Five Lies of Our Anit-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield (2023) — a timely treatise by a qualified author.

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Author Rosaria Butterfield is perhaps best known for her breakout book on hospitality, The Gospel Comes with a Housekey (2018), which I devoured for my own dissertation on the same topic. Some might say she goes overboard with hospitality in that book, but it’s hard criticize someone for being too kind, isn’t it?

Her first book—titled The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2012)—is a grippingly personal memoir about her conversion to Christianity and away from lesbianism and well worth a read. I admit I’d never heard of her 2015 follow-up, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ. Guess I’ll have to look that one up too!

The Author and Her Fourth Book

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age is Butterfield’s fourth book and my final read in this year’s Siblings’ Book Club, and it’s no surprise that she returns to the same issues of gender and sexuality. Some may dismiss her as a one-track-mind with an axe to grind, but I suspect that judgment usually comes from those who have not actually read her books—or if they have, they’ve done so out of hatred not openness to learn, much like how Butterfield met her pastor-friend so long ago!

Butterfield is firm—sometimes even dogmatic—on these sexual issues, because she has lived on both sides of them. She speaks with authority, earned through a long and sometimes painful conversion experience.

She writes carefully and humbly about people immersed in homosexual and transgender cultures, yet she also refuses to yield an inch to the ideologies themselves. In fact, my heart broke when I read passages describing her regret over decades spent helping build that golden idol of sexual autonomy. Even after her conversion to Christ and her separation from her lesbian partnership and that entire subculture, Butterfield admits that she initially took too soft a stand against it. She writes:

I have sinned in using transgender pronouns and claiming it as hospitable. I have come to see my use of ‘preferred’ pronouns today as sin, pure and simple. Not only is it lying to people who are already being lied to by the world, but it also falsifies the gospel imperative of the creation ordinance, with its eternal binary of being created in the image of God as male or female and the command to live out that image-bearing within God-assigned sexual roles… For years I said things like, ‘Homosexuality is a sin, but so is homophobia.’ I defined homophobia as a wholesale dismissal of someone’s soul, that is, of seeing some people as outside of the grace of God. But this is neither a truthful definition of sin nor a truthful definition of homophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear. It is not irrational to fear sin running rampant. (31)

A Quick Summary of Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

I was a bit miffed when I first read Butterfields list of the five “lies,” yet I had to remind myself: she never calls these the only lies out there. Instead, she considers these five of the more prominent lies, especially at the time of publication (the tail end of the obnoxious, Biden-era Wokeness). The five lies she covers in this book are:

• Lie #1: Homosexuality is normal (26, Part 1)
• Lie #2: Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian (27, Part 2)
• Lie #3: Feminism is good for the world and the church (27, Part 3)
• Lie #4: Transgenderism is normal (29, Part 4)
• Lie #5: Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back (29, Part 5)

Throughout each section, Butterfield devotes 2-4 chapters to developing a clear, scriptural, and reasoned apologetic against these lies now running rampant throughout the West. She not only tells us where these lies came from, but also hints at where they’re heading.

What I appreciated most about this book is that Butterfield doesn’t necessarily describe how we Christians will fix America or the world with our right thinking. Instead, she gets personal, focusing on how concerned parents, friends, relatives, and neighbors can truly love the individual people in their circles by pointing them—not to her own ideology but—to the source of Love Himself, Christ Jesus.

Diagnoses and Recommended Cures to the Church

Early on in the book, Butterfield offers this drastic diagnosis of the church at present:

The world is in chaos, and the church is divided because we have failed to obey God and value his plan for how men and women should live. (21)

Her recommended cure for this is simple: Christians need to get back to the Bible!

Although she names many reasons we’ve stepped away from God’s Word, I noted this small one of technological distraction—something we can all admit is rife with sexual idolatry anyways. The gunk we slop up from our phones throughout the day keeps us from seeing the warning signs all around us and from hearing the cries of the needy within our own circles. Here’s just two of the many times she mentions it:

An unbreakable biblical logic connects God’s design for men and women, God’s standards for sexual behavior, and the Bible’s teaching on sex roles in the family, church, and world. God created men and women in marriage to do different and complementary things: husbands lead, protect, and provide, and wives submit, nurture, and keep the home. Because Satan would like you to think that my previous sentence is conspiratorial hate speech, strong Christian women need to know what the Bible says on this matter rather than what some famous almost-Christian feminist blogger says on Twitter. In fact, being wise in Scripture and ignorant of Twitter may be the first step. (15)

Your witness for Christ ultimately requires that you know Christ better than you know the world. (And this means that you are in the Bible more than you are on the Internet.) (34)

Two Highlights among Many

I could go deep into Butterfields handling of each of the five lies, but won’t. There’s too much, and you should read the book for yourself.

But let me highlight first a blunt truth claim she makes about Lie #4: Transgenderism. It’s something so obvious to those of who haven’t drunk the Woke Kool-Aid:

The root problem is that transgenderism is a sin. It is a sin that tears apart truth and tears down families. Transgenderism is the sin of envy. (190)

There it is, God’s truth in black-and-white. It’s what we all instinctively know, yet so many of us suppress, like we do with many sins—especially “respectable sins” envy.

It stares us in the face, as we watch arrogant, selfish men destroy female athletes in female sports. It makes us feel an unnatural mixture of disgust and pity as we see images of women who’ve undergone mastectomies-by-choice and other irreversible, “gender affirming” surgeries.

But we can’t stop with anger, pity, and disgust! We need to wake up and see that these are lost souls for whom Jesus, the Son of God died! Butterfield challenges us to ask, how do we help them? How do help those human souls wallowing in envy, crying for help, struggling with “gender identity”? We love them with the love of Christ. Later on she writes this too, a clincher for those souls who have repented of their sin yet still struggle with the flesh:

Envy is the vice, contentment is the virtue. (234)

Another highlight has to do with that pity we feel for folks like this. What begins as pity can turn to sympathy, which is good and healthy when founded on truth. But it can sometimes go too far.

Out of a twisted view of “Christian love,” entire denominations have embraced the sin along with the sinner, allowing their pity for broken, unrepentant sinners turn to empathy. They understand and accept. They feel the transgender’s pain and welcome. They support and march and—goodness me!—ordain these folks, “because that’s what Jesus would do.”

How far we’ve fallen! About this sympathy-turned-empathy problem, Butterfield writes:

If someone is drowning in a river, jumping in with him may break up his loneliness, but having two drowned people produces an even greater problem. Sympathy allows someone to stand on the shore, on the solid ground of objective truth where real help might be found. Empathy’s intent is good—connecting with another person in pain. But when the person in pain needs to be rescued, empathy leads to alienation. (107)

Conclusion

Alongside a great discussion about repentance on pages 39 and an excellent resource about reading the Bible in the appendix, this book is filled with other fantastic discussions about gender and sexual identities from a Christian perspective. Butterfield writes with love and encourages love, yet holds nothing back when calling out sin.

• For anyone with a loved one dealing with these sin issues, I highly recommend this book.
• For anyone tempted to cut verses out of the Bible and accept the sexual sin along with the sinner, I implore you to rea this book.
• For anyone who needs to strengthen their apologetics about sexual issues in these darkened days, you need look no further that Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age.

©2025 E.T.