Ep. 159: Sexuality. Identity. Hospitality. Food. | Pt. 1

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s Word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Ryan McCurdy:
Hi everyone, it’s great to be with you today. My name is Ryan, your indoubt host, and today I’m very glad to have Rosaria Butterfield with me. She is an author and has been a speaker and professor and has been able to add to a very compelling conversation about identity, belonging, and value.
In this first episode with Rosaria, I was able to talk with her about her very own personal story. We get into some topics on what it means to be valued and how we tend to search for dignity. In today’s culture what often happens is people define themselves by their sexuality and they label their identity as either gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, straight, married, or single. I was able to ask Rosaria about the origins of why we do this, where these labels come from, and how we tend to view ourselves. Rosaria has a very unique perspective with her history and her past, and so it would be great for you to listen in and hear what she has to say.

Ryan McCurdy:
Today on this episode of indoubt we have Rosaria Butterfield, who has her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. She’s an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former tenured Professor of English and Women’s Studies. She is the author of ‘The Secret Thoughts of Unlikely Convert,’ and ‘The Gospel Comes with a House Key.’
Rosaria, so good to have you with us today. Thanks for being with us.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Thank you, Ryan, it’s a joy to be here.

Ryan McCurdy:
Great, well just even as I’ve read that little intro of who you are, I’m thinking of your story and if you would have thought all those things under your name 20 years ago, you probably would have thought somebody reading that bio of you’s crazy or insane.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Yeah, oh yeah, no, no. I would have thought like I had been abducted by some alien force or something.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Right, that’s crazy.

Ryan McCurdy:
That’s not you?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Yeah, no.

Ryan McCurdy:
So what is a little bit of your story, how did you come to faith, would you be able to paint a little bit of a picture of that for me?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Sure, absolutely. In so many ways I came to faith through the faithful hospitality of a neighbour. So I lived in New York, at Syracuse University where I was a professor in English and Women’s Studies. I also held joint appointments in a burgeoning gay and lesbian studies program which is sort of the old way of saying Queer Theory, and Peace Studies and Peace Activism.
And I was very happily partnered with my lesbian partner, our lives were not in shambles, we were happy, were good citizens, we ran a golden retriever rescue, we were members of the Unitarian Universalist church.
If somebody had said that we were bad people, I would have just said, “Well, you know, here’s my life, you look at it.” So, after I was tenured, tenure takes a long time, so after I had everything in line, tenure was on the tracks, I decided to start a book on the religious right, and their politics of hatred of people like me.
I mean, basically I just wanted to understand why people like you, no offence intended, found people like me immoral, untrustworthy, unsafe to be around children, and on the list goes, and so in the process of writing that book, the Lord provided me with a very unlikely friend, a Christian pastor who was also my neighbour, and whose house, strangely enough, functioned at least in its exterior forms, a lot like my house.
So this is New York, this is the LGTBQ community, and this is the 90s. AIDs is ravaging our community, everyone’s home in my community was open one night a week, just to talk about you, and life, and AIDS, and suicide, and drugs, and culture, and care.
And my partner and I, our home was open on Thursday nights, and strangely enough, when I met Ken and his wife Floy Smith, their house functioned in a really similar way. They had all these Christians in their home and all these neighbours in their home. All the time.
And so when he and I met, hospitality was very much our connection. I wasn’t afraid to go to his house and eat a meal and talk, and he wasn’t afraid to come to mine. And so we did that and while I’m working on this book, I’m also reading the Bible because I’m an English professor, I don’t just get to go and interview people, I have to actually read the book.
And Ken’s, you know, he’s a good reformed pastor, he’s happy that anybody’s reading the book for any reason at all. So he’s helping me along and it’s a long story, but after about two years of reading the Bible, seven times through, and meeting with Ken and Floy, probably eating hundreds of meals at their home, the Bible just started to become bigger than I, and when I committed my life to Jesus, I didn’t actually stop feeling like a lesbian.

