Five Lies image

Five Lies

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This book will make you scream, or at the very least curl your toes. I can almost guarantee it.

Rosaria Butterfield’s latest, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age, is a no holds barred evisceration of five contemporary assumptions: Homosexuality is normal; Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian; Feminism is good for the world and the church; Transgenderism is normal; Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

Butterfield doesn’t start gently and I imagine many will stumble before making it through the introduction. It is worth persisting though. Her arguments should be engaged with. At every point she is erudite, biblically focussed, and the narrative is cast against the background of what she once was: a feminist lesbian professor of English, who ‘helped create this world’.

The closing anecdote gives a flavour of what Butterfield is doing in this book: seeking to be uncompromising, accepting while not approving, sympathetic rather than empathetic, hospitable, biblical, and faithful. In this story she manages to combine clever apologetics, Kuyperian sphere sovereignty, and tight biblical application. It is worth reproducing in full:

Here at the Butterfields’, the gospel still comes with a house key. Let me give you a recent example.

One Lord’s Day morning, early, during the height of the Covid frenzy in 2021 and directly after vaccine mandates were leveled, I was heading out the side door with my two dogs in tow, Bella the Shih Tzu (50 percent dog, 50 percent stuffed animal), and Sully the goofy three-legged dog (75 percent dog, 25 percent plucky comic relief). My older neighbors Bill and Jason were waiting for me at the end of the driveway, with their elegant poodle Trixie.

Bill jumped right in: “I want to know why you Christians don’t believe in the vaccine! Don’t you believe in loving your neighbor?”

Bill and Jason have been in a homosexual relationship for thirty years. As Bill was talking, Jason was holding his cigarette at the left corner of his mouth so that he had two free hands to adjust Trixie’s halter. After the halter met his approval, he allowed Trixie and Sully their special quality personal-sniffing time.

“Bill, I have a question for you,” I countered.

“Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s during our other pandemic, how come gay men rejected wearing condoms? Didn’t you love your neighbor? Or even your sex partners?”

Jason’s mouth opened like a fish on a line and his cigarette fell to the ground.

It was early, around 6 a.m., and maybe they weren’t expecting the word condom to come out of the pastor’s wife’s mouth. Or sex partners. Or both. Who knows?

Bill exhaled deeply. “I never made the connection. Jay, she’s right. Remember [AIDS activist] Larry Kramer supported condoms but most of us thought he was selling out.” Jason recovered and said, “And Kramer was right. So many more of us would have lived.” He choked a little, cleared his throat, and said, “All the funerals. All the young men in the prime of life. That could have been us, Bill—” his voice trailed off. In hoarse whispers he blurted: “It should have been us.”

We walked in respectful silence until we turned the corner, each lamenting in our own life the toll taken by AIDS.

“Do you want to know why some Christians reject the vaccine and why some gay men rejected condoms? Do you want my opinion?” I offered softly, breaking the silence.
My neighbors nodded.

“Because everyone wants freedom to exercise their conscience. For Christians, that freedom comes from the Bible—”

Jason rebuked me, “Oh, sure, like the Bible has anything to say about vaccines! Or freedom!”

“The Bible has everything to say about freedom as well as making health choices, because the Bible has everything to say about spheres of authority”

“Huh? The Bible?” offered Bill.

“Absolutely. The Bible offers spheres of authority: the family, the church, and the civil government. Health decisions are under the jurisdiction of family. The government has the right to issue taxes but can’t tell the church how to serve the Lord’s Supper. And the church has the authority and responsibility to proclaim the gospel to all the nations, warning people about sin, calling them to repentance, and sharing the good news about eternal salvation through Christ, who covers the sin of his people with his atoning blood. You might miss the whole discussion about spheres of authority if you fail to read the Old Testament, but I believe that the whole Bible is true. The church can’t be the government and the government can’t be the family and—”

“Preach it, sister,” said Jason, a retired public-school teacher. His last years of teaching made him feel more like a social worker than a math specialist. He hated that. Jason loved his job when he could actually teach math and loathed his job when all he could do was plug holes of family neglect.

We were heading back into our neighborhood, and my house was right around the next corner.

“So, gentlemen, you answered your own question. Getting the vaccine or not getting the vaccine, wearing a mask or not wearing a mask - it’s a personal choice, not a sin and not a grace. Some Christians reject the vaccine because they are exercising their biblical authority over their health care over their bodies. Everyone wants freedom, and Christians find their freedom in the Bible. When gay men rejected condoms, that was an exercise in freedom. The question is this: Where does our freedom come from – our personal feelings or something greater? Which freedom is safe, and which is not?”

We stopped at my driveway. Sully and Trixie gave each other one last sniff. We all looked in each other’s eyes with love and care.

“I never know what is going to come out of your mouth,” Bill said.

I decided that morning to take Bill’s comment as a compliment.

“I want to talk more about this,” offered Jason.

“Maybe tonight’s dog walk, we can pick up where we left off?” he asked.

“It’s a plan,” I said.

I hope that story encourages you to read the rest of the book, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: there will be things you don’t like.

Butterfield is a theological conservative, an Orthodox Presbyterian. She believes in male leadership in the church and home; she believes husbands are to lead and wives are to be domestically focussed (a home schooler all the way): ‘husbands lead, protect, and provide, and wives submit, nurture, and keep the home’. She is unapologetic in her takedown of the likes of Preston Sprinkle and Wesley Hill and what she sees as their selling out to the lies of our age. Butterfield is uncompromising. Issues like attending a gay wedding, what pronouns to use, or whether ‘gay Christian’ is a legitimate identity receive short shrift.

But press on…

It’s worth engaging with Butterfield’s distinctions between acceptance and approval, sympathy and empathy. (‘Empathy is dangerous because if the highest form of love is standing in someone else’s shoes, no one is left standing in a place of objective truth. If someone is drowning in a river, jumping in with him may break up his loneliness, but having two drowned people produces an even greater problem.’)

Her claim that, ‘The sin of transgenderism is actually the sin of envy’ is an angle I hadn’t previously considered, and worth considering.

And her own story is remarkable, a truly unlikely conversion.

You might not like it, but you should read it.

 

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