The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

My former life still lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.

Outside of the Lord, life is a very treacherous ordeal. Proverbs teaches this when its author Solomon writes: “The way of the unfaithful is hard” (Prov. 13:15). Of course, Christian life is hard too, but it is hard in another way, in a way that is at least bearable and purposeful. Christians can lay hold of the meaning and purpose and grace of suffering and truly believe that all things, even the evil ones, “work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). A life outside of Christ is both hard and frightening; a life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.

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.

Since all major U.S. universities had Christian roots, too many Christians thought that they could rest in Christian tradition, not Christian relevance. 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. Like it or not, in the court of public opinion, feminists and not Bible-believing Christians have won the war of intellectual integrity. And Christians are in part to blame for this.

I honed my hospitality gifts serving pasta to drag queens and queers—people like me. I prefer discussing matters of disagreement around a private table.

I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.

Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.

And what about my home, my habitus? A habitus is a way of life that forms habits of the head, habits of the heart, and habits of the mind. My habitus had heretofore been a bastion of leftist political activism. What does a Christian habitus look like, especially one run by a single ex-lesbian with a now-defunct PhD?

Conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos. I sometimes wonder, when I hear other Christians pray for the salvation of the “lost,” if they realize that this comprehensive chaos is the desired end of such prayers. Often, people asked me to describe the lessons I learned from this experience. I can’t. It was too traumatic. Sometimes in crisis, we don’t really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: sometimes our character is simply transformed.

Pride is the root of all sin. Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence. Proud people always feel that they can live independently from God and from other people. Proud people feel entitled to do what they want when they want to.

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. God did not create us so that we would, as the title of an early book on postmodernism declares, “amuse ourselves to death.” Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin—slowly and almost imperceptibly.

God calls us to be merciful to others for our own good as well as for the good of our community. Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.

Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values. They are God’s standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covet-ousness.

Sexuality isn’t about what we do in bed. Sexuality encompasses a whole range of needs, demands, and desires. Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.

I’ve come to note that normally moderate non-pretentious Christians tend towards extreme emotional excess in the areas of weddings and baby showers. This particular weakness had not been mine to witness until I became the object of this attention. I found this kind of attention uncomfortable and annoying. It seemed as though people that I thought were my friends saw me as suddenly more legitimate now that I was going to join the club of the married.

Never again will I think of knowing God’s will as anything but the most humbling of acts. And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will.

This was my conversion in a nutshell: I lost everything but the dog.

I had learned in a rich and organic way that the Bible webs into all conversations and cultures, like active verbs in sentences or oxygen in the atmosphere. I had learned that Christians need to follow the complex and counterintuitive ways that the Holy Spirit leads. I had learned that being a hero for Jesus was noble work, especially when no one but Jesus himself knew the stakes of the sacrifice at hand. But Bible verses that front salvation over Christian service, instead of being important interfaces between Christian homes and the watching world, seemed like sneaky little raids, quick and insulated targets into culture, with no sense that a worldview of care lay behind them.

Sexual sin is predatory. It won’t be “healed” by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less. I told my audience that I think too many young Christian fornicators plan that marriage will redeem their sin. Too many young Christian masturbators plan that marriage will redeem their patterns. Too many young Christian internet pornographers think that having legitimate sex will take away the desire to have illicit sex. They’re wrong. And the marriages that result from this line of thinking are dangerous places.

Do I have to perform in a church service in order to participate in it?

“Hermeneutics” is an old Greek word that refers to how we interpret life, text, and events. That is, hermeneutics is the study of how we make meaning out of text. Another word that often interchanges with hermeneutics is worldview. Hermeneutics focuses on the details; worldview takes the point of view of the frame. These two terms need to be understood in relationship. A stained-glass window relies on the right relationship between the details that make up each frame and the big picture that emerges when you lift your eyes off the minute detail. It is exceedingly dangerous to build a Christian life on just one or the other. You must hold both in tension and balance. Taken together, hermeneutics and worldview make up a critical perspective.

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.

Adult children can appear obedient when they are tuning out instead of acting out. College life tends to bring out all the fears and doubts and perceptions of contradictions and hypocrisies. Between this hyper-sensitivity to authority and rules, and a growing sexual awareness, we met students who were struggling with real moral issues. Their unsuspecting parents had no idea how their over-protection had dangerously ill-prepared their beloved, overly protected children from all of this.

“It’s always good to let the Novocaine take effect before pulling the tooth.”