In October, Rosaria Butterfield discussed her new book with the Witness editor. Dr. Butterfield is the author of Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Openness Unhindered, and The Gospel Comes with a House Key. She is a member of First (Durham, N.C.) RPC.

RPW: After The Gospel Comes with a House Key, you could have chosen to write on a variety of things, and a reasonable number of people would’ve read it. Why did you choose Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age?

Rosaria: Around 2019 people started writing to my website or stopping me at Costco or in the neighborhood and asking me hard questions: Why can’t we major on the majors anymore? Why can’t the evangelical church agree about what the majors are so that we can major on them? Why if Christ isn’t divided is the church divided? When I went to a small group and I prayed that my lesbian sister would repent of her sin and come to Christ, why was I rebuked and told I was homophobic?

The Obergefell Supreme Court decision was in 2015, but everything didn’t just change. Although the White House went up in rainbow colors, things didn’t change at the ground level so quickly, but they did change. The dignitary harm clause of the Obergefell decision defined legal harm to include failing to use someone’s LGBTQ identity. When Ken Smith met me, he said, “Rosaria, I can accept you as a lesbian. I just don’t approve.” The dignitary harm clause makes it a little harder to say that.

Some Christians were saying things like, “Well, this is just vocabulary. I say gay Christian, you don’t. There’s no difference.” Then, in 2019, Peter Vlaming was fired from his job as a high school French teacher because he was not using transgender pronouns—and he was also teaching in a foreign language where nouns have gender.

It seemed to me that there was something afoot with the questions these moms were asking me, and the questions would get more dire to the point where one grandma wanted to Zoom with me to ask, “My lesbian daughter is now non-binary. She wants to raise my three-year-old grandson as a girl to save the world from toxic masculinity, and is using tucking underwear.”

This was happening in a state where parents and grandparents don’t have parental rights over the LGBTQ+ lobby. All of a sudden, I broke out into a cold sweat, and I realized that a pretty predominating indwelling sin that the Lord rescued me from is now the idol of our day. Furthermore, my fingerprints are all over it because, when I lived as a lesbian, I was not just the lesbian next door. I spoke before the legislature; I wrote policy. It struck me that as these moms and grandmas were asking me a very simple faith and reason question. If Christ is not divided, why are we? I want to major on the majors. Why can’t we agree about what the majors are?

I sat down and drafted an outline, and I came up with three reasons that have unleashed five lies into the visible church, and we don’t seem quite equipped to deal with them.

I don’t think it’s a polemical book. I don’t think it’s apologetics. I’m not a theologian. I’m still just an English professor. I wrote it because I do believe that the truth will set you free. If you see places where the church has adopted a slogan that doesn’t square with Scripture, that slogan is not going to set you free.

The other reason I wrote it is I thought about myself and how hard it would be to fight an indwelling sin that has now become a national idol. I thought it was hard decades ago. I can’t imagine now. In the writing of this book I talked to friends. Christopher Yuan and Beckett Cook are my very good friends. We talk all the time and we consider ourselves the three musketeers. We realized that some of the things we had been saying, or some of the ways we had been phrasing things, were really misleading.

I realized that I needed to repent of some sin. If you’re a public figure, there’s a particular way that your sin is on blast. Even something like the use of transgender pronouns or the promotion of using it. Most people who hang out with me at dinner would say, “You haven’t said that in years.” But if it’s in a book and the book sold 100,000 copies, it requires public repentance.

In the writing of this book, the introduction starts with my own public repentance around, I think, four issues. Then at different times, given whatever pressure’s going on in the world, I’ve rewritten them, made them longer as articles.

I don’t think that should be shocking. Honestly, it is the strangest thing that the Christian world responds to Rosaria’s public repentance with shock and awe. It is not shocking that Christians repent, and Christians have no business to call other people to repentance if we aren’t repenting. I realized in both personal and more large-scale ways that I had said things that had led people to believe something that’s not true about sin and about grace. I needed to come clean on that.