Rosaria Butterfield:
What happened was I was converted out of unbelief, I was not converted out of homosexuality. That was a different conversation, and that’s a different story and we can talk about that if you want to. It’s all messy, it’s all raw, and it’s all good. It’s all good because the Lord uses us in the complexity that makes us us, and that’s why when I talked to Christians around the nations about living fully for Christ, the most dangerous thing to do is think that you need to somehow be different.
What you need is to love Jesus more than your sin. What you need is to be sober about sin, knowing original sin distorts you and condemns you and actual sin distracts you and enlists you, and indwelling sin manipulates you and that’s true for you and me and every Christian on the planet. The only person who’s made peace with sin is someone who does not know that the blood of Christ was the payment for it.
So before I was a Christian, I was not struggling with being a lesbian, I wasn’t struggling with guilt or any of that, I thought that was just wacky, but with faith comes responsibility and with responsibility often comes the burden of how to hate your sin without hating yourself.
So that’s a lot to talk about, but the long story was I came to faith because I had a very faithful neighbour whose home was open all the time. The people in that home didn’t all share the same last name, didn’t all share the same worldview, didn’t all share the same nation or skin colour, but at a certain point in the evening, Ken Smith would very whimsically, but very effectively distribute Bibles, not to stop the conversation, but to deepen it.
And I learned that the big difference between my home and Ken Smith’s home wasn’t the love or the care for your community, wasn’t all the people that showed up with all of their needs, it was that Ken had a God who was alive to whom he could appeal, and I had my good intentions.

Ryan McCurdy:
That’s a beautiful story, and I think a beautiful picture. I think one of the things that sticks out to me is just the progression of being patient, right?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Right, yeah.

Ryan McCurdy:
Like it wasn’t like you stepped into Ken’s house and he was like, “Okay, now that you’re here, I’ve got a 30-minute sermon for you, let’s go.”

Rosaria Butterfield:
Right, yeah I never would have come back.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Ever.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right.

Rosaria Butterfield:
And I would have written about him in my next book, not in the ways I have.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right, totally, and I think that’s one of the burdens that a lot of people think is I need to have all the answers, I need to know how to respond in season and out of season, in every single way with ultimate truth and ultimate authority, citing everything back to God’s word that I’m dialoguing with the non believer, and what I’m hearing you say is, okay, yes, God’s word is our root, our source, our authority. Yet how we relate to other people is in the messiness of our lives.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Right, and it’s huge, if your words are stronger than your relationships, you’re going to hurt people, even with all of your good intentions.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. I like how you say that “if your words are not as strong as your relationships,”

Rosaria Butterfield:
Yeah, your relationships need to be at least as strong as your words.

Ryan McCurdy:
So can you expand on that a little bit?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Absolutely. It used to be, maybe in the 70s when I wasn’t a Christian and you probably weren’t born, I don’t know. The years of the evangelicals, I think it made a lot of sense that you would just go to your neighbour and say, “Hey, I’m having a Bible study, I want to introduce you to Jesus. Jesus has saved you from your sins.” And it made sense, the people would respond to that, but today people do not believe they need saving from their sins, they believe they need saving from you.
And you’re living under a rock if you don’t know that, and so what you need to remember is that the big heartfelt void of today is the knowledge that you are made in the image of God, that inside each and every human being, every person who identifies as gay, or lesbian, or trans, any person who is of any creed or nation or ability or disability, every single human being has the image of God inside of us, and that is what separates us from animals and from the heavenly beings, from angels.
But it’s also what gives us a dignity, and it’s only in Christ that we can reflect that image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. But even before Christ enters into your life, you are precious, and you are irreplaceable, and you have a world clamouring for dignity.

Rosaria Butterfield:
What is the groundswell of the LGBTQ rights demand right now is dignity, and nothing can give that like the Gospel. It’s really at the end of Romans, Romans 1:26 that makes it really clear that if you cannot get a blessing from God, you will demand it from men.
And so Christians should not be surprised that there has been a political groundswell that has a religious zeal attached to it. The propensity for that is right out of Romans 1. What we need to do is not match that political propensity with political rancour, but we need to go to the root and the root is: You are made in the image of God. And so recently when a neighbour of mine, when her 30-year lesbian relationship fell apart, and she came and she said, “I am destroyed, I want to talk to you, but I don’t want to hear about your God.” I was able with complete good conscience say, “I want to hear what’s going on with you, but I want you to know one thing, Jesus never treats his daughters like this.” That was not an opportunity to rebuke – she was broken – that was an opportunity to figure out how we could be some earthly good, and so it wasn’t hard to figure that out.
She needed a place to stay, she needed an apartment. She needed meals, I mean come on, if the church can’t function, church is you push a button and the church goes into that mode. Do you know how many of our neighbours would just benefit from that? We don’t withhold love because people have brought their own crisis upon themselves, that’s the tragic condition, and that’s the human condition, and it was while we were yet in sin that Christ died for us.
So, we don’t come in the name of Christ the Judge, we come in the name of Christ the Saviour, but before we can talk about matters of salvation, we do need to talk about what it means to be an image bearer of a holy God. All that sounds very nice, it sounds like, “Oh, phew, that’s not complex -” that’s actually one of the most complex ideas around.
For example, when I came to Christ, I needed to figure out if being a lesbian was how I was, or who I was, and it’s really image bearing that answers that question. You see, we will all be thumb printed by Adam one way or another, and anybody who thinks that he or she is not is a danger to himself, and to the church, so we are all born with Adam’s thumbprint one way or another.
But we live in a political world that says, “No, no, no, gay is who I am, not how I am,” and it’s image-bearing that actually challenges that. So on the one hand while this is a wonderful message and it speaks to the felt needs of everybody, it’s also going to really push a lot of buttons about world view and so we need to be ready for that.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, and I find that very interesting, this distinction between how I am and who I am, where did that come from? Where did this idea of I am my sexuality or I am my situation, right? Whoever you are, it’s like I am single, or I am married, or I am this.
Where did this identity come from? Has it always been there?

