Podcast: Sexual Confusion, Cultural Lies, and Our Christian Witness (Rosaria Butterfield)

September 11, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Christians Should Respond to the Lies of Our Culture

In this episode, Rosaria Butterfield responds to many of the most common claims and arguments that we often hear related to gender and sexuality today. She also answers tough questions that many of us will encounter at some point in our lives, like whether or not to attend your child's same sex wedding, or how to respond to a request to use someone's preferred pronouns.

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Rosaria Butterfield

Bestselling author Rosaria Butterfield addresses 5 lies modern culture has embraced about sexuality and spirituality, using the word of God to help illuminate each topic. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:01:24 - What’s So Wrong with the LGBTQ Movement?

Matt Tully
Rosaria, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Rosaria Butterfield
It is my delight to be here, Matt. Thank you so much.

Matt Tully
It’s great to be in person, and to be in person to talk about a really important, serious set of topics.

Rosaria Butterfield
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
I’m just struck by how timely the new book that you’ve written is; how controversial some of these topics can be in our culture today, even within the church; and how emotional this could be for so many people on all sides of the issue. As I think about that, acknowledging that’s the reality, I can’t think of someone better positioned to help Christians think through these issues in a biblical, loving, gracious way—but courageous way—than you. Thanks for doing this.

Rosaria Butterfield
Well, we’ll see, Matt. That definitely captures my heart. We’re at a crossroads, so the challenge is to get up ahead of the tsunami. And Christians don’t throw anybody away, so we don’t want to lose anybody in this. We really don’t.

Matt Tully
The fundamental motivation is love for God and for others.

Rosaria Butterfield
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
That is a good way to set the stage for the first half of this interview. As Christians, we are often confronted—whether personally, directly with ourselves, or often through our children as they’re being confronted with these things—we’re confronted with arguments, statements, or even challenging questions from the world, from unbelievers, that we’re on the defensive about. At least we feel on the defensive oftentimes. And so I think sometimes as Christians we don’t know how to respond to those. We feel confused by the language, by the challenge of some of these things, so I’m wondering if I can present some of those to you, playing devil’s advocate a little bit, and then you can respond to those from the perspective of a mature Christian. So, first question, and it’s just a big picture question, What’s so wrong with the LGBTQ movement, from a Christian perspective? Why can’t Christians just accept and affirm all people along with their lifestyles and their sexual identities and orientations and their choices of who to love? Why can’t we just accept that out of respect for who they are as individuals, especially that, as Christians, we believe they’re made in God’s image and they’re humans with dignity? Why can’t we afford them the dignity of accepting them for who they are?

Rosaria Butterfield
That’s a great question. I have to say that’s like the mothership question, because we hear that a lot. That presumes a gospel that doesn’t have to deal with sin. And it presumes a Savior that didn’t die to ransom people from their sin. And if we can even go further back, it implies a world where the Old Testament is insignificant, specifically where we find the original statement about being made in the image of God—Genesis 1:27. And we believe the Word of God is true, so let me just say that. We start with the position that we believe that this is an inerrant, infallible, sufficient, perfect book. In addition to that, we also presume that this book knows what I need better than I do. And so my feelings, although very strong, they’re downstream from the fall of Adam. And so when Adam sinned in the garden, it wasn’t just a kind of “oops.” It was actually an attack against the covenant that God had made. It was a rejection of God’s love. And so we read in Genesis 1:26–27, “Then God said, ’Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” And so we were made in the image of God, not as the image of God. And what that means is we can’t then say, My feelings are directed in this particular way, and that’s the kind of person I am. No, it actually says here that there are two kinds of people: there’s man and there’s woman. In the next verse, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Gen. 1:28). So man and woman were created in the image of God, and in order to reflect that image, we have to grow in the knowledge and the righteousness and holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ, because we start out with a sin nature. It’s a sin nature that predisposes us to love things that God hates. And for some of us, the things that we love are sexual desires directed at the wrong people or the wrong object. But God created man and woman with a pattern in mind also. And that pattern is heterosexuality. And that pattern is heterosexuality whether you’re single or married. Now, does that mean that every person on the earth is going to feel an ease with which God has called you? Absolutely not. And so that’s why the church and the gospel—the rescue of the gospel—is that we learn how to hate your sin without hating yourself. And it does take maturity. You said we’re going to have the conversation about maturity. This is it. It is an act of Christian maturity to learn how to hate your sin without hating yourself. We (Christians) believe that there’s victory in the gospel. Not just, I don’t know, like a self help group, or something like Your hair won’t fall out or You won’t get fat or You’re just going to be a great version of yourself. That’s not it at all. It’s that you’re going to grow to be more like Jesus, that once justified, you will be sanctified. And so when people say things like, Well, I know God wants me to be a lesbian, but God says in his Word that his will for you is two-fold: he wants you to grow in sanctification (1 Thessalonians), and he says that he wants your faith to faileth not. And so since we believe that there are no problem passages in the Scriptures and that the Bible will cross us, when the Bible crosses us with a revelation of our sin, we need to respond. And we know that that’s what’s good for us. Now, what about people for whom this is really going to be a very big struggle? Well, that’s where the church is. But the church is not here to lie to people. The church isn’t here to make casualties. The church is here to come up alongside people and step into the crushing loneliness that comes when you’re doing a hard battle with sin.

00:09:13 - Doesn’t God Care about People’s Feelings, Pain, and Suffering?

Matt Tully
I think that gets at my next question. Sometimes the perception can be, even among Christians but certainly among the outside world, that the church (Christians), and that by extension our view of God, proclaims a God that doesn’t care about people’s feelings, doesn’t care about the pain and the suffering of people who struggle with these feelings. And actually, we would we would say, Stuff that down. Get that out of my face. I don’t want that. How do you respond to that, what I imagine you would call a misunderstanding?

