Rosaria Butterfield speaks at the Crabtree Family Life Series at Union. — Photo by Molly Vogt / Union University
JACKSON — Rosaria Butterfield told Union University students Feb. 25 that her former identity as a lesbian activist was not the root of her sin, but rather the “evil fruit” of a deeper unbelief in God.
Speaking in the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel as the featured guest for this year’s Crabtree Family Life Series, the author and former Syracuse University professor shared the narrative of her radical conversion from a prominent leader in the LGBTQ movement to a Christian and a pastor’s wife. She cautioned students against a “half-gospel” that offers forgiveness for guilt without the power to break the bondage of sin.
“My sin was unbelief. My sin was refusing the free offer of the gospel,” Butterfield said. “Homosexuality is a sinful deed of the flesh, not a permanent feature of any Christian’s life.”
Butterfield described her life in the 1990s as a “postmodern intellectual” who strove for justice and stood with the disempowered. At the time, she viewed her lesbianism as a “cleaner and more moral way to live” and recoiled in anger at the mention of the name of Jesus.
Her perspective began to shift through an unlikely friendship with Ken Smith, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor and neighbor who reached out to her after she wrote an article criticizing the religious right. Rather than debating her, Smith invited her to dinner and challenged her to read the Bible as a scholar.
“I started reading the Bible in earnest with pen in hand and notebook in lap,” Butterfield said, noting she often read for up to five hours a day during a local sabbatical. “Slowly and over time, the Bible started to take on a meaning and a life that startled me.”
Butterfield spent two years “fighting with the Bible,” eventually realizing that if the God of the Bible is the creator of all things, the text had the right to interrogate her heart and feelings. She specifically highlighted the impact of Romans 1, a passage she had previously “dodged” and that characterizes homosexuality as an outworking of the suppression of truth.
Reading it alongside a picture of a transgender friend’s abandoned family caused her to rethink her belief that an LGBTQ lifestyle hurt no one.
“For the first time in my life, I wondered if I was wrong,” she said.
Her conversion was not a result of being told to “pray the gay away,” she noted, but was instead a theological shift toward justification. She described the moment of surrender during a church service where she realized she belonged to Christ.
“I came to Jesus alone, open-handed and naked. I had no dignity upon which to stand,” Butterfield said. “There is only one thing to do when you meet the risen Jesus Christ. You fall on your face, and you repent of your sins.”
Now 27 years since her conversion, Butterfield describes the Christian life as a “normal war” between the flesh and the spirit. She urged students to rely on the Bible as the “discerner of the thoughts of the heart,” rather than cultural or sexual identity.
“The Bible actually has the right to interrogate my life, my culture, my heart, my feelings, and not the other way around,” Butterfield said. “The Bible knows you better than you know yourself.”
Butterfield’s full address can be viewed online. B&R
