The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterflied REVIEW
“I write these days as a drowning person gulps air.
I steal time here and there, and in the backdrop of my theft you will find
children, friends of children, and a husband whose government job and its
constant din of stress and competition organize our days. We have a mini-van
that Kent has christened the Traveling Garbage Can. I have been known to clean
out this van by sending in my trusty Golden Retriever, Sally, to fetch old
PB& J sandwiches, juice boxes, and pizza crusts. Sally is the same age as
my youngest daughter; it was like having twins separated by species.” – Rosaria
Butterfeild, The Secret Thoughts of an
Unlikely Convert
In the Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film, Blackrobe, we encounter the story of European cultural and religious colonization of North America. In one poignant scene, an Algonquin chief by the name of Chomina has a dream of a raven plucking out one of his [Chomina’s] eyes. Upon awaking and discussing the dream with his wife, Chomina comes to the conclusion that the black raven is a symbol of “blackrobe” – the nickname given to the Jesuit priest who has come to evangelize and convert him. The picture of the raven plucking out this Native American’s eyeball is a striking and thought provoking one for as we see in the film, this is precisely what the Jesuits had come to do to Native North American ways of seeing the world. They intended to change the filters through which their world was observed.
Ironically, in the course of the film, Blackrobe, we see that Native American ways of seeing the world could just as easily take away a young Frenchman’s way of “making sense” of experience as well. Indeed, at points in time in the film, even the devout Jesuit, father Laforgue, begins to experience “worldview vertigo.” He sees his young disciple’s mindset about morality, about heaven, about community, and about sexuality being changed. There is a scene where Father Laforgue finds himself lost in the woods and he begins to see the trees look like cathedral pillars and you get the sense that Native American perceptions of sacred space are intruding on his French Catholic perceptions, against his will as it were.
What the film reveals is that other people’s world views often will have a more powerful impact on us than we may think they can. And the more committed we are to our own way of seeing the world - the more “totalitarian” we are about our world view, the more powerful that impact can be when we meet a similarly “totalitarian” worldview. (Here, I use the word totalitarian not in the sense of Stalin or Hitler but in describing a world view that orders and informs every aspect of your life.)
Clearly, Rosaria Champagne Butterfeild finds this to be the case when, as a tenured professor of Women’s Studies and an advocate and spokesperson of radical feminist lesbian ideology, she steps into the world of conservative Christianity in order to do “oppositional research” on it and finds herself, much against her will, converted. Her account of that conversion process can be set in a long history of autobiographical resistant-conversions stories that begins with Paul the Apostle, continues through the Confessions of Augustine, and carries into modern classics like C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, Sheldon Van Auken’s A Severe Mercy, Josh McDowell’s autobiographical story in Evidence that Demands a Verdict, or Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford. “When I was 28 years old,” Rosario Champagne Butterfeild begins her account,
“I boldly declared myself lesbian. I was at the finish of a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies. I was a teaching associate in one of the first and strongest Women’s Studies Departments in the nation. I was being recruited by universities to take on faculty and administrative roles in advancing radical leftist ideologies. I genuinely believed that I was helping to make the world a better place.”
Her story is something of a modern counterpart to that of Paul, the persecutor of Christians, being confronted with a vision of the risen Christ on the Damascus Road. “Christians always seemed like bad thinkers to me” she confesses and though she sums up her former creed with the dictum ”there [were] no truths, only truth claims” it is clear that in that previous life, she was every bit the dogmatist about feminism that she asserted Christians were about their religion.
There are interesting paradoxes to be explored here. “Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame,” she writes. But note well the regimentation that she enforced on her Syracuse University Women’s Studies 101 students. The following passage from The Secret Thoughts is instructive:
"Critical perspective asserts that we make meaning out of our lives not by personal experience but by the frames through which we filter that experience. On my Women’s Studies 101 syllabus, I wrote this about critical perspective:
‘NB (nota bene, or, “note well”): Students are expected to write all papers and examination essay questions from a feminist worldview or critical perspective. In Spanish class you speak and think in Spanish. In Women’s Studies you speak and think in feminist paradigms. Examination essay questions written from critical perspectives outside of feminism will receive an automatic grade of F. Papers written from critical perspectives outside of feminism will be allowed one revision. Any student who is unable to write and think from a feminist critical perspective or worldview with a clear conscious should drop the class now.’
In other words, she believed in the importance of immersing oneself into a worldview as a prerequisite to understanding it and thereby ultimately converting to it. In short, she was a secular feminist missionary working at Syracuse University. When she converts to Chrsitianity, she will insist upon a similar internally imposed totalitarianism of that new world view. She refuses to allow herself the option of picking and choosing portions of the Bible to integrate or not integrate. For her, to be converted is to be given new eyes and to have the old eyes taken away. “The Prodigal Son didn’t repent of his sin because he got tired of living like and with the pigs,” she writes,
“He repented because God gave him eyes to see. Until this happens, no personal experience can topple his critical perspective. That’s the thing about the frame that we use to look at the world. It is actually stronger than life experience because it is mindful, positioned, owned, established, and deeply held. Personal experience can seem fickle. Worldview (the end result of the critical perspective we choose) is always intimate and claimed.”
Worldviews cannot then, be chosen piecemeal. And they cannot be subjected to experience based revisions. One does not start thinking somewhat different. One becomes a new species of seer. And this applies to the way that she thinks as a member of a particular denomination.
“The question, then, for me, was: how do we in the Reformed Presbyterian church assemble our worldview? What goes first, my personal experience as a believer or the church’s doctrines?”