Rosaria Butterfield
That’s a terrible misunderstanding. The Lord Jesus Christ went to the cross to pay for every imaginable sin on planet earth—both the sins that you have already committed and, sadly, the sins that you’re going to go on to commit.vChristians have no right being squeamish. That would be absolutely absurd. And you know what? I think it would be untrue to our own profession of faith. I’ve never met a Christian who doesn’t desire something God hates.

Matt Tully
Would you say sometimes the prudishness, the squeamishness of Christians on some of these issues is actually sinful?

Rosaria Butterfield
I think it’s a theology problem. I really do. So I think that if you are a Reformed Christian and you believe that the Lord has set apart a people for himself and those people will come to faith, we are to bring the gospel to all ends of the earth. We’re to bring the gospel to the gay pride march. The real gospel. The gospel of change. We’re to bring that. And if you are God’s elect people, I don’t care what miry pit that you’re stuck in. Those words will be the words of life, and they will root, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in that new heart of flesh that you have just been given unbeknownst to you, and the Lord will take you every step of the way. And Christians need to be there to help you learn how to walk. I don’t think Reformed Christians are squeamish. I do believe that part of an Arminian gospel goes something like this: Wait a second. Didn’t you commit your life to Jesus? Why are you sinning if you committed your life to Jesus? Romans 7:21–27 really is a dividing passage for many people when Paul says “Why do I do what I don’t want to do? It is the law of sin in me.” If you believe that’s Paul as an unbeliever, you have no category for indwelling sin, and then it’s going to be really hard to talk to somebody like me. Or I’d say, anybody who’s alive on planet earth right now. It’s going to be really hard to talk to anybody who knows, and I don’t care what it is, every Christian on planet earth knows when you get up in the morning, before you put your feet on the floor, and before you have your first cup of coffee, you need to pray against something that is a temptation and that could become a sin very quickly. If you are not praying that God would protect you from it, that you would turn from it, that you would not entertain it. And we see that here in Paul. Paul’s saying the same thing. So if we don’t have a category of indwelling sin against which true believers fight the good fight—picture the Narnia battles: blood, sweat, tears—if you don’t have that category for an already true mature believer, what you’re going to get is a very thin gospel of good and bad practices. And you’re going to start to misunderstand your enemy. Your enemy is not a physical problem. Sin is not a physical problem. It goes way deeper than that, and Jesus tells us that. It’s a sin to desire that which God hates, not just to do that which God hates.

00:13:29 - Is Criticism of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity a Personal Attack?

Matt Tully
I want to get into that dynamic, too, a little bit later as we talk, but before we get there, how would you respond to those who would argue that sexual orientation and gender identity are core facets of a person’s identity? They go down to the very core of who we are. That’s the message that we hear often today. Therefore, for Bible-believing Christians to criticize those feelings or those preferences or dispositions is tantamount to attacking someone’s identity—their very being. How do you respond to that?

Rosaria Butterfield
That’s a great question. The distinction between biological sex and cultural gender, and then the separation of those two, and then the relegating of cultural gender to a category of identity, personhood, and being is indeed a 19th century construct. It comes in part from Freud, and then it is, in some ways, perfected in feminism. It is a worldview that you just don’t find in the Bible. And so what I would do if I was sitting down with someone who is not a believer who says that to me, and that happens a lot, what I would say is, Can you accept that you and I are using two different origins for our worldview? And this is a basic research question. So, if you can’t accept that, that’s a problem.

Matt Tully
That’s the problem with some of these worldview issues is that we don’t know we have them.

Rosaria Butterfield
Correct. So I would start with, You and I are using words like ’being.’ The philosophical word for that is ’ontology.’ And we’re rooting it in different dictionaries. First of all, can you accept that? You think I’m a bigot, hater, idiot, but maybe I’m working with a different library. And you can decide that’s not a good library, but that’s different than being a bigot, hater, idiot. So I would start there, and then what I would do is I would say, The Bible says that my ontology is not rooted in a Freudian invention of sexual orientation. It’s rooted in my creation as male or female. And to sin homosexually is to attack the ordinance of creation, according to my dictionary. So again, I would want to really keep it here: I understand that you and I disagree. And I understand that you have no interest in believing what I believe. But can you hear me? Can you hear that we are actually dealing with different—it’s almost like if we were going into a research library, you go to the left and I go to the right, and we are still researching the same topic.

00:16:29 - Evangelicals Are Divided on the LGBTQ Movement, So Who’s Right?

Matt Tully
It seems like you’re pointing again and again back to a fundamental theological problem with some of these things, that we often live on the surface of actions and even words but are not thinking deeper about those things. You’ve kind of already answered this, but I wonder if you could put a bow on it a little bit. Another type of thing that someone might say to a Christian is, I passed a church this morning with a rainbow flag on their front lawn. There are many Christians who embrace the LGBTQ movement, so who are you to say that you have a corner on what true Christianity says on this issue?

Rosaria Butterfield
What I would say is I don’t have any corner on anything. I just have this thing called a Bible. And you know what? I would probably also say, and I do say this to people, I will remind people that I don’t have a degree in theology. I am a professor of English. I know how to read a book. That’s what I know how to do. But there is no way, biblically speaking, to be a Christian in good standing who continually violates the law of God, because the law of grace and the moral law of God go together. You can’t bypass repentance to get to grace. But what the Bible does say is you can be deceived. You can even be a false teacher and a wolf and not even know it. But the Bible gives me the ability to see that you are a wolf. And now you might say, But come on, Rosaria, you can’t read my heart. I’m not reading your heart. I’m reading your rainbow flag in front of your church. I’m reading the books you write. I’m reading the words that come out of your mouth. And I’m quite capable of doing that. And it’s my job to do that. Christians are not called to pretend that people are Christians if they just say they are.

Matt Tully
When you say “It’s my job to do that,” do you mean that for you specifically, or are you saying all Christians have a job to discern the Christian teaching that they are hearing from others?

