Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Book Reviews

Nov 29

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age Book Cover

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age
By: Rosaria Butterfield

[Fulfilled ‘A book with a number in the title’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]

“The gospel message hurts our pride in life-giving ways, and for that I praise God.”

“God used the offense of God’s word for the good of my soul.”

Rosaria’s newest book is a Bible-saturated and bold truth-telling book that the world needs right now. Her personal experience and background gives her every right to say the things she does.

“This is a book about dismantling the idol of our times— the world of LGBTQ+ that I in my sin helped build.”

“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.”

Five Lies is not an op-ed. Fully based on Scripture, Rosaria’s book exposes the ways the church has compromised truth, with good intent or not, and calls us as Christians back to the truth— the full truth— even if it goes against our feelings and what the culture has deemed ‘nice’.

The lies she writes to dispel are:

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Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

Rosaria is very honest and transparent about her life and beliefs she had when she was a lesbian. She says that when she first attended church, she thought:

“[The church] was patriarchal (and that was bad), and I was a feminist lesbian (and that was good). The Bible was outdated and untrustworthy, and I was progressive and kind… I was confident that the Bible was androcentric (man-centered), heteronormative (promoting heterosexuality, which I thought was a bad thing), and misogynist (woman-hating). And I hated everything to do with the Bible, since I was a women-centered, pacifist, lesbian vegetarian (and this was all very good and moral, in my opinion).”

Throughout the book she shares how God and his Word challenged what she thought to be true and ultimately led her to saving faith.

Her tone may come across as too forthright for some, but I see it as a woman who has walked the path the culture is celebrating. She experienced firsthand what the culture’s lies do. She was saved from that path and her plea and exhortation is out of love for others to escape the life she lived in bondage to her sin.

One reviewer said Rosaria’s introduction was generating fear and that there is no fear in love. I disagree with her— I felt the introduction was written with sadness not to fear-monger. While we may not all encounter those things in our personal lives, they are happening. They are reality. And it is sad. Furthermore, there is a place for fear: fear of the Lord. Reverence for his Word. ‘No fear in love’ is not referring to fearing the holiness of God and delighting to keep his commands.

This book is a controversial one and we can’t discount the courage it took Rosaria to put all of this down on paper. She is sure to get some backlash for sharing these truths and calling the church back from the lines it has crossed, but that does not mean that what she wrote is the problem.

It’s easy to conform to the world and to compromise with the trends of the day. It’s hard to be the dissenting voice especially when the ‘opposing side’ has done such a thorough job of controlling the language in their favor. Those who reject Rosaria’s words do so in the name of love, empathy, grace, and compassion but as Rosaria reveals in her book, their path is a path of lies which is not loving, compassionate, or gracious.

Rosaria caused me to rethink one of my beliefs. I hear it said a lot that we need to stop telling same-sex-attracted people that their sexual desires will go away. We don’t want to set them up for failure when the feelings don’t leave so we tell them it’s something they will have to continue to live with the rest of their lives and that God just calls them not to act on it. That the sin is in the action, not the feeling.

But as Rosaria says, “we can’t domesticate sin.” Scripture tells us that hatred is the same as murder, lust is the same as adultery. Sin is more than just outward behaviors. It’s our thoughts and it’s our hearts. Scripture says that when we trust in Jesus we are dead to sin and alive in Christ. We are to put off our old self and put on our new self.

“Sin is still sin— a transgression against God’s law, an act of moral treason. This definition stands whether we suffer because of our chosen or unchosen sin.”

Are we not in the process of sanctification— the process that we are made to look more and more like Christ? Are we to think sexual desires are too strong for the Holy Spirit to change? Are we to say, come to Jesus, but he can’t change you?

It’s reasonable to say that we can’t expect change overnight or that it could take awhile, but it is wrong for us to tell people to expect to keep their sin. There is grace and forgiveness every day, but there is also power in the Holy Spirit and we have a wrong view of God and his Word if we think we won’t be transformed at all this side of heaven. The Holy Spirit can change our sinful desires and I repent for thinking otherwise.

Some Strengths

I took pages and pages of notes so I’ll just highlight some of the points that stuck out to me:

She reminds us that we should not normalize sin but should reject anything that seeks to do just that.
“You can’t domesticate sin because sin is predatory. But if you normalize sin (parades, drag-queen story hour at the local library, and other oddities are meant to progress you along in the normalization process), you grow insensitive to its real danger.”

