Secret Thoughts
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a feminist. She was about as radical as you could get. She was a teaching associate professor of English at Syracuse University. And she was the coordinator of their gay and lesbian advocacy group. She, too, was a lesbian, having declared herself such at the age of 28. She says that her worldview was grounded in Freud, Marx, and Darwin.
She tells her story of conversion from lesbianism to Presbyterianism in the book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: an English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith.
This short book (148 pages) is useful for at least two purposes. On one hand, it helps us see into the heart and mind of a postmodernist. “Christians always seemed like bad thinkers to me. It seemed that they could maintain their worldview only because they were sheltered from the world’s real problems, like the material structures of poverty and violence and racism. …‘The Bible says’ always seemed to me like a mantra that invited everyone to put his or her brain on hold. …‘Jesus is the answer’ seemed to me then and now like a tree without a root” (4-5).
It seems to me that Professor Butterfield – like many leftists – lived her life in an echo chamber. Do you know any Christians who are sheltered from the world’s real problems? Do you know any Christians who have dealt with poverty? Violence? Racism? Most of the Christians I know are immersed in the “world’s real problems.” But my point here is to show that the cultural leftists in our country simply do not know what Christians experience nor how our faith sustains us through it.
Coming “from the inside,” Professor Butterfield writes about the modern secular university: “Feminism has truly captured the soul of secular U. S. universities and the church has either been too weak or too ignorant to know and to know better. …since all major U. S. universities had Christian roots, too many Christians thought that they could rest in Christian tradition, not Christian relevance. …in the court of public opinion, feminists and not Bible-believing Christians have won the war of intellectual integrity” (7).
Professor Butterfield sounds a call to us Christians. In fighting the war raging today – both on the moral front and the doctrinal front – trite answers are not sufficient. While I am convinced that all the “distinctive” doctrines of the churches of Christ are: 1) biblical; 2) logical; 3) practical; 4) persuasive; 5) relevant, I also recognize that we are dealing with a culture now that has trouble believing that truth does not change from person to person like skin color. What that means is that we have to get back to the basics.
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Another point I have drawn from Mrs. Butterfield’s sort-of memoir is how she came to “Christian faith” (actually, Presbyterianism). First, to her credit, she admits that even in the midst of her left-wing feminism, “unanswerable Big Life Questions started to nag” her (6). Back in 1996, she started to write a book on the Religious Right. That motivated her to write a critique of the Promise Keepers.
A preacher for the Reformed Presbyterian Church wrote her. He did not blast her. He did not condemn her. He asked her thought provoking questions. How did you arrive at your conclusions? Do you believe in God? “He didn’t argue with my article; he asked me to explore and defend the presuppositions that undergirded it” (8). Commenting on this preacher’s approach to her, she writes: “But how do we develop spiritual eyes unless Christians engage the culture with those questions and paradigms of mindfulness out of which spiritual logic flows?” (9). Jesus calls us to love Him with all of our mind, doesn’t He (Matt. 22:37)? If we are going to save our culture, we need to get back to using our minds.
The preacher and his wife became friends with Professor Butterfield. Once, they invited her to their home for a meal and he led a prayer. According to Mrs. Butterfield, he led the prayer as if God cared. As if God listened. As if God answered prayer. She had never heard such a prayer before.
Mrs. Butterfield spent two years reading the Bible. During that time, she talked off and on with the preacher and his wife. Eventually (some eight years later), as you already know, she left her leftist ways and her lesbianism and became a member of the Presbyterian church and later married a man who became a Presbyterian preacher. She also left Syracuse and her tenured position with all its perks. They would adopt four children. Her book is fascinating.
It is easy to write off the leftists of our culture – as hard-hearted, hard-headed, and destined to destruction. Yet, all of them are not. With the right approach, the Sauls of Tarsus and the Rosarios of Syracuse can be led out of their darkness to embrace the Light of the World.
“The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:24-25).
–Paul Holland