Rosaria Butterfield
Absolutely. And part of it is your love of neighbor, because to love your neighbor means to want them to know the truth, not to know something that is not true. To be deceived about your eternal state is a very awful thing. When I was a lesbian activist, feminist professor, I had neighbors who loved me enough to tell the truth. And I don’t mean like to tell the truth once, like, Oh, hey, Rosaria, here’s a pamphlet. Read it, but like five hundred times they enfolded me into their life. They loved me. They didn’t pretend I was their friend. They did something harder. They loved their enemy. And I think we just have a lot of sloppy categories. And I think some of it really has come from a social media infused world. And a social media infused world is one where you really just care too much about what other people think of you.

Matt Tully
How big of a factor is that in your critiques of the evangelical church? How core is this fear of man, in your mind?

Rosaria Butterfield
Thomas Brooks, in his Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices—

Matt Tully
A Puritan.

Rosaria Butterfield
A Puritan. Yes, sorry. Those are my people! At the end of just a wonderful, wonderful book, he identifies six characteristics of a false teacher. And the first one is that you’re pleasing men. Part of why that’s false teaching is the gospel frees you from the fear of man. You’re to fear God. We’re told in Proverbs that fear of man is a snare. A snare is an instrument of execution from which you don’t extract yourself, not all by yourself.

Matt Tully
I think the categories we have so often are either silence—we want to be friends with everybody, and so we don’t want to say things—and then also there’s the culture war, often online yelling at each other. And that we miss that middle ground, as you’re speaking about, in our homes, in real relationship with people where we’re not hiding the differences, but we’re also not hating each other.

Rosaria Butterfield
And there’s a link between those three things too. If you’re in a church that focuses more on programs than people, you’re not going to learn how to sit in the discomfort and the awkwardness of what I’m talking about. Christians just need to embrace awkward. But also, if you’re online and you’re not careful, which is like everybody I know online, then you are probably creating gratuitous enemies. The social media world has almost functionally destroyed the beauty of privacy in the evangelical life. The beauty of coming together in a living room where the doors are closed and we’re going to talk, and you’re not going to blog about it after we talk—that kind of thing. We’ve lost that. And I think these are matters of sin. I think that we are not to confuse public and private. And I think we do. I think our social media infused world helps us do that. And then I think what is created is we’ve just become a culture of exhibitionists, where everybody’s talking and nobody’s listening.

00:22:13 - Isn’t It Kind and Respectful to Use Someone’s Preferred Pronouns?

Matt Tully
Another challenge that we might hear from somebody: Even if someone, a Christian, were to personally hold to Biblical convictions about gender and sexuality, what’s wrong with them still using their friend’s preferred pronouns or still accepting their non-Christian friend’s choices? Isn’t that just an issue of basic respect and kindness, even if you don’t agree with that?

Rosaria Butterfield
For years I agreed with that. For years I would have said that was true. I even wrote about that.

Matt Tully
Before you tell us why you don’t think that’s true anymore, because I know you’ve changed your mind on that, explain what your thinking was before.

Rosaria Butterfield
My thinking was before—and by “before,” I think we should situate this historically. Before Obergerfell. Before the 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage in all fifty states and included the Dignitary Harm Clause that said a new definition of harm is now going to guide our legal system. You are harming people if you fail to affirm their dignity. Prior to Obergefell, you are harming someone if you failed to provide a material service. So that is a big definition. Before Obergefell, I would absolutely use transgender pronouns. And I’ll tell you that the only people I knew that were in the T category were biological men who had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. So this is before Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. This is before the ideology of transgender.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing. This is not that long ago.

Rosaria Butterfield
No, it’s not that long ago.

Matt Tully
But it was a very different world.

Rosaria Butterfield
It was a very different world. And so I was thinking and talking to people with fairly significant mental health challenges, and it didn’t seem to me that it was helpful or useful to exacerbate them. The problem is that after Obergefell and after the Dignitary Harm Clause, what used to be terminology—I call you by a new name, I call you by a different pronoun; it’s just in the synonym finder and it’s all on the same level—now it’s no longer terminology but it’s ideology. After Obergefell, we’re dealing with two kinds of different kinds of people when we talk about transgenderism. You still have people who have actual gender dysphoria. That is a medical illness. It’s not a physical illness. There’s no biologic pathogen that informs it, just like there’s no gay gene. But it’s still a mental health category. And if you meet people—

Matt Tully
Like schizophrenia or something else.

Rosaria Butterfield
It’s real. And it’s not something you would just say, Go be warm and filled. It doesn’t count. Christians are called to have compassion. But the mental illness that would cause you to hate and despise the body that God gave you is not improved by mutilating the body that God gave you. And so we see that surgeries and hormone blockers are not helpful. And in fact, when they’re used on children they’re a setup for a lifetime of failure. In 85–90% of cases, a child—and they don’t call it gender dysphoria for a child; they call it gender anxiety—that child’s body will regulate itself after natal puberty has gone through. Now, you’re not going to leave that child all alone for those years and say, Well, I’ll check in with you when you’re seventeen. But still, if you use hormone blockers then you’re going to set that child up for a lifetime of medical needs. Now, today you’re not only dealing with people with gender dysphoria as a medical category; you’re dealing with an ideology of transgenderism. They talk about self-ID or nonbinary—I can just declare who I am, and you must honor that. And if you don’t, you are in violation of the law. So the reason I don’t use transgender pronouns today is two reasons. First of all, I think I’m sinning against God by knowingly telling a lie. Secondly, I’m not helping the people who have been indoctrinated by transgenderism.

Matt Tully
By the ideology.