RPW: That slides into the next topic. Once you decided to write on lies of our anti-Christian age, the spectrum is broad. You could have chosen 50 or 100. Why did you pick these five?

Rosaria: I picked those five because I believe these are the five that are hurting Christian women in special ways, either directly or indirectly, because of our daughters or granddaughters. I also picked these five lies because they all expose what is the dominant problem that the church faces when it functions during an age like ours—the issue of biblical anthropology or personhood.

These five lies have basic things in common. One is that they rebel against the creation ordinance in Genesis 1:27–28. The other is that they rely upon a feminist idea that biological sex and cultural gender are separate and that that’s a good thing. They confuse sins of the flesh with personhood. These are also the issues about which people would write to my website or talk to me. One or two or maybe all five lies would come up as things that are dividing families as they’re getting ready to sit down for Thanksgiving or other gatherings.

RPW: You mentioned here and you mentioned prominently in the book that this book is especially for women. Reading it as a man, I didn’t find a place where I thought, “I don’t need to read that.” Why is it especially for women?

Rosaria: I have done a bunch of interviews about this book, and it seems I keep wanting to write for women and I just can’t; so everybody is like, “I’m sorry, Rosaria. I’m glad you think this is a book for women, but it’s not.” I guess it’s because women are the people who would write to my website and also because my applications for the book are more in the domain of the domestic and the personal. This is how I pray, this is how I think, this is how I read Scripture. You don’t need a PhD in queer theory. You need to be sanctified in your ignorance as well as your knowledge. I think that men are called to go out there in a more public way and lead and shape and, in some ways, do combat. I don’t think women are actually set up for combat. The combat I recommend in this book—

RPW: You mean like military combat?

Rosaria: Yes, or Twitter combat. I think we’re better at wrestling in prayer. In some ways perhaps my diagnosis of the world would be useful for men. I hope it’s accurate so in that way it’s good, but I don’t think that my solutions would necessarily be useful for men.

RPW: Maybe this is a good point to talk about biblical patriarchy. I’ve always heard that term, but I’m more accustomed to hearing biblical headship. You used both terms, but why did you gravitate toward biblical patriarchy in describing biblical family roles?

Rosaria: One of the first frames of the book is the frame that says the seeds of the gospel are in the garden. A dominant thread throughout this book is that the Bible is a unified biblical revelation and, when the New Testament makes a command, often the anchor of that command is found in the Old Testament. For example, transgenderism is a sin of envy and a violation of the 10th commandment. The anchor for that understanding is in the Old Testament, in Exodus 20.

Biblical patriarchy is a good Old Testament idea. My friend Kevin DeYoung much prefers complementarity to patriarchy or headship and did his best to try to convince me to use it, but I’m just so tired of neologisms. I wanted to use a word that was in the sweet spot of the Bible, but also I feel like it has an edge to it. The word patriarchy—there’s a hierarchy in that.

RPW: That would be a term that your enemies would use as opposed to complementarianism or something, which sounds a lot nicer.

Rosaria: Right. I have gotten some pushback on it and I’ve said, “Did y’all read The Gospel Comes with a House Key?” Because I used it there too. I think people were so excited about the minestrone soup that they didn’t notice it. I think it’s important because, if you don’t like biblical patriarchy, what do you think of transgender patriarchy? There’s an analogy I can’t draw if I use complementarity or headship, and that’s that when the Bible offers a command and a frame, if you mess it up, you’re going to see it in a distorted way.

I think people don’t think that about complementarity and headship. I think they think, “Well, if the Jones family is struggling with headship, that’s a very private thing and the problem stays in the household.” Here’s what I know to be true. If the church fails at the understanding and application of biblical patriarchy, we get to see it again in its Frankensteinian form in terms of transgenderism. The way that transgenderism has become an act of male dominance is, I think, important to recognize.

