Tuesday Testimonial: Rosaria Butterfield

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is an American author and former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University converted to Christ in what she describes as a train wreck. Her memoir, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith, chronicles her conversion. Rosaria is married to Kent, a Reformed Presbyterian pastor in North Carolina.  She is a mother, grandmother, author, and speaker.

Raised and educated in liberal Roman Catholic settings, Rosaria loved books and philosophy. In her late twenties, allured by feminist philosophy and LGBTQ+ politics, she adopted a lesbian identity. Rosaria earned her PH.D. from The Ohio State University (1992), then served in the English department and women's studies program from 1992 to 2002, earning tenure in 1999. Her primary academic field was critical theory, specializing in queer theory. Her historical field was 19th-century literature, informed by Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, with a special interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She advised LGBTQ+ student groups, co-authored Syracuse University’s domestic partnership policy for same-sex couples, and actively lobbied for LGBTQ+ legal advancements alongside her lesbian partner.

In 1997, while Rosaria was researching the Religious Right “and their politics of hatred against people like me,” she wrote an article against The Promise Keepers. Local Reformed Presbyterian pastor Ken Smith responded to that article, and Rosaria regularly met with Ken and his wife, Floy, over dinners in their home. Ken and Floy became a resource on the Religious Right and the Bible they loved. Eventually, they became her confidantes.  In 1999, after reading through the Bible multiple times under Ken and Floy’s care, Rosaria converted to Christianity. 

“It was a very complex time. It was a very painful time. I started reading the Bible like how I was trained to read a book. I never went to VBS, so I didn’t know you were supposed to read it like a horoscope. (You know, flip around, put your finger somewhere, find a verse.) No one told me that! So I read it like a book. I looked at its canonicity, at its authority, at the different kinds of hermeneutical approaches one takes to the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament.

And in the course of reading through it about seven times, all of my well worn assumptions didn’t stick. The upshot of the story really is that at some point the Word of God got to be bigger inside me than I. And that’s what happened. And then life started to really get complex.”

Here is Rosaria's testimony...