Rosaria Butterfield
The ideology. The people who have been indoctrinated, and right now I’m specifically thinking about something like the federal mandate that requires all government schools in the United States to teach gender ideology as part of an anti-bullying legislation. Which means, if you’re a Christian parent, you cannot remove your child from that. The children who are downstream from this kind of government education today, and it’s in other places too, but it’s certainly there, they are easily indoctrinated. They are very vulnerable. I don’t know any young woman who didn’t feel terrible in her body at the age of fourteen. I mean, I remember what I felt like. And to be told, Well, this is why. Maybe you’re really a man. I think I would have been especially vulnerable to that message, actually. It’s quite terrifying to me. So, I don’t use transgender pronouns anymore because I don’t believe that participating in somebody’s indoctrination is a kindness. There you have it. And people will say, Well, then you must not talk to very many people in this category. Well, that’s not true. That’s not even close to true. I just don’t take my cue of friendship and my cue of relationship from what the internet tells me.

Matt Tully
So you would say that sometimes the messages that we hear from the internet, from the media, from the public conversation about how so often the thing around this issue of pronouns is if you don’t use the right pronouns, you’re going to cause harm, you’re going to destroy the mental health of people. Has that not been true in your experience?

Rosaria Butterfield
That’s not true, and it’s part of another category of things. So we’ve been told that if you don’t go to a gay wedding, you’ll never have a relationship with these people. And yet look, ten years down the road people are saying that’s not true. We’re told if you don’t support “gender affirming care” for a “transgender youth,” that person is going to kill themselves. We’re seeing that there’s actually a higher rate of suicide after “gender affirming care” than there was before. And so now you’re telling me that if I don’t use somebody’s pronoun, we can’t have a relationship as neighbors and as coworkers? Well, you’re not a very legitimate guide to all of this, because you’ve been wrong on all the other ones. Just watch me. Watch the way Jesus walks through this world. Jesus dines with sinners. And again, I’ll come back to this, hospitality is really important. You need to make room to talk privately with people. And you need to make room to listen to people privately. And you need to not presume you know where people stand on things. And you’re not going to do that if the cameras are rolling. You need to do this privately. And I think for many people what I just said is the most terrifying thing I might say in the next hour.

Matt Tully
That call to private relationship.

Rosaria Butterfield
Private relationship.

00:29:49 - Why Are You Opposed to the Label “Gay Christian”?

Matt Tully
That’s your last book with Crossway, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, talking about the importance of that hospitality. All right, another question or objection: Why are you so opposed to using the label “gay Christian” for believers who experience same sex attraction and yet they practice celibacy? They don’t act on those feelings. They acknowledge that action would be wrong and it would be sinful against God’s creation ordinance, but they still want to say, I would want to call myself a gay Christian.

Rosaria Butterfield
Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first one is that you can never be a Christian who is sinning in a category that God has already chosen to deliver you from. And I know people hate this analogy, and I kind of hate it, too. It’s like, Well, you wouldn’t call yourself a gambling Christian, and you wouldn’t call yourself . . . . Okay, but if you’ll just bear with me for a moment. To some degree, that isn’t a completely bad analogy. To use an adjective to modify the noun “Christian” that refers to a sin that the Lord Jesus Christ has already paid for means that somehow in your theology you believe that the blood of Jesus makes an ally with the sin it crushes on the cross.

Matt Tully
What’s your experience? Why do Christians say that? Why would they want to define themselves by that?

Rosaria Butterfield
Because I think it feels right. Because I think we live more at the level of observation than revelation. Because I think we’re trying to communicate, in some ways I would say in the most just hopeful way, we’re just trying to say, Look, this is where I struggle. This is where it hurts. The problem is in a world that has made that particular sin the idol of the day and a category of affirmative action. The problem is you’re not safe using that category, and I’m not safe using that category for you. And to put it in another way that might sound really strange, if you do have unchosen homosexual desires, please do not come out of the closet. Please tell your pastor and your elders and a few close friends. Please do not suffer in silence, but please do not come out of the closet, because that will indeed give Satan a whole lot more room than you need him to have right now in your life.

Matt Tully
What do you mean by that? What would coming out of the closet mean in your mind?

Rosaria Butterfield
Coming out of the closet is a stage in gay rights activism. It’s almost a marker like baptism might be. It’s a sacrament, really, in the gay rights movement that you come out to the world as a lesbian. When I came out as a lesbian, that was a way of marking my territory. It was also an ontological category. It’s a way of saying, This is who I am, not just how I feel.

Matt Tully
It’s an identity marker.

Rosaria Butterfield
It’s an identity, but it’s an ontology marker too. This is who I am, and this is who I’m always going to be. And, of course, we know that that is absolutely not true. That in the new heavens and the new earth, there is no such thing as a gay person. So, you can’t be a gay Christian on earth because you’re not going to be a gay Christian in heaven. Now, you may be somebody who battles a lot longer and harder with the sin of homosexuality than I did. And I want to lock arms with you if that’s the case. And I want to protect you from both the world that says, This is who you are! Be yourself! and the Side B gay-affirming church that says, Oh, maybe you need to go to a Revoice conference. Maybe we need a gay bowling league. If you’re going to really deal with a sin, you’ve got to deal with it at the root, and you can’t do that if you also need to fan the flames of affirmation.

Matt Tully
I’m picking up on two distinct lines of argumentation that are related. On the one hand, there’s an ontology, ultimately a theological problem with thinking in terms of a gay Christian identifying with a sin. But then there’s also a practical danger with that. It kind of opens the door to fanning the flame, maybe even unintentionally, of those sinful desires.

Rosaria Butterfield
Right. And we should probably close the loop on that. The reason it fans the flame is because sin never stays where you put it. If you say, I’m a celibate gay Christian. This is who I am and you never repent of your desires that are sinful, you just pat yourself on the back and say, You know what? I’m a victim. The world doesn’t appreciate me. This is super hard. I’m really lonely. Maybe I deserve this. Why am I so lonely? You can just see how Satan’s going to toy with that. It’s really hard. Nobody likes this. We all have to learn how to hate our sin without hating ourselves. And we need to be more in the Word than we are in our entertainment practices that tell us that we’re entitled to physical pleasures. We’re really not.