When I go to school board meetings, you don’t see students there. If you do see students, they’re there because they want to talk to you about school lunch. Otherwise it’s all the activists. The activists come from all over the state. Some of them are paid to be there, and they’re all about the needs of trans girls, who are boys, to play sports.

What has happened is the idol of our day has so perverted the idea of biblical patriarchy that what you see now is transgender patriarchy. I think this is part of the natural order of things. I think that men will be in charge, that men will be dominant. If you don’t want the godly men to be dominant, it will be distorted in the way we see today.

RPW: Thank you for explaining that. We all know women who have been abused by a false biblical patriarchy. We know some personally, of course, and they’ve been told by the head of household, “God has given me this right,” and so the women suffer under abuse for decades. Even in some of those households, the head of household pushes back the authority of the elders and says, “Look, you can come to my front doorstep, but no farther without going through me.” Do you have a word for those women?

Rosaria: Yes. I think that I have seen more examples of the deleterious effects when women are leading their households than I have when men are. In those kinds of situations what I’ve seen are children who are not walking with the Lord because it seems like the words of God are pretty hypocritical—because Mom is very much in charge. When Dad can’t lead and Mom does, I’ve seen a whole host of other problems result. I don’t mind pushback, I love pushback. I think where everybody thinks the same, nobody thinks very much. I’d rather come up with actual lived examples.

In a situation of abuse, a woman should call the authorities. There’s no vow that she’s violating by calling the police. In a situation of abuse, women and children should be given a different place to live. You can talk to me on the front porch, but there’s nobody else in the house because the church has been able to provide a shelter. That’s common sense. The other part of this is that really good premarital counseling needs to happen. People need to know each other’s sin patterns before they get married.

In a case where a woman is being abused and the elders feel like they can’t intervene because Dad will only meet them at the porch, if that woman is a member of the church, then she has absolute access to her elders and she is not to obey a husband who is defying God’s law. The elders need to not be part of the old boys’ club at that point, and they need to do the right thing and provide an alternative place to live.

The fact that sinful people abuse a paradigm that God gives doesn’t mean the paradigm needs to change. That’s the problem with the feminist analysis of all of this. They say, But too many people have abused the paradigm. Then people need to stop abusing the paradigm. I don’t know how you do this in a Baptist church, but in a Presbyterian church you have lots of opportunities to get this right, and I think we need to exercise that.

RPW: Your book evokes a sense that you feel convicted that we are the lukewarm church in Laodicea from Revelation 3. Is that a good representation of where we are?

Rosaria: I wouldn’t say that about the Reformed Church at all. I think that the visible church, and especially the visible church that has become highly influenced by parachurch ministries, has had a very hard time recognizing what time it is and dealing with that. What I’m seeing is slogans instead of Scripture and a real rejection of understanding the pressure put on the church by the Obergefell decision, the Bostock decision, the dignitary harm clause, the change of Title IX, and the Biden administration’s reinvention of the 14th Amendment.

In Aaron Renn’s word, we live in a negative world. We’re not neutral anymore. When I speak at a school board meeting, the only time I’ve ever heard the word pervert used was against the Christians. I get the sense that in broad evangelicalism there’s a resistance to know what time it is, because it would be really hard to keep everybody happy. Liberals make bad martyrs.

I think that we could just say, Know what time it is. We might be in a place where we are the voice crying in the wilderness. I don’t think we’re prepared.

I meet a lot of people who don’t know how to proclaim the gospel to a hostile world. They know how to proclaim the gospel at a barbecue where you’re in a neutral setting. They don’t know how to go to a school board with people who are hating you and spitting at you and calling you names. They don’t know how to function in that environment, so they pretend that environment isn’t real or the church shouldn’t go there. The book is trying to help Christians know what time it is and proclaim the gospel in a hostile world without being hostile.

