In the late 90s, Rosaria Butterfield was content. She seemingly had all she wanted: A tenured position in her department at a major research university. A respected administrative position in the university community. A long-term, stable relationship with her lesbian lover. A large group of people who admired her as a person and agreed with her worldview.

As recorded in her recent book – The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith – God smashed to pieces that world of contentment. Through a research project on the religious right, God brought a local pastor and his wife into her life. They loved her, listened to her, and invited her into their home. God opened Rosaria’s eyes: “I asked him to take it all: my sexuality, my profession, my community, my tastes, my books, and my tomorrows” (509). He did. After a few years, the only constant from her past life was her dog.  She experienced a series of difficult trials as she dealt with “the rubbish of my sin, forgiven by God, but still there to be cleared away” (596). As she writes, Rosaria needed to fall on her face to learn God’s lessons – so He was kind enough to let her fall (1414).

The book is a compelling story of Rosaria’s struggles at conversion and in her Christian life to grow in Christlikeness. It also contains an invaluable critique of evangelical American subculture from someone who shares a belief in biblical authority, but lived for much of her adult life outside that subculture.

I strongly recommend the book. As Carl Trueman writes, “I do not agree with everything she says; but I did learn from everything she wrote.” Let me whet your appetite by providing excerpts – some clearly helpful, some provocative – on four topics: Sexuality, effective outreach, her critique of the evangelical subculture, and the strengths of a biblical church.

1) Sexuality

Homosexuality— like all sin— is symptomatic and not causal— that is, it tells us where our heart has been, not who we inherently are or what we are destined to become (690).

In understanding myself as a sexual being, responding to Jesus (i.e., “committing my life to Christ”) meant not going backwards to my heterosexual past but going forward to something entirely new (705).

2) Effective Outreach

Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue. There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted (238).

Ken and Floy invited the stranger in— not to scapegoat me, but to listen and to learn and to dialogue. . . . We didn’t debate worldview; we talked about our personal truth and about what “made us tick.” Ken and Floy didn’t identify with me. They listened to me and identified with Christ. They were willing to walk the long journey to me in Christian compassion (308, emphasis added).

If Ken and Floy had invited me to church at that first meal I would have careened like a skateboard on a cliff, and would have never come back. . . . Ken was willing to bring the church to me (320, emphasis added).

That morning— February 14, 1999— I emerged from the bed of my lesbian lover and an hour later was sitting in a pew at the Syracuse [Reformed Presbyterian] church. I share this detail with you not to be lurid but merely to make the point that you never know the terrain someone else has walked to come worship the Lord (494).

3) Critique of the American Evangelical Subculture

I believed then and I believe now that where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much (176).

Christians claimed that their worldview and all of the attending features that I saw— Republican politics, homeschooling biases, refusal to inoculate children against childhood illnesses, etc.— had God on its side. Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible (208).

I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin. I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in, when the going gets tough. And I suspect that instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride. Do we really believe that the word of God is a double-edge sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul? Or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior? (588)

[Reflecting on Ezekiel 16:48-50) Living according to God’s standards is an acquired taste. We develop a taste for godly living only by intentionally putting into place practices that equip us to live below our means. We develop a taste for God’s standards only by disciplining our minds, hands, money, and time. In God’s economy, what we love we will discipline. . . . Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin – slowly and almost imperceptibly (653).

I know, I told my audience, why over 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce: because Christians act as though marriage redeems sin. Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that (1632).

[When reflecting on some who left their small church plant because of a “lack of fellowship.”] What does it really mean to “lack fellowship”? At least as it regards the handful of families that showed immediate excitement and then after a month a changed heart, this is what “lacking fellowship” means. It means that the family needs to be in a church made up of people who are just like they, who raise their children using the same childrearing methods, who take the same stance on birth control, schooling, voting, breastfeeding, dress codes, white flour, white sugar, gluten, childhood immunizations, the observance of secular and religious holidays. We encountered families who feared diversity with a primal fear. They often told us that they didn’t want to “confuse” their children by exposing them to differences in parenting standards among Christians. I suspect that they feared that deviation from their rules might provide a window for children to see how truly diverse the world is and that temptation might lead them astray. Over and over and over again I have heard this line of thinking from the fearful and the faith-struggling. We in the church tend to be more fearful of the (perceived) sin in the world than of the sin in our own heart. Why is that? Here is what I think: I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness (2229, emphasis added).

4) The Strengths of a Biblical Church

I needed (and need) faithful shepherding, not the glitz and glamour that has captured the soul of modern evangelical culture. I had to lean and lean hard on the full weight of scripture, on the fullness of the word of God, and I’m grateful that when I heard the Lord’s call on my life, and I wanted to hedge my bets, keep my girlfriend and add a little God to my life, I had a pastor and friends in the Lord who asked nothing less of me than that I die to myself (566, emphasis added).

The fact that God is sovereign over the good and the evil does not necessarily make the evil any less frightening (1370).

I came to believe that my job was not to critique and “receive” a sermon, but to dig into it, to seize its power, to participate with its message, and to steal its fruit (1424).

Through [her pastor’s] preaching, I would learn how to grieve through repentance without feigning false innocence. I learned that night the simple truth of sanctification on this side of heaven: it is as the writer of Hebrews tells us, both “already” and “not yet.” Even when faced with the blinding sting of someone else’s sin, it really is not someone else’s sin that can hurt us. It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all (1490, emphasis added).

[All references are not to page numbers but to Kindle locations of the beginning of the quote.]