Matt Tully
Learning to hate your sin and not yourself—was that a struggle for you personally? You can kind of understand that, I suppose, in a deep way.

Rosaria Butterfield
Absolutely. For me, I think I’ve had just a lifelong study of what the Westminster Confession of Faith calls “repentance unto life”—this idea that you cannot bypass repentance to get to grace. This idea that repentance is the threshold to a holy God. This idea that you ask the Lord, like in Psalm 19, Search me. Show me where my sin is. This desire that you have to wake up in the morning and take this Bible and say, Okay, Lord, cross me with it. Show me where I’m off. And also this desire to not pray without acting. So if you pray that you want God to kill this sinful desire, you can’t fuel it in word or in deed. To kill it is to kill it. And in the case of homosexuality, it would mean to take the word “gay” and never use it to describe yourself, but instead to use Biblical language. Indwelling sin. Homosexual desire. And that’s why you would talk to only the people who have your soul in mind.

00:36:29 - Christians Need to Get Their Heads Out of the Sand

Matt Tully
Moving on from the common challenges that we might hear as Christians to a biblical perspective on these things, here are a few other broader questions. You told me when we were talking the other day that one of the key impetus for this book is the letters that you’ve received—many, many letters each week, dozens each week—from parents and from grandparents, desperate for your help, coming to you and telling you their stories and asking you for help. What are the kinds of things that they’re saying to you?

Rosaria Butterfield
It breaks my heart. And you’re right, this is why I wrote this book. I wrote this book for the mothers and the grandmothers who are on their knees with tear-drenched hands, trying to understand how the children they raised in the Lord have now become literally abducted by the LGBTQ+ community and who have now disavowed the faith, either because they’ve just said, Peace out. I’m out, or because they’ve said, Well, God doesn’t say it’s a sin. Did God really say? I think your faith is wrong. I think you’re the one who’s the hater and the bigot. My Jesus loves me. My Jesus is not the Word. My Jesus is separate from the Word. The Word is flawed. Jesus is perfect. And that was hard enough. But then after 2015, the transgender issue put a particular—it’s just pretty gothic. It’s one thing, and it’s a terrible thing, to have a daughter who’s a lesbian and she is taking aim against the Bible and the church and you fear for her soul, and rightly so. And then it’s another thing to have a daughter who wants to get a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy over spring break. You are seeing, in the words of Abigail Schreier’s book, this “irreversible damage.” And they’re saying and doing these things in the name of empowerment, and yet she lives in your house and you’ve seen how taking testosterone for this last year has not improved her mental state but has in fact increased a greater—she is at the doctor every day. She was a healthy—physically, at least—person, and now is a medical patient for life. And she’s trying to convince you that you need to affirm this. And it’s just getting harder and harder and harder and darker and darker and darker. And then to make matters worse, your church tells you, Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe she is a trans Christian. Maybe you have a brain ontology that’s different from a body ontology. I don’t know. Who’s to say? The combination of your daughter just spiraling into this gothic state of horror and medical need—and, obviously, spiritual need—and your church, instead of fighting against the darkness that is encroaching, is welcoming it. And you feel so betrayed. And so those are the people I wanted to write to because I wanted to say to them, You’re not crazy. You’re not crazy. And don’t stop praying. Get out of this church and find a faithful one, because you need help too. But there’s a reason why we’re here. There are three reasons, and they’ve produced five lies. And these five lies are in the world, but they’re in many of our hearts.

Matt Tully
I think maybe some of us who are, just depending on what our life circumstances are—whether or not we have children, where they go to school—we might not be aware of how common this stuff is. We hear about it in the news, but it might sometimes seem like it’s far away and it’s not happening here. I think there’s a lot of temptation as parents to not really want to have to think carefully because of the implications of finding something out or needing to consider how to respond to this. It feels so hard.

Rosaria Butterfield
But the parents I talk to would like these parents to know this is a really good time to know what’s going on. The hard thing is when you have an apostate child. The hard thing is not right now trying to help strengthen your fifteen-year-old to understand what is going on. Even something basic, like let’s say your fifteen-year-old comes home from Christian school and says, We just learned in our worldview class that people who are gay are gay, and the gospel doesn’t change them. It’s offensive to ask those people to change. Instead, we should help them to just live their best life. But mom, I remember hearing a sermon a few weeks ago about the gospel changing people. I remember the man at the side of the well. Does Jesus just not change people anymore? When people are born again today, do they not have the power to no longer be gay? Is what I just said homophobic? Because my teacher would say it was. Is there anybody who’s just delivered? Okay, I get it. You fight the temptation of your former sin pattern, but it’s not alive. It’s kind of flopping around like the chicken with its head caught off, but the heart isn’t still working. Right, mom? What’s real? Is the gospel still true? That’s a wonderful conversation to have with your child right now. And if you find out that he or she is at a school that uses a curriculum that says, No, God doesn’t change gay people. God doesn’t change trans people. It’s the church that needs to change to be sympathetic, then you need to do some hard things. And I will tell you that if you think it’s super hard, I recently learned about a family. I won’t mention the state they lived in, but it was a state that does not protect parent’s rights, which would be a lot of them—over nineteen.

Matt Tully
An increasing number.