Again there is an interesting commitment that she seems to make to a shared communal ideology that individuals are not necessarily free to modify. Ideology has overtones of group loyalty. There is a sense that, as in an Amish community, if one person is to change their minds about something, they must have the whole group do so as well. Thus, the author in several instances looks at the process of private “mind changing” as “betrayal.” A few examples follow.
Rosaria speaks of her decision to give a “coming out” speech to her university’s freshman class - A speech in which she practically deserts her former feminist and lesbian loyalties. She regards this decision as a “betrayal” of her former “group.” “What was different this time was that in giving this lecture, I betrayed my friends,” she writes. And later, she adds, “Each Lord’s Supper makes me experience my traitorship to my gay friends and to the person that I once was.”
She speaks of her decision to commit herself to her church as a similar “betrayal” of her old ideology and friends. “Once I had said these vows with my lips and held them in my heart, therein truly lay my treason from the gay community.”
Ideologies are things that groups of people ascribe to and demand that others ascribe to in order to “belong.” They are things that one has to conform to, though that may entail time, struggle, and at times, deference. She cannot accept her Christianity in any piecemeal way. “During this time of struggle, others tried to help,” she writes of her decision to convert to Christianity as a practicing lesbian,
“A Methodist pastor and the Dean of the Chapel at Syracuse University believed that I did not have to give up everything to honor God. Indeed, he told me, since God made me a lesbian, I gave God honor by living an honorable lesbian life. He told me that I could have Jesus and my lesbian lover. This was a very appealing prospect. But I had been reading and rereading scripture, and there are no such marks of postmodern “both/ and” in the Bible.
And thus, the lesbianism had to go. “When Christ gave me the strength to follow him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian,” she writes,
“I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t change my feelings until I obey him. . . . Ah ha! Here it was! Obedience comes before understanding.”
She is a believer in the maxim that it is in continuously acting as though we believe that we convince ourselves of what we wish to believe. “One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session,” she writes, inferring that a sexual orientation is a sin. It is not hard to see why she would write of this time in her life that “conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos.” One might argue that someone who grew up believing in orthodox Christian ideas about sexuality and then reversed them would also experience the same sort of “complicated comprehensive chaos.” She has decided to rewire herself (or to put it in words that she might use, “She has decided to allow herself to be rewired.”) “I didn’t choose Christ,” she insists,
“Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.”
Ironically, this is probably how she would have once portrayed her sexual orientation; as a thing, “not-chosen.” One cannot help as they read this to see how her life will be used by some as a piece of evidence that sexual orientation is malleable and sexual “misorientation” is thus potentially dysfunctional, or maybe even “criminal.”
But let’s not speak of that here.
I want to return to her narrative and contradict myself. For indeed, what analysis of any person’s life will not lead an author or reviewer to contradict themselves – for lives are contradictory. Along with being a totalitarian, Rosaria Champagne Butterfeild remains a “liberal;” a person who resents being put into an ideological straight jacket. She wants the comfort of communal coherence but not too much. “I believed then and I believe now that where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much” she says of her early life experiences with Christians. Indeed, she defines the whole reason for her late exposure to Christianity to be a result of Christian inflexibility. “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.”
“Here is what I think,” she avers in her concluding chapter on homeschooling and culture, “I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness.”
And yet, forgive me reader for I am merely following the internal conflicts of this person’s report of herself, we must again return to the former position. In her discussion of Christian worship, Rosaria makes it clear that she thinks that church worship should restrict itself to the singing of Psalms. She is not a fan of human creativity in worship.
“Is God pleased with our creativity in the context of worship? How much creativity does God want? Yes, interpretation matters, yes, interpretation is messy, but is there a biblical warrant for worshiping God in specific ways? If so, how tightly does God draw in the boundaries?
"And the more that I study, the more I believe that God commands us to sing Psalms in worship to the exclusion of man-made hymns.”
Are we not all full of these paradoxes? Do we not all want to belong to communities that give us precicely the same measure of uniformity and tolerance that we want to extend? As we look for shoes in the right length, right width, right style, right color do we not also look for ideological family in life? In the end, we are all left with questions if we are believers or if we are members of ideological communities of any kind. What decisions should be left to me? What decisions should not? For Rosaria, worship is too important to be left to a human to decide. Sexuality is too important for an individual to decide. The roles of men and women in marriage is too important a matter for mere mortals to decide.
“For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God.”
Questions of education, child-rearing, adoption, occupation, and mate selection however are, for her, not to be delegated to any group. “And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will,” she writes of a failed engagement that was aided by her church’s encouragement. Perhaps this unending internal debate about what it means to “convert” is something that she still has to deal with? As I suspect does anyone who converts to or from anything. “Real learning depends on our quest for real knowledge, not its perpetual deferment in the form of endless doubt,” she concludes in one place. And yet in another,
“My conversion still felt like a train wreck, and I am adverse to clichés on any level.”
I might just say that a “de-conversion” is often a train-wreck as well.
And that I too am adverse to clichés on any level.
In the end, something happened to Rosaria Champagne that cannot be reduced to words or explanations. It cannot be conveyed to someone else who was not there or who has not had an experience of a like nature. “That night, I prayed, and asked God if the gospel message was for someone like me, too,” she writes of that night of her conversion, “I viscerally felt the living presence of God as I prayed. Jesus seemed present and alive.”
And for hundreds of millions and billions of people throughout history, that has been the beginning of their new life and the end of their old one.
And no one can really explain that. Which is why we keep finding stories like Rosaria’s intriguing.
Question for Comment: How important to you is it that you have one way of seeing the world and that it be the way that you see all of it? What groups do you intentionally not belong to because they will not let you see something “your way” or because they allow people to see things in too many ways?
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