interesting. Wow. Day one?
Day one. I mean, because we... So he didn't hold back?
Not obnoxiously. I mean, I should tell you, he knew who I was. I mean, I had co-authored the university's domestic partnership policy, which was a forerunner to gay marriage in New York. We were not unknown. I mean, we hadn't ever sat down and... Bend together. Bend together, but we knew each other.
It's a fairly small community at that point. And I testified before the legislature for gay rights. He knew who I was. And he just said... And he wasn't edgy. It's not like he said, oh, you're an idiot or anything like that.
He said, I just want you to know, here's what's wrong. We believe as Christians that what is true determines what is ethical and what is valuable. You believe what is ethical, according to your standards, determines what is true. And that's our biggest difference.
Yeah. One's rooted in... And I thought, this is amazing. This is actually someone that is thinking through, in some ways, the same things I am. Because it wasn't lost on me that situational ethics could lead you into an implosion.
So all to say, immediately I realized that Ken and Floyd and I were going to get along. And the other thing he said to me, which is very powerful, he said, Rosaria, I can accept you as a lesbian, but I do not approve. And what I appreciated about that was that it was honest. I would not have expected any evangelical to affirm or to approve of me. Then I wouldn't have needed to be at the table with you. I wanted to figure out why you didn't affirm.
But he also said something very loving. I accept you. I see you. I'm not a non... In other words, although I didn't have words to describe it, he treated me like an image bearer of a holy God, not because I was lesbian, not because I was speaking truth to power or whatever that means, just because God made me. Right.
Because you're human. Yeah. And so that began a long relationship. In that relationship, Ken gave me a lecture. It really was a lecture. Actually, he wanted to give it to my students. And I was like, no way, buddy. You're not getting at my students.
You're good, but you're not that good. Exactly. So he gave it to me. In fact, it's in Five Lies. The whole lecture was something he allowed me to repurpose for us. And in it, it's really a hermeneutic of...
But before we go there, we wanna go there, but before we go there, the end result there is that you... Okay. Yeah. The end result is that I read the Bible seven times through in two years. And if you do that, you give the Holy Spirit a lot of attention. Yeah.
I mean, and you have a lot of room in your life. And at the end of this journey, I realized that this book was different from any other book I had ever read. It was powerful. It was reading me.
I was not reading it. And so I did the only responsible thing. I went to Ken and Floyd Smith, and I said, that's it. We're done. I'm gonna throw the Bible in the garbage. And I don't need... Ooh, so now you're getting intimidated.
I don't need you guys as friends anymore. Okay. So that was the response. That was my response. I'm like, no, this is dangerous. And also... Because you were feeling it.
I was feeling it, and my lesbian partner was feeling it, and my lesbian community was feeling it. And I'm like, okay, this is not what I bargained for. I bargained for a research project where I wrote a book explaining, well, you guys are stupid.
I was not planning on having this book overhaul my life. And so their friendship really gave me the courage to keep reading, this time not because I was writing a book, but just because I needed to read for myself. And at a certain point, I just came to realize that the resurrection was true. It was true whether I believed it or not. And so we have to realize, and this is where Christians... One of the things that was powerful about, of course, Ken Smith meeting with me is he didn't have a program.
He didn't have like, hey, here are my three favorite slogans, and they go with T-shirts. No, he was a Christian who prayed for me and said, Lord, what's the bridge to this woman? And so we have to be careful that we're just not kind of pulling out like, well, this worked with me, so this is going to work with someone else. Because Christians need to know what time it is, and we need to know, especially our young people, are heavily influenced, I'm even going to say seduced, by the idol of our day, which is LGBTQ plus affirmation. Should the Lord tarry, our day will be remembered in the infamy of Moloch. And to make it worse, the broad evangelical church is buying gay Christianity in its softer version, and it is creating enough cognitive dissonance for people like the person I used to be that we just don't have any fight left in us. We are effectively tying the hands behind the back of our young people who are genuinely feeling a tension of the sin struggle. I mean, our children who were raised in Christ are not heathens, they are not pagans, they are people with a conscience, but they don't have any fight left because the church is not speaking with clarity, with conviction. Instead, it creates this kind of nonsense world where Jesus comes to liberate captives, but just not you if your issue is sexual sin.
It is heresy. In fact, when you look at it, the scripture in the New Testament is replete with examples of sexual sin. I mean, we tend to look away from that, but Paul wrote extensively about it. Right, but we don't call it sexual sin, we don't put it in that category, we call it personhood. We say things like, well, I'm not sinning, I'm just gay. And then you have whole segments of the evangelical church trying to camp out there and be quote, unquote, faithful and compassionate. Well, it's not faithful and it's not compassionate if you don't help people know that God saves sinners just like me and he changes our lives.
He liberates the captives. That's the gospel. And so the book started for me with my repentance for the ways that I believed all these lies. See, Ken and Flay Smith loved me. They loved me enough.
And you felt it. But they loved me enough to tell the truth. Okay, they didn't say, oh, we need a gay bowling league in our church so you can feel comfortable. They understood that you want to minister to the LGBTQ plus movement?