Rosaria Butterfield
An increasing number. And mom and dad—this is a Muslim family—mom was at the pediatrician, and the fourteen-year-old boy said to the doctor, I really want to be a girl. Child protective services came in and the doctor came in and said, Now look, this is not your son. This is your daughter, and we expect you to comply. And the mother went along with it. Yes, of course. We will do anything we can. And that night the family moved to Idaho. So, if you think it might be rough to make some accommodations in your Christian school, think about that family, and then make it even a more difficult one. Think about that family, because that family doesn’t have the gospel. That family doesn’t have the hope of the resurrected Christ who is currently alive and currently fighting your battles, taking the fiery darts. Think about the courage that it took to uproot that family. That’s a real story. It’s real. So, I think we have to stop thinking that the days of comfortable Christianity are still ours. If you want a gospel that doesn’t come with sacrifice, that’s not the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. He gave his life, every drop of blood, so that you could have victory, and now you don’t want to walk in it? I think most Christians just need this laid out for them. And I think we just all need courage. And here’s the thing: if everybody just acted with courage and we were a firewall for each other and we just said, This is nonsense, this problem would be resolved pretty quickly. But if your biggest concern is, Oh no, what if I lose my job? Oh no, what if I lose my friends?, then that’s not a gospel priority in mind.

00:45:24 - Acceptance vs. Approval

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into one of those major fears that often is there. You’ve hit on this a little bit already. I wonder if you could speak to the parent who is listening right now. In relation to a child, a child who has come to them and said, Hey, I do feel this way. I do have these feelings. I think the temptation, even for mature Christian parents, can be to do whatever they need to do to protect that relationship, to guard that relationship. They’re so afraid of the thought of their child disowning them, of never talking to them again, of getting out of their life. And we can sometimes rationalize that by saying, I want to continue to have a Christian influence on them, and so I’m going to make a compromise here to protect that relationship. What would you say to that parent who’s feeling that right now?

Rosaria Butterfield
I would say that in ten years if your child really is a Christian, he will resent you for your cowardice. And I know that sounds harsh, but I would say look, you are not to fear man. And that includes you are not to fear your children. A wonderful book to read and a wonderful person to get to know is a woman named Laura Perry Smalts. She wrote a book a few years ago called From Transgender to Transformed. She is a counselor, and she lived for ten years as Luke, with all of the surgeries and hormones. And when the Lord woke her up and she came to a clear and saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, but also her God-given destiny as a woman, she returned to her conservative parents and to the church of her youth who never once called her by her preferred pronouns and who never called her by her made up name. And when asked, Why did you go back to them? She said, Why would I stick around with the liars? These are the people who never, ever lied to me. So, I think that we need to hear that. I have not had that experience as a mother, but I have countless young people coming to me in that situation on a fairly daily basis. And they’re not coming to me because they think I’m going to say, You’re a gay Christian. Go be the best gay Christian. They’re coming to me because I’m going to say, Son, daughter, look: the means of grace are powerful to equip you to fight this indwelling sin. And progressive sanctification is real. It’s like every battle out there. You’ve seen the Narnia movies. Every time you advance on the battlefield, you’re closer to winning. It gets easier.

Matt Tully
In the book one thing that stood out to me is you draw a distinction between acceptance and approval. And I think this could be really helpful for parents in particular. You write, “The difference between acceptance and approval is the line that a Christian who loves someone trapped by these lies must navigate. It’s a fine line.” Unpack that for us. What is the difference between those two concepts and how might that apply to a parent?

Rosaria Butterfield
Right. And I didn’t make this up. This is what Ken Smith said to me the first night I had dinner with him. He said, Look, I can accept you as a lesbian, but I can’t approve of it.

Matt Tully
Ken Smith and his wife led you to Christ.

Rosaria Butterfield
Yes, they did. He was the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Matt Tully
Unpack that distinction there, because I think parents might wonder, I kind of want to do that, but I don’t know how.

Rosaria Butterfield
I get pushback on this all the time, including from people who are very conservative who say, No, no, no. There’s no distinction. You can’t do that. But acceptance is just living life with your eyes open. This is how this person lives. It’s observationally true. It’s not eternally true, but it is observationally true. That’s what acceptance is. And approval is, And I support you in it. For example, acceptance might be your son, who calls himself gay, is coming home for Thanksgiving and he wants to bring his boyfriend. It’s Thanksgiving dinner. I think acceptance is you put a plate at the table. They’re not asking to sleep in your guest room. They’re asking to come for dinner.

Matt Tully
And if they were, that might be a different answer.

Rosaria Butterfield
Oh yeah. But I would say if they’re saying, And we’re going to stay overnight in the guest room together, that’s approval. That would be where the line is. And so I think people are always trying to figure out, I love my children. I have embraced them and carried them and I’ve sacrificed everything for them. I don’t want to lose them entirely. Well, there’s the line. The line is acceptance. Can we enjoy Thanksgiving dinner? I should hope so. Jesus dined with sinners. He didn’t sin with sinners, but he dined with sinners. But the minute that you say, Sure. Bob and Joe, there’s the guest room. Lock the door, no. That gives an appearance of evil. And it gives an appearance of approval of the relationship. But you can approve of your son as an image bearer of a holy God. And you can even approve of his friend as an image bearer of a holy God, too. And to really communicate that with people, the palpable love that that shows is very powerful.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful because I think sometimes there’s maybe two ditches for parents. One would be to become fully affirming, to just compromise in these things, and the other sometimes would be to just deny outright what’s happening and to refuse to acknowledge, as you said, what’s right in front of you. So you’re kind of saying that there is this path of loving and accepting what’s happening without approving of it.

Rosaria Butterfield
Right. I would say one thing, though, on the acceptance end. I don’t believe that there is any such thing, ontologically speaking, as a gay person. As you are accepting your son, you’re accepting him in an observational way, not in an eternal way. What he is is a man made in the image of God who has a sin pattern that is getting the better of him. But he is a man. He is not a gay man. He is a man. Gay is not an ontological category, nor is it an eternal category. So I wouldn’t think of him, even as you’re accepting him, I wouldn’t accept him on these Freudian terms.

Matt Tully
Does that mean you correct him every time he calls himself a gay man?

