Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age
By Rosaria Butterfield.
Crossway, 2023.
Hardcover, 368 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Sarah Reardon.
Pride flags bedeck the Planned Parenthood clinic in my city. Often the volunteers who “escort” women into the abortion clinic wear pride shirts or pins. In the last few years, Planned Parenthood has also expanded their “gender affirming care” services in many clinics across the country. This alignment between abortion and the LGBTQ movement ought not be surprising, for both spring from a radical rejection of divine order woven into humanity.
What ought to be more surprising, however, are the Pride flags that bedeck many churches and the affirmation that denominations across the country offer to transgenderism, homosexuality, and abortion under the guise of “loving your neighbor.” But perhaps, like me, you have grown numb to the sight of a “Love is Love” sign underneath a beautiful stone church spire, and you simply shake your head as you drive by. Perhaps you, too, have grown accustomed to institutions which used to proclaim truth now pronouncing lies.
If so, Rosaria Butterfield’s book Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age promises to again remind you of these startling contradictions in our society and in some modern churches. Five Lies also exemplifies a way forward for those who, like Russell Kirk, believe that “there exists an enduring moral order” in which “moral truths are permanent.” Five Lies imparts a broad vision of true order within the scope of our society’s current troubles and presents a positive vision of a biblical pattern of life in our secular age.
Butterfield structures her book around the following five lies, spending several chapters on each:
- Homosexuality is normal.
- Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian.
- Feminism is good for the world and the church.
- Transgenderism is normal.
- Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.
Underlying Butterfield’s entire response to these lies is her conviction that love for Christ necessitates obedience to his commandments and love for one’s neighbor necessitates commitment to the truth. Put short, love begets truth. Though Butterfield does not explicitly give five succinct answers to the above lies, the book is studded with several truths that together give a thorough—and loving—response to the lies of modern secular culture.
First, Butterfield holds that the order of the world, given by God, is good, and her belief in the significance of divine design weaves her book together. Though she hardly uses the language of “natural law,” Butterfield clearly maintains a similar concept: that creation has a particular order which we ought to follow. The goodness of God’s order especially shines out in Butterfield’s sections on sexuality and gender. As Butterfield writes in the introduction, the divine design for men and women is not separable from but rather central to the Christian understanding of the gospel, despite what some modern churches may attest:
We foolishly believed that we could permanently extricate the gospel from the creation ordinance—that we could have the New Testament without the Old. We foolishly believed that personal piety and love for Jesus require no doctrinal integrity and no foundation in the Bible as God’s inerrant, sufficient, and inspired word.
The church cannot extricate the “simple gospel” from God’s revealed moral order. Rather, the whole Word of God is normative for all of life, or, as Paul says, “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.”
Creation sets the stage upon which the biblical drama takes place, and central to creation, in Butterfield’s framing, is the imago dei—the image of God with which God fashioned mankind. Man cannot image God without his particularities—especially, the particularities of gender. Butterfield emphasizes that we may image God by pursuing “knowledge, righteousness, and holiness as men and women.”
Though men and women are often godly in similar ways, Scripture and natural law teach men and women to excel also in duties and roles particular to their sex. Butterfield accepts this fact of gender roles, rendering her voice a rare one in Protestant circles today. In fact, Butterfield provides a refreshing discussion of biblical patriarchy, unabashedly employing an oft-twisted term. Butterfield defines biblical patriarchy as the leadership of godly men. As she recounts snippets of her conversion to Christianity, which brought her out of a community of LGBTQ academics and into the world of Reformed Presbyterianism, Butterfield tells of her previous resentment of the idea of patriarchy, which she now sees in a redeemed light:
Decades ago I railed against patriarchy and the Bible, seeing submission of any kind as a recipe for abuse… Today I believe with all my heart that the only safe place in the world for a woman is as a member of a Bible-believing church, protected and covered by God through the means of faithful elders and pastors, and if God wills, under the protective care of a godly husband.
Butterfield clarifies that godly patriarchy does not mean that men are inherently good or morally superior to women. Rather, godly patriarchy is part of divine design, and it provides protection against those men who are indeed wicked.
Beauty flows from order. Just as the beauty of music flows from the musicians’ submission to the rules and patterns of music, beauty in human life flows from submission to divine design. Butterfield herself has grown, as her testimony plainly shows and as Five Lies narrates, to embrace God’s order. This is the fruit of sanctification.