She lists a series of anecdotes on page 150 that should convict Christians that right now we are to call all sin sin; it is not a matter of ‘I can handle this sin because it’s not as bad as this other sin.’ The gradual progression she exposes is jarring and true.
She critiques intersectionality.
“Intersectionality maintains that who you truly are is measured by how many victim statuses you can claim— with your human dignity accruing through intolerance of all forms of disagreement with your perceptions of self and world.”
She points out the idea of sexual orientation originating with Freud and how the idea of objective truth has deteriorated:
“Romanticism introduced the idea of ‘my personal truth’— and with this concept, we lost all standards by which to measure objective truth. Anyone who disagrees with ‘my truth’ is now a bad actor or an oppressor, not merely someone with whom I disagree.”
She speaks against identifying yourself as a ‘Gay Christian.’
“even if you believe that you are just using the category of gay as a plain way of describing your feelings, you must remember that gay is a keyword, not a neutral one. Gay is no longer just one of the many vocabulary terms. Gay refers to our nation’s reigning idol.”
She warns us about the sin of empathy. Empathy is a good thing in a lot of ways but it needs to be tethered to something. (She quotes Joe Rigney who fleshes this point out very well in THIS VIDEO.)
“Empathy is dangerous because if the highest form of love is standing in someone else’s shoes, no one is left standing in a place of objective truth… Sympathy allows someone to stand on the shore, on the solid ground of objective truth where real help might be found.”
She also takes on Kristin Kobes Du Mez who wrote the controversial book Jesus and John Wayne. Her assessments of Du Mez’s book were very similar to my own. She challenges the critiques Du Mez made of Christians:
“God gave us the full story of Judas Iscariot so that we can understand how people can read the same Bible, or in Judas’s case, be a disciple of Jesus and live with him and other disciples and reject the real Jesus for one you make in your imagination. Judas could live with the Lord and betray him fully. And so can anyone else. The fact that we read the same Bible means nothing except that sin deceives us.”
She exposes how transgenderism is the sin of envy.
“Envy is delusional entitlement masked in a package of victimhood and unbearable pain… Love holds people to the impartial, objective, and safe standard of God’s truth, not the malleability of sinful desires and the posturing of sinful people… Real love confronts the lie that suffering people can’t help but envy others. Real love does not envy.”
She shows how modesty isn’t just about what we wear, but the way we conduct ourselves. Social media has created a hotbed for immodesty in a whole host of ways. This was a convicting truth.
“Making public everything from your current grievances to your lunch blurs the line between public and private such that the category of private sometimes completely disappears from our lives. And when privacy disappears, so does modesty. Indeed, a social media-infused Christian life will always choose exhibitionism over modesty.”

Preston Sprinkle

Preston Sprinkle gets his own little section in this review because he is increasingly one of the most influential voices in the LGBTQ+ conversation. His book Embodied has been very popular and influential.

Christians who disagree with Rosaria may do so because of Sprinkle and so I think it’s important to consider some things.

He is known for his compassion in listening to and engaging with the LGBTQ+ community, seeking to practically help families whose loved ones identify as LGBTQ and being a bridge between the church and the LGBTQ community.

Rosaria has strong things to say about his teachings which will probably be a point of critique for a lot of readers.

So what does Sprinkle actually believe? Because it’s not enough to just be compassionate and helpful.

Sprinkle believes the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin. He believes there are only two sexes and that Scripture doesn’t allow for humans to be identified by anything other than male or female. (THIS seems like a balanced review of his book Embodied.)

However, he has some other concerning beliefs. He co-wrote the book Erasing Hell with Francis Chan back in 2011. Since then he seems to have changed his belief about hell and is now an annhilationist which essentially means he does not believe in hell. (Related article HERE)

He is currently complementarian but his recent Twitter posts regarding his exploration of the term ‘kephale’ suggests he may be rethinking that stance as well. This is significant because virtually all churches in America who ordained women as pastors also came to say that homosexuality is not a sin.

“Egalitarianism is the highway to LGBTQ+ church leadership, as a faulty interpretation that endorses