Rosaria Butterfield
No. But it means that you don’t use that. You would be careful and mindful about how you would explain things to your sister. You wouldn’t say, My gay son, Eric, came over for dinner. You would say, My son, Eric, came over for dinner. And, yes, he is still not able to battle homosexuality, and it’s a bear. And you would say it the same way you would if your son, Eric, were an alcoholic: Eric came home, and he still is not on the right side of this alcoholism. Please keep praying. But, no, this is not who he’s going to be in heaven. He’s not going to be an alcoholic in heaven. And he’s not going to be gay in heaven either, should he get there, which we pray.

0:53:00 - Perseverance When Dealing with Indwelling Sin

Matt Tully
Many of our listeners probably already know a little bit about your story. As you’ve referenced already, you were a liberal feminist and a lesbian, but eventually you came to Christ through this ordinary pastor and his wife. It’s a beautiful story you’ve told many times. Since then, you’ve gotten married and you have adopted children. Your life is so different than it once was. You’ve testified to the fact that it was challenging. That change in your life was a hard change that took years, and is ongoing, I’m sure. But I think many people might be listening right now, who struggle with these feelings, and might think, Well, I just don’t know if she had it as hard as I have it. I don’t know if she understands fully the duration of these feelings, notwithstanding my own desire to see them change. Speak to that kind of person. It’s not changing like they thought it would. You talk about the power of God in our hearts, the power of sanctification, and the means of grace, but it just doesn’t feel like things are getting easier.

Rosaria Butterfield
I would say you’re probably right. I would never, ever, ever say that I had it as bad as you do, because I don’t even know how I would measure that. I am very grateful that I didn’t have it any harder than I did, because I don’t think I could have handled it. First of all, I would just agree entirely with you. But what I would say that would be most helpful is to take this homosexual desire, and instead of putting it in the category that the world puts it in—a category of personhood from which you’re never going to escape, not even in heaven—I would suggest that instead you would keep it in that category of indwelling sin. And for most Christians, even if I’m not currently dealing with homosexual desires, that doesn’t mean I’m not battling indwelling sin. And so to not lose heart. To die in your sins—the Puritans would always talk about this—to die in your sins is the very worst thing. To die in jail is not such a bad thing. To die in a pit is not such a bad thing. But to die in your sin is the worst thing ever. And so what I want for you is I want you to have wonderful people, Christian people, who are gathered around you so that you can fight the good fight. And I don’t want you to worry about where you’re going to go for Thanksgiving, because it’s my house if you want. I think what happens sometimes in a fight with indwelling sin is we think, I can’t keep this up forever. But that’s not the question. The question is, Do you have one more blow? It just isn’t.

Matt Tully
It’s one more day.

Rosaria Butterfield
It’s one more day. It’s today. Can you fight today? But then that sounds really cheap because you’re like, Yeah, that’s true, Rosaria, but Christmas is like next week. I don’t have a family. Well, sure you do. If you have a church, you have a family. And this is where the church comes in. The church should not be allowing singles to live in crushing loneliness. You just shouldn’t. That’s just barbaric. Everybody, if we’re really a family, and we believe we are, then we do stuff without invitation. We do stuff because we belong to each other. We share a meal because we belong together.

Matt Tully
That speaks to the importance, though, of people who are struggling to, as you said, maybe not proclaim it from the rooftops, because that could be counterproductive, but to be willing to share these hard, sensitive struggles with other Christians in their church.

Rosaria Butterfield
Yes, specifically with your pastor and your elders, because they are the people who are responsible for really doing battle with Satan for your soul. It is discouraging. And I would say this too, that we can’t help the time that we live in, but we live in very soft times. We live in times where people don’t really want to be denied very much. We want to set the air conditioning just right. We are very committed to our creature comforts. And so I think that is a special burden for people who have to fight a hard indwelling sin. We’re just not fighters, but we need to be.

Matt Tully
Maybe all of us need to be, regardless of what those sins are.

Rosaria Butterfield
Yeah, I think we do. But we need to be sensitive to each other and not barter this at the level of feeling. A question about are you growing in sanctification, it does sometimes have to do with your liberty from sin. But none of us have been lobotomized, so you’re not going to be not fighting sin until glory. So if you’re alive, you better be fighting, and that’s the normal state.

00:58:16 - Lightning Round: Weddings, Holiday Visits, Manipulated into Approval, the Workplace, and Disagreeing with Your Pastor

Matt Tully
All right, for the last few questions maybe we can do these more rapid fire. These are very concrete, situational questions that we might find ourselves in at different points in our lives. I wonder if you could give us a quick answer to what we should do. My neighbor recently put up an LGBTQ+ flag in their yard. Should I say something to them, just stay quiet, or something else?

Rosaria Butterfield
I don’t think you should have the need to say something to your neighbor because of yard art, unless you’re curious. We had a neighbor who, after Roe v. Wade, hung the American flag upside down. He had just moved in, and we just really had no idea.

Matt Tully
After Dobbs?

Rosaria Butterfield
Yeah, sorry about that. I meant to say after Dobbs. After the fall of Roe v. Wade he hung it upside down. We were just gardening, we’re friends, and I’m just like, Hey, I just curious. Can you tell me what that means? Because I just didn’t know what it meant. And so he was very happy to tell me. We had a long conversation. And we’re grown ups. Nobody fell over dead. I just didn’t know what it meant.

Matt Tully
Presumably, you disagreed.

Rosaria Butterfield
Yeah. Absolutely. And then we worked on the block party for the next week. So, it’s not like you have to be the policeman. But I don’t think it hurts to make sure that you leave room for people to know they could ask you why you don’t have one up. Or sometimes it is helpful, I mean, I think it’s always good to know how do I talk to my neighbors when yard art makes it clear we don’t agree? I think it’s just sometimes helpful to say, Hey, can you tell me why you put that up? I’m great. I just want to know why. I’m just curious. I’m not upset. We’re a big world here, and I get that. I just want to know why.

