By Varvara Vasyanova –
Rosaria Butterfield was a militant feminist English professor at Syracuse University waging a “war against stupid.”
By “stupid,” she meant Christianity.
“The name Jesus made me recoil in anger,” she says. “I tired of students who believed that knowing Jesus meant knowing little else.”
Her worldview was fed by social justice and modernized morals. After about a decade of dating men, she gave up entirely and got hooked on lesbian lovers and left Ohio State University not only with a PhD in English and Critical Theory but also with a lesbian partner.
“I cheered that the DSM had long since removed homosexuality from its list of disorders, thus rendering homosexuality in the eyes of the world and the academy normal,” she says. (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is considered the benchmark for psychology.)
Imbued with the modernist views of Freud, Hegel, Marx and Darwin, she “strove to stand with the disempowered.”
In 1997, she published an article in a local newspaper lambasting faith as the enemy of reason. She got hate mail and fan mail. But one letter could not be classified in either extreme; it was a simple and kind invitation to examine the presuppositions undergirding her postmodernist worldview.
She was planning to expand her article into a book. The pastor’s letter unsettled her. Surely, she needed to dedicate due diligence to at least look at the Bible if she meant to undermine it, she thought.
“If I was going to understand how this book, the Bible, got so many people off track, if I was to understand why so people believed in Jesus, then I needed to understand Christianity as a supernatural idea,” she explains. “I thought the category of ‘supernatural’ was reserved for Stephen King novels.”
And so, Rosaria launched into Bible reading and kept at it for two years.
“I read the Bible through several times. I saw for myself that it has a holy author. I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of 66 books with a unified revelation. The Bible had the seal of truth.”
She had started wanting to cross-examine the Bible. She found out that the contrary would happen.
“The Bible actually had the right to interrogate me and my life and my culture,” she says.
She began attending church.
“The fog burned away,” she says. “I found out that I truly wanted to hear God’s voice and I wanted God to hear my voice. My hands let go of the wheel of self-invention.”
When she recognized God’s authority over his creation, she realized her modern morals were self-invented.
“I came to Jesus alone, open handed, naked,” she says. “so I repented of the pride that led me to believe that I could invent my own rules for faith, life and sexual autonomy, the pride that said that I was entitled to live separately from God.”
Today, Rosaria is a Christian and married with children.
