A Secularist with Questions

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield has an interesting story to tell. She says, “As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one.”⁴⁴ She was a postmodern intellectual and an expert in queer studies. Her worldview was materialist, not supernaturalist. She started doing research on the Religious Right and “their politics of hate” as she put it. To do this properly she knew she needed to read the Bible for herself.

She was a professor of English at a secular university and as trained academic she knew how to research with integrity. In her own words:

I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my transgendered friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. “This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria,” she warned.

Fresh questions came to her mind:

With tremors, I whispered, “J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?”

I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world.⁴⁵

She recounts:

When I started to read the Bible it was to critique it, embarking on a research project on the Religious Right and their hatred against queers, or, at the time, people like me. But the Bible was getting under my skin. Hours each day I poured over this text, arguing at first, then contemplating, and eventually surrendering. Three principles became insurmountable on my own terms: the trinitarian God’s goodness, the trinitarian God’s holiness, and the authority of Scripture.⁴⁶

Admirably she began reading the Bible as matter of intellectual honesty. If you are going to critique X then get to know as much as you can about X. Over time the Bible itself overcame her resistance to it. She put it in this way: “Oh, yes. The Bible is an amazing book, and I had never read it. I was more than happy to criticize a book I’d never read. I’m a bookish kind of gal, and the Bible really gets inside of you. And it made me confront some really haunting things. It made me face a whole category of sin—both mine and other people’s.”⁴⁷

Now having read thus far you may be someone who knows the kind of resistance that Butterfield knew. If so ask yourself two key questions about any resistance you find within yourself: Is the problem one of understanding or is it one of life? I recall talking to an academic at a state university who had asked me for some literature about the historicity of Jesus. He returned the books and said that the evidence was surprisingly good. He asked that if the evidence were as good as it appears to be why more people didn’t believe it. I replied many people just don’t know how good it is.