Matt Tully
I think back to something you said earlier, that the strength of our words should, ideally, match the strength of the relationship. So, it might be a great prompt to go build that relationship that would allow you to ask that question and have a good conversation.

Rosaria Butterfield
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
Another question: Should I attend my homosexual friend’s wedding?

Rosaria Butterfield
No.

Matt Tully
What if it’s my son or my daughter?

Rosaria Butterfield
No. Especially no.

Matt Tully
Give us the one paragraph summary of why that is.

Rosaria Butterfield
Because you will have a terrible witness when your son or daughter needs you most. And at some point you’re going to have to repent to them when they say, Why in the world did you come to my wedding if you don’t think that that was a good thing? Why did you do that? You’re looking toward a day when your son or daughter is faithfully in the Lord. Now, I’m not saying you have to be a jerk. If you’d like to send a present, do. I mean, what my recommendation—it’s not really mine; Christopher Yuan always says this—don’t send one present to the couple. Send two presents. You don’t have to be a jerk. You can, I guess, if you want to be. But, no, you can’t because a wedding is not a birthday party. A wedding celebrates the one-flesh union and a blessing that you believe God is bestowing upon them. And really, what you’re going to be doing now is pray that they’re breaking up. And this is why Christians should oppose gay marriage: no Christian should put a stumbling block between a fellow image bearer and the God who made her. And the deeper that you go in your sin, and the more that your sin is protected by the law of the land, the more that Satan has you held in a position that he wants, and the harder it is. Quite frankly, the more you have to lose.

Matt Tully
Should I allow my daughter and her lesbian partner to come for a few days at Christmas? And if so, what should that look like?

Rosaria Butterfield
Yeah. I’m always about having people come. I would do my very best to come up with really decent accommodations. Don’t put your daughter’s partner in the laundry room. You know what I mean? If your house is big enough and you can come up with two appropriate places that are comfortable, and again, respectful to adults. Again, don’t put somebody on the top bunk with a six year old. That’s obnoxious. Or, maybe you can make a hotel reservation for one and one can stay here, but do your very best to do, in some ways, what you would do with an unmarried son and girlfriend. And just make it normal. These are adults. If they want to go stay in a hotel, they’re going to stay in a hotel.

Matt Tully
Don’t try to control them.

Rosaria Butterfield
No, don’t try to control them, but try to accommodate according to Christian standards.

Matt Tully
How should I respond to a child or friends who says, Unless you accept me for who I am, I cannot have a relationship with you? What would you say to that?

Rosaria Butterfield
I think you just have to hear that and pray for fortitude and pray that wouldn’t be the case. But those are often empty threats. As parents, how many times have we heard that on other things? If you don’t buy me this toy, if you don’t give me this gift, if you don’t agree with me on this, then I’m going to hate you. I don’t know. Actually, my kids have not said those kinds of things. We’ve counseled parents who have children who have said those things. And here’s what I would just say: there’s a particular rhetorical discourse that child is using. It’s called manipulation. In general, I think as a Christian, anytime anybody tries to manipulate you, because I can’t be manipulated by anything but the Lord Jesus Christ, so a manipulator is trying to assert authority over Christ. So you can say—again, accept but don’t approve—Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you feel that way. I am here for you whenever you change your mind.

Matt Tully
I don’t feel that way.

Rosaria Butterfield
I don’t feel that way. And I don’t feel that way about you or your partner.

Matt Tully
My employer asked me to help decorate for pride month. What should I do?

Rosaria Butterfield
That is a really tough one. And I guess it depends upon how gross—you know what I’m saying?

Matt Tully
What if it’s just rainbow banners around?

Rosaria Butterfield
I think one thing you could do if you feel like I don’t want a rainbow in my cubicle, I think it’s appropriate to go and speak privately with your boss and say, You know what? I am 100% here for every person in this office, and there isn’t anybody in this office I wouldn’t go change a tire for, walk a dog for, and all that. But I am very uncomfortable with being told I have to affirm these different things.

Matt Tully
Final question: My pastor recently said that there is such a thing as a gay Christian, so long as that person doesn’t actually act on their homosexual desires. How should I respond as someone who is under his spiritual authority in that church?

Rosaria Butterfield
I’m so glad that you mentioned that—“under his spiritual authority.” If you are an elder or an elder’s family, you need to go talk to him about the seriousness of denying biblical personhood and believing that the blood of Christ makes an ally with the sin it crushes on the cross. You need to tell him that sin is not a matter of physical action but it’s an ethical problem and a moral problem that takes root in desire. And you can give him some really good books. Mark Jones’s book Knowing Sin organizes all of the different ways of thinking about this. Very readable. You could read it in a day. You could give him John Owen, too, but you know. And then you need to find a new church, because having preached that from the pulpit means he cannot be your shepherd.

Matt Tully
So there’s no room for conversation and seeing if he would change or agree?

Rosaria Butterfield
Well, if he would. I suppose that’s right. You just had this conversation. But what are you going to do with your family? You’re in a tough spot. You’ve got to go home as the head of your household and sit down with your wife and your six kids and you need to say, Pastor Jones just said something false. And we love Pastor Jones. He’s been our pastor since Mom and I met in youth group in this church. We’re really shocked. And we’ve talked to Pastor Jones. And if Pastor Jones gets up from the pulpit and repents of that sin, we can stay here. But if not, for the health of our family, we need to go. So we need to pray for Pastor Jones. It’s not enough for Pastor Jones to just never say it again. Pastor Jones has to repent for having sinned against God.

Matt Tully
Publicly.

Rosaria Butterfield
Publicly because he preached it publicly. And if he doesn’t, we need to go because we are not honoring God by staying here.

Matt Tully
Rosaria, thank you so much for talking us through so many of these difficult issues and for bringing God’s word, God’s truth to bear on these things. We appreciate you taking the time today.

Rosaria Butterfield
Thank you so much.

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