At one of the school board meetings I attended—and it’s almost become iconic for this to happen—the last speaker of the day stood up with a microphone and screamed. Everybody gets three minutes, and you have to sit there and listen to people for three minutes. Then she identified herself as a Durham County schoolteacher. After the meeting I caught up with her and said, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say, but I would like to know. I would like to know what you are thinking. Here is my phone number. I will meet wherever you want. I just want you to use your words. I just need words.” My son was my bodyguard that night, and we got in the car and he said, “Mom, the last time you told me to use my words, I was four.” I thought, “Oh, that’s true.” Sin infantilizes people.

The last time I encountered this woman could have been a hostile public battle. As a Christian, that’s not what I choose to do. I choose to find people and invite them into a private conversation. The Christians that I go with to school board meetings, we sit with the gay rights movement because we want to talk to people.

RPW: Maybe saying “Know what time it is” is a polite way of saying “Wake up.”

Rosaria: Maybe.

RPW: Ever since I’ve been young, I’ve heard preachers say, “We’re not persecuted. If you become a missionary and you go to one of those countries, you’ll be persecuted. Thank the Lord that we’re not persecuted here.” What I hear you saying is, “Wake up. You are. You just might be the frog in the kettle.”

Rosaria: I wouldn’t say that you are persecuted, but are you aware of what time it is? Do you not know anybody who’s been fired from their job because they didn’t use transgender pronouns or they didn’t plaster a rainbow flag on their Facebook page? It’s happening. It might not be happening to you yet.

Our denomination has the doctrine of the mediatorial kingship of Christ, which means that we are called to proclaim Christ to the nations. What that means is we call people to repent and believe, and we call them to do that at their personal level, but also at the level of their office. If those on the school board happen to be hanging millstones around the necks of children, part of what we believe we should be doing is calling them to repentance. I’ve not heard anybody say, other than Jen Wilkin on the Gospel Coalition, “It’s perfectly safe to send your kids to public school. It’s a first-rate education.” Again, I don’t know her personally. All I know is that’s the kind of statement that somebody says when you don’t know what time it is.

The mediatorial kingship of Christ proclaims Christ to the nations, which implies there’s something going on in the nations. The Bostock decision in 2020 that added transgenderism to the 1964 Civil Rights Act—it’s because of that that people are losing their jobs. Can I go to a Gospel Coalition conference right now where somebody, such as Preston Sprinkle, is going to say, “Rosaria, it’s just vocabulary. I like to say gay Christian. You don’t. It’s all vocabulary.”

I’m thinking it can’t be just all vocabulary because Peter Vlaming lost his job over vocabulary. He lost his job over ideology. He lost his job because some words can’t be spoken. Sometimes when I am invited to speak on a podcast, the podcaster will say, “Rosaria, don’t hold back. I know if we were using YouTube, we wouldn’t be able to publish this, but we’re Blaze TV. We’re Moody Radio. Say it like it is.” If we can’t exercise free speech today, what’s it going to be like in five years? I’ve been on the front line of this conversation for over a decade. This is the first year that people are saying this. Why? Because they know what time it is.

RPW: What if people say, as I’m sure they do to you, You’re highly educated, you’re well-read in this area, and you also have a lot of life experience. It’s one thing for you to go to school board meetings and invite a teacher home. It’s one thing for you to relate to people directly on this. It’s another thing for me. I don’t know these terms. I don’t know how they think.

Rosaria: First of all, that’s why I wrote the book. I wrote so you could know these terms so that you don’t have to get a PhD in it. I agree with you entirely. I don’t think everybody has to do this. I think we’re the body of Christ. I don’t think nursing mothers have to go to school board meetings and be hassled by gay rights activists who are imported from all parts of the Earth. I agree with you. I don’t think everybody has to do it. I think the church has to do it.

Who from the church wants to do it? It’s a little bit like anything else in the church. I don’t think everybody has to practice hospitality all the time because there are seasons in your life when you’ve got to keep the doors closed. Who’s going to do it? It’s a church question. It’s not an individual question.