Rosaria Butterfield:
No, I’m so glad you, actually, when you read my bio, there was one book you didn’t mention.

Ryan McCurdy:
Okay.

Rosaria Butterfield:
And I write about it this book, it’s called, ‘Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ,’ and I wrote that in 2015 in response to this question, because 2015 of course was the year that in the United States the Obergefell decision legalized gay marriage in all of the 50 states.
Part of how that happened was through a world view that says this is who I am, and so I spent years, myself, wrestling with that question and so I wanted to study that and it actually began in the 19th century, late 18th century. It began when the classical movement moved into the romantic movement, those are worldviews, those are political ideas, it has a lot to do with art and culture and philosophy.
And basically the idea was that your feelings were a form of epistemology or truth-telling, and then Freud, really, he himself is part of the romantic movement, so Freud developed a study of human sexuality based on the idea that the object of your sexual love is the proof of who you really, enduringly and ontologically are.
And that stands in opposition to the Genesis 1:27 understanding that no, you are God’s, you are made in the image of God. Having been born after Genesis 3, you happen to come with a thumbprint of Adam.
And having come after Genesis 3, you come with the responsibility of dealing with that thumbprint of Adam, you are not a victim because Adam’s sin, no, you love the darkness, says John 3, you love it, I love it.
And so it’s only in union with Christ that any of us can put some daylight between our identity and our sexual desire because it isn’t just a homosexual issue, this isn’t just a gay issue. There’s a writer named Michael Hannon, and I love the way he says it, he says it, “If homosexuality binds, b-i-n-d-s, binds you to sin, heterosexuality blinds you to sin,” and I think that’s spot on. The other question is why did the church prefer this 19th century understanding of personhood over the Biblical one, and that has a theological story to it also.

Ryan McCurdy:
Right, and I think one of the things that I’m confronted with is this reality that there are many people, inside and outside of the church, who have beliefs about themselves that are more concerned with how than who, so it’s like how I function in my faith is more important than who I am in my faith as a son or daughter of God. And I think even as you explain this epistemological and ontological, ontology meaning like what I believe to be true about myself?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Well, actually ontology meaning who you inherently are from before the foundations of the world.

Ryan McCurdy:
Okay, yeah.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Ontology is being. Epistemology is thinking and that’s the issue of what is true? What is the truest of the true?

Ryan McCurdy:
So what can be known about what is true would epistemology, and then what is true would be ontological?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Yes, yes.

Ryan McCurdy:
Great, and I think one of things that I’m curious about is wherever we’re coming at in this conversation, from whatever background we have, opening our door to people who are different than us and have different views and different perspectives and different values might naturally bring up ideas of fear, of how do I sit across a table from somebody that I don’t know what they’re gonna say?
And so, a question I have for you is like, what would you say to someone who thinks it’s a great idea to open their door and have a dinner, but is just paralyzed in fear of what to say or anxiety or all these things. What would you?

Rosaria Butterfield:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a great question, and I think, I’ll tell you, what you just described though, that fills me with joy. When I think about getting into a group and I have no idea what people are gonna say, and where people are coming from, and I have the opportunity to be a first gospel contact, maybe not tonight, but two years from now, and I have the opportunity to figure out how to be some earthly good to my neighbours who don’t know Christ.
So I just see this huge display of Christian joy in front of me, and that might be a good question, too. Temperament is sometimes learned. Is there something about our church culture, something our people-pleasing culture, what is it that makes us fear dining with strangers because Jesus did that. It’s certainly not because we’re following Christ.
If you’re following Christ, you’re not afraid to dine with strangers. You’re not even afraid for other people to think ill of you because your dining with strangers, you’re not afraid of that.
But I would say that we have become too pragmatic in the Christian life. We tend to look at the Bible as a big book with a lot of propositional truth. Instead of seeing that yes, there is much propositional truth in the Bible, but it’s a living book, and it’s meant to liberate the captives, and when you’re deep in your sin, the Bible uses the word “deceived” and one of the root understandings of deception, to be deceived, isn’t just to be wrong, you made a mistake in your crossword puzzle, you’re wrong, well big deal.
To be deceived is to be taken captive by an evil force to do its bidding. Now if that doesn’t fill you with compassion, I don’t know what would. So two reasons I think we’re afraid if we’re afraid, and I think a lot of people aren’t afraid, I think we’re just so used to think we’re afraid that we act like we are.

