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| Rosario Butterfield |
lesbian woman or a transgender woman (and then you can fill in all of the different categories that come under the umbrella, LGBTQ).
“And the reason is because, in Genesis where we have to start, we are given our identity. Our identity is in the image of God, bearing it as a man or as a woman. There are two kinds of people in the world—a man or a woman.
“A man who says he's a gay man is a man with a sin pattern that Jesus came to help set him free from if he will mortify it, repent, believe, go to war. It's very hard to do that. I'm not suggesting it's easy, but that is our job, and you know what? It's not just somebody whose indwelling sin is homosexuality who happens to have that call. It's everyone, because we are all born in the sin of Adam. And it is because of the sin of Adam that we have sin in our nature.
“And that quite frankly means that every person in this room needs to wake up every morning, drive a thousand fresh nails into your choice sin and do that before breakfast and then do the same thing before lunch. And if you do that, Satan's gonna get a little tired of you.
“But here's the problem, homosexuality is the only sin pattern with a civil rights group behind it. And therefore, people who are deceived, as I was and Christopher [Yuan], by the lusts of our flesh have a cheering community behind you, and this is where you get the rub.
“You see, it used to be that the church was clear and the world was the world, but because we have wolves in shepherds' clothing, we have way too many young people who are leaving the true church and claiming, 'Well, my same-sex attracted pastor told me it's not a sin to be gay.'
And you know, we are to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. I want to be gentle with the people who are trapped in the lie of LGBTQ, but I am not gentle with the wolves...I quite frankly think they need to get a job selling insurance until they repent..."
Rosaria Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University, converted to Christ in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Crown and Covenant, 2012), chronicles her conversion. Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina. She is a mother, grandmother, author, and speaker.
Raised and educated in liberal Roman Catholic settings, Rosaria loved books and philosophy. In her late twenties, allured by feminist philosophy and LGBTQ+ politics, she adopted a lesbian identity. Rosaria earned her PH.D. from The Ohio State University (1992), then served in the English department and women's studies program from 1992 to 2002, earning tenure in 1999. Her primary academic field was critical theory, specializing in queer theory. Her historical field was 19th-century literature, informed by Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, with a special interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She advised LGBTQ+ student groups, co-authored Syracuse University’s domestic partnership policy for same-sex couples, and actively lobbied for LGBTQ+ legal advancements alongside her lesbian partner.
In 1997, while Rosaria was researching the Religious Right “and their politics of hatred against people like me,” she wrote an article against The Promise Keepers. Local Reformed Presbyterian pastor Ken Smith responded to that article, and Rosaria regularly met with Ken and his wife, Floy, over dinners in their home. Ken and Floy became a resource on the Religious Right and the Bible they loved. Eventually, they became her confidantes. In 1999, after reading through the Bible multiple times under Ken and Floy’s care, Rosaria converted to Christianity.
Rosaria has written four books: The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown and Covenant, 2012), detailing her cataclysmic conversion and the Lord’s beautiful faithfulness. Openness Unhindered (Crown and Covenant, 2015) answers many of the questions Rosaria received about identity, repentance, and faith before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision (2015). The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Crossway, 2018) chronicles how the Lord used a humble couple’s simple invitation to dinner to draw her - a radical, committed unbeliever—to himself. Inviting readers into her house, Rosaria shows how we can use hospitality in evangelism in a world that increasingly despises Christianity. In Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, 2024), Rosaria identifies the cataclysmic shift against the Christian faith in our post-Obergefell world by identifying how LGBTQ+ has become the reigning idol of our day codified into law. Offering gospel hope to people trapped in the lies of our culture and helping parents of children who have become casualties of these lies, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age helps Christians “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and to do so with joy.