The second truth which Five Lies offers its readers is the necessity of sanctification. Sanctification, which comes from the Latin word sanctus, has to do with purification. Butterfield defines sanctification using the Westminster Catechism: “Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.” Much of the book’s discussion of homosexuality and transgenderism involves the topic of sanctification.
The reality of sanctification gleams behind Butterfield’s discussion of transgenderism as a sin of envy: transgenderism reveals discontentment with what God has given, but Christians in the process of sanctification are called to contentment. Butterfield advises those who struggle with contentment to treasure their heavenly heritage above their current cultural home.
Sanctification also grounds Butterfield’s refutation of the Revoice movement, a movement which claims that homosexual orientation itself is not a sin. Whereas Scripture’s explicit teaching on sexuality refutes “gay Christianity,” Scripture’s teaching on sanctification also refutes acceptance of “homosexual orientation,” for homosexual orientation is defined by sinful desires.
Butterfield maintains that Scripture teaches that Christians are called to put on a “new self,” and that this is indeed possible. Because a biblical view of sanctification recognizes that Christians must be conformed to Christ, true teaching on sanctification cannot be compatible with an acceptance of homosexual orientation. Christians, Butterfield writes, must be dead to sin and alive to Christ, continually striving to put to death their sin. As Butterfield writes, “If this sounds impossible, you might not have a good understanding of the basics of the gospel.”
While Christians must be prayerful for and hospitable to those who are lost, Christians should never welcome their sin, hence Butterfield’s refusal to endorse pronoun usage. Christians must image God to those far from the radical beauty of sanctification and invite them into it.
Finally, Butterfield proclaims that modesty is indeed a virtue, one missing from our milieu. The final section of Five Lies addresses the idea that modesty is a burdensome and patriarchal concept: instead of holding women back, modesty is, in fact, a thing of valor, an attribute of a heart that does not seek its own glory but the glory of God. Modesty is a noble fruit of the necessary work of sanctification. Importantly, Butterfield’s concern with modesty includes both “our body and our blogs,” and much of her final section addresses “exhibitionism.”
Exhibitionism, “the new almost-Christian virtue,” exalts one’s own opinion. Although Butterfield’s specific focus is on women, all can exhibit exhibitionism, especially through social media. In the online world we readily find “a cult of immodesty,” where we “garner ‘likes,’ sympathy, and solidarity…create new sins and redefine old ones, and engage in slander and prideful derision all in the name of discernment and telling the truth.”
Butterfield’s comments regarding social media hardly herald any new opinion of Christian media engagement, but her connection of media with immodesty provides a valuable lens through which to see the Church’s relationship to the Internet:
Why does social media elicit sin from progressing Christians? The idea that you can spend hours on Twitter engaging in sin (gossip and time-wasting) but adorn it as biblical teaching shows that delusions of grandeur hold powerful sway over women who aspire to be influential. Modesty chooses the better path over influence.
Virtue outshines and outlives grandeur, despite what our culture attests. The apostle Paul plainly values “a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way,” and Scripture tasks all people with humility but women particularly with cultivating “a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.”
Butterfield does address modesty’s physical aspects: Christian women should not dress like the world. But beyond this, Butterfield also highlights that Christians should not act like the world, prizing influence over that which is truly precious: “Loving your children, your church, and neighbors is a high calling,” Butterfield writes. Modesty chooses the simple yet noble life of love and obedience.
Butterfield’s book supplies good food for consideration not only for all who inhabit our deceit-filled culture. As Butterfield writes, “we all live in Babel now,” and we all need clear, cohesive reminders of the truths that Christianity calls us to. If Butterfield’s book fails in any way, it is not in her harsh view of our cultural surroundings, but in that she has not devoted more time and space to considering the truths and virtues which we must live out in our anti-Christian age.
The Christian and classical tradition in the West has long maintained that beauty, goodness, and truth are a triad of interconnected virtues. We cannot have goodness or beauty—and certainly not love—without truth. At the close, Butterfield encourages her reader to faithfully and boldly live in light of this:
The Christian faith speaks to our whole life and our whole world. Truly all of life is the triune God’s love and law… And the Lord Jesus Christ and his grace that weaves this life together is strong enough to hold you fast, in grief and joy, as you serve in the body of Christ, the church militant, until the Lord returns and we become the church triumphant. We leave our grief and tears here, for there are no tears where we are going.
Sarah Reardon teaches at a classical Christian school. Her writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.
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