Rosaria Butterfield:
I think a lot of people think, “Hey, this sounds like fun! I get to talk to people who are really different than I am.” But if you are afraid, then you might be afraid because you’re people pleasing and you’re afraid about what the Jones’ will think.
You might be afraid because you actually think somebody else’s sin will hurt you. Actually, the only sin that’s going to undo you is your own. When Paul says “I’m the chief of all sinners,” that’s not just because he really did some bad things. It wasn’t because there was a poll taken and he was nominated, “Yes, you’re the chief of all sinners.” It’s because he knows the only sin that’s going to shipwreck him is his own.
So there’s that, and another reason is you might be thinking to yourself, “I haven’t thought through how to manage this with my children at the table. I haven’t thought through how to manage this with my aged mother at the table,” or if you’re married, “I haven’t thought through how my spouse and I are going to relate to these differences.” So the first is deal with your own sin, deal with the compassion that you ought to have for unbelievers, but the later is do some homework. I know people who spend all kinds of time doing lots of preparation to get their home in order. Bag that, and get your heart in order.
Don’t worry about the cat hair on the couch, it’s not gonna kill anybody, and get your relationships in order. Have a plan for what you’re going to do when your neighbour discloses something really important that you need to move in with Christian love and at the same time, maybe the kiddos need a little interpretation on the matter.

Rosaria Butterfield:
But you know I’m gonna tell you, my kids are older now, all of them are either 20s, 30s, married with kids or teenagers in the house, and they’ve been raised like this, and one of the things that will never happen if you raise your children like this, you will never be able to pull out Jesus as a silly little prop for Sunday morning or Wednesday.
They will know that Jesus Christ saves sinners just like us, and they will see people come to faith not because it’s easy, but because it’s true and it’s hard, and that will be vital, that will be such a good investment for them.
So I think sometimes we think we protect our children by sheltering them, how much shelter can you give a child in a post-Christian world? Not enough, so those are some of the things that I think we need to think about.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, because eventually, that bubble is gonna burst, right? Especially with children, if they’re not exposed. And I think this is what a lot of young adults face is, I grew up Christian, a Christian family, Christian school, maybe, I went to church, I did all the Christian things, and then I had my first year of university, second year of university, and some of the challenges primarily are, I don’t know what to think, but deeper I don’t know how to live, I don’t how to disagree with people who are different than me and still remain true to who I am in God.

Rosaria Butterfield:
Right, and I also think that there’s a sense of the betrayal that my parents and my church didn’t tell me the whole truth. They told me my lesbian neighbours are sinning, but they didn’t prepare me for what it would be like when they’re the nicest people on the block.
And the Gospel prepares you for that. Jesus wants you to love people for real, and have them in your home, and I get all kinds of criticism on this about how my poor children have been just subjected, to what? Well to me as a mother. Let’s just start there, right?
If your Gospel doesn’t prepare you to see the sin and appreciate that that person is the nicest person on the block because of common grace, then you don’t have 100% grace and 100% truth.
And every time I’m on some podcast – you haven’t done it and I appreciate it – where somebody says, “How do you balance truth and grace?” You don’t, because you can’t live with 50% grace and 50% truth. You don’t balance it. You want 100% grace and 100% truth and if that blows things up, great. Hallelujah! Let’s see what happens in the rubble.

Ryan McCurdy:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of indoubt with Rosaria Butterfield. You can’t follow her on social media, but you can get her latest book and find her on her website, and her latest book is, ‘The Gospel Comes with a House Key.’

Ryan McCurdy:
I want to remind you that indoubt exists to bring the Good News of Jesus into everyday issues of life, faith and culture. We want to encourage you and equip you to engage with the tough questions of our time in a way that honours God.
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Ryan McCurdy:
Next week we have Rosaria with us again as we do part two of our conversation, this time focusing more on hospitality and how we can engage with those in our world all around us.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening! If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on instagram, Facebook and Twitter.