Good, there won't be an LGBTQ plus movement because they'll be Christians. So they understood that. They loved me enough to tell the truth.
And instead I see Christians today pretending that our enemies are our friends or just pretending we don't have any enemies. Now, let me ask you, I mean, that leans into this idea that you were willing to hear that truth. Something in you.
Yes, yes, I was. Because you can meet with 100 people from the LGBTQ community and maybe one is going to respond the way you did. Well, I would say this, that God has put eternity in the hearts of all men. So how do we find that? And so you might want to go, you know, yeah. And so you need to know that it is only the truth that will set people free. So here's what I would say. I would say this, and this is not a Bible verse, so don't ask me for a Bible verse.
This is just kind of how Rosaria ticks. If I have a strong relationship with you, I can have strong words. But if I don't have a strong relationship with you, it's going to be hard to have strong words. But a strong relationship is not based on garbage. It's not based on affirming what is not true.
It's based on showing genuine mercy. How can you help your neighbors? Who needs to be picked up from the bus stop? Who needs to have their garden weeded?
Who needs a front screen door fixed? You know, those are basic things that don't involve you lying to people. But a lot of this stuff bled into how I thought about things. And so the book... Let's hit the five lies. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, your book titles, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, everybody should be waking up going, wow, okay, what are those? And lies are not things that you can marshal to the service of Christ. Let's be clear. I'm not saying five differences, five nuances.
I'm saying five lies. Okay, that means they're of the devil. They're of Satan. That's Galatians 5 18.
Thank you, yes. That's his fruit. That we do have a Bible verse for. That's his fruit.
That's right. So the first is that homosexuality is normal for some people and that sexual orientation is a category of personhood instead of what it actually is, which is a 19th century category invention, okay? You are not... There's no such thing as a gay person. You're a person. And in fact, specifically Genesis 1 27 and 28 says that you are made in the image of God as a man or as a woman for the purpose of procreation, for godly marriage.
You were made for godly marriage. No matter how you feel, you are not a gay person. You're a man or you are a woman whose sin pattern makes all of that feel impossible.
I completely get that. But to normalize how you feel is to spit in the face of God. So the normalization of homosexuality. Let's stop there for a second because I think as I've interacted with a handful of people in the LGBTQ community, that's one of the things that they tend to stereotype Christians with is that we perceive ourselves to be perfect as opposed to we're broken people too. And this idea that sexual sin only flows to that alphabet is not right. I mean, heterosexuals have problems. Like if you look at a woman in lust in your heart, you've committed adultery.
But it's not the same problem and this is where we need to say it, okay? And yes, I need to deal with my own sin and that's what a lot of this book is telling you about this but the first ingredient of repentance is recognizing sin as sin. So if I don't recognize it as sin, if I say, no, this is my sexual orientation, I'm a victim, I'm a whatever, out the box I can't repent of sin. And without repentance, repentance is the first word of the gospel out of the mouth of Jesus. I think it's Mark 1.15, 1.15, repent and believe. So repentance is a gift from God, no question.
It is not something you can just kind of... So you pray for repentance. You pray, Lord, this is a wonderful prayer for anyone listening to this who's struggling with your sexual sin. Lord, help me to see it as sin because I don't. I see it as my daily reality. Help me to see it as sin.
So that's number one. Number two is this belief that pagan spirituality is good and it's just as good as biblical spirituality because these are just nice people doing nice things. And the problem with that is that it tends to rely on an ocean of common grace. Like, look at that, how can you say homosexuality is sinful when my lesbian neighbors are the nicest people on the block? Well, in God's sovereignty, he has often put good skills and not a saving grace, but a grace in the lives of unbelievers, and that's to bless you and bless the church. And the fact that they still are going to hell with it should make you want to share the gospel. Now, you refer to that as a spiritual person versus a Christian. Yes, versus a Christian, yeah.
And so... I don't think many people talk in those terms, though. It's good to understand what you mean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it helps you understand that we're not talking about a secular world anymore. We're not talking about the evils of atheism and secularism. We're talking about the evils of competing religions. And that's why there's so much fervor attached to this.
If we were all just being objective outsiders saying, well, you know, it would be totally different. But Peter Jones from Truth Exchange has been writing about this for years. And it really talks about this Romans 1, just the power of what Romans 1 is saying, specifically like 18 to 24. Do you mind if I read that passage? Yeah, go.
Yeah, it's good. Because I think it's just helpful to think this through. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks. But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged, that's the word I want you to look at, exchange, exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal men and birds and animals and creeping things. And therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, if you want to know the scariest line in the Bible for me, that's it right there, because I was there, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged, that's second exchange, the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever, amen. And for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, second scariest line in the Bible for me. Gave them up to be given up by God, oh.
Handed them over. Handed them over, I was there, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what they ought not to do.
They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, and it goes on. You see three exchanges, and what we need to know about those exchanges, the first was the exchange of the worship of God for the worship of self, okay? Check, that's exactly what homosexuality is, and that's exactly what pagan spirituality is, right?
You're going to find God right inside you. The second is the exchange of the truth of who God is for the lies of a man-made, now pagan, religion. And then the third is the exchange of what is natural, which is heterosexual, for what is unnatural, which is homosexual.
Now part of why this becomes a really important passage is that you see in pagan spirituality the exchange of all of these three lies, but you also see a particular way that gay Christianity uses the exact passage that I read. Now gay Christianity is a movement that has come up in the church. It is a church-grown movement, okay? It's not like it fell from the sky. Humans didn't create it.
Not outside in. Not outside, no, because all heresy comes from the church. You want to know where heresy comes from?
Us, we do it. Side A is the position that affirms gay marriage and gay sex. Side B affirms gay identity and gay feelings as good and noble and right, but denies that acting on them is appropriate.
Now one of the kind of lead figures in the Side A movement is Matthew Vine. So you know what he says about that passage? He says it has nothing to do with homosexuality. The whole thing.
The whole thing. You're like... Yeah, denying it. You need a reading comprehension class. I mean, I don't know what else to say. I'm an English professor.
You have a PhD in English. But Side B does something also equally interesting with it. Preston Sprinkle, who is an advocate and probably the lead figure right now in Side B gay Christianity, he says that Christians, straight Christians, should never use Romans 1, wave these texts around the way he puts it, to call gay Christians to repentance. You know, obviously that's wrong. It's obviously wrong.
But one of the things that's wrong about it... So we could say like, well, that's false teaching. But no, I would say that's heresy. And the reason it's heresy and it fits right into the second lie is because the Word of God is an objective truth. Hebrews 4 says it's a double-edged sword. It cuts between the soul and the spirit.
It doesn't change because of the posture or the subject position of the person wielding it. And people who say that are heretics. And so that second lie encompasses a number of pagan movements, including the pagan movements that some of us, some people will call Christian, like gay Christianity. Well, Rosaria Butterfield not holding back there, sharing about the truth of God's Word. And my goodness, what a conversation with Rosaria today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. She doesn't, John. She doesn't hold back.
And that's what I love about Rosaria. She is a fierce defender of the Christian faith. And think about that after being on the opposite end of that spectrum, where she was a fierce defender of things that were not lined up with the Christian faith. Each one of us is born into sin. And sometimes we as believers, we have got to remember that. And we're born into a desperate need of God's grace. The Bible says all have sinned, not just all of them. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And that's why Jesus came to lay his life down for us, to take the punishment for our sin upon himself so we could have eternal life.
We believe in him and turn from that sin. I'm amazed at many things that Rosaria shared. But being an educator and a researcher, man, she demonstrates that hunger for truth wherever it's going to lead. And she said that she read through the Bible seven times in two years as a non-believer. Yeah, I wonder how many Christians can say they've read through the Bible recently.
Yeah, no kidding. Many believers have not read through the whole Bible, John, like you're saying. But God's Word spoke to her powerfully. And it really changed her life. That is a witness. You can't mess with a person's testimony.
It is what it is. And also the pastor and his wife were such a loving example of Christ leading to her spiritual transformation. And then of course, she left the lesbian lifestyle. It's exciting to see how God is using her now to help others. Yeah, what a remarkable story. And we'll have more to share tomorrow as we continue looking at the five lies in the culture. And Rosaria's book is great for follow up.
It's called Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age to read more in depth about her journey and cut through the cultural chaos. John, I want to emphasize this. When we're saying be a partner with this, help us on a monthly basis, give a gift of any amount and we'll send you the content.
Man, we're not asking for you to do that transactionally. We're asking for you to enter into doing ministry with us. Where is Rosaria's message going to get out if not here at Focus? We're not simply telling you what we think. We're having great guests come on that have powerful testimonies like Rosaria and sharing it with you. And hopefully you can share it with others that might be struggling with some of these issues in our culture today. That's the impetus for us to say, join us, be a part of the ministry in God's big economy.
It's not transactional. It's be a brick in the wall that is being built to help bring people to Christ. So well said, Jim. And it's so fun to see you activated. You're passionate about this.
Yeah. I, you know, I just want us to participate together. Jean and I do it.
I know you and Dina do it this way. Monthly support. And it's not business, folks. This is spiritual, but we can't do what we do without you. We have to rely upon you and we want to. So let's get more of this message out.
Yeah. Make a monthly pledge as you can of any amount and support the work of Focus on the Family. We'll send the book is our way of saying thank you. And if you're not in a spot to make that monthly commitment right now, we totally understand. Make a one-time gift of any amount and we'll send the book. Donate today and support this ministry. Be part of it when you call 800-232-6459.
800, the letter A in the word family. We're stopped by the show notes where you'll find the links. And if you like what you heard today, there's an even more comprehensive conversation that Jim had with Rosaria on this topic. Visit refocuswithjimdaily.com. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Join us next time as we continue the conversation and once again, help you and your family thrive in Christ. Hi, I'm Dr. Greg Smalley and I'm Erin Smalley. Marriage is an amazing gift from God, but it can also be a challenge sometimes.
That's right. We could all use a little guidance and that's why we started our podcast, Crazy Little Thing Called Marriage. We talk about things like recognizing conflict cycles, dealing with stress and how to grow your love each day. Listen at crazylittlethingcalledmarriage.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We can't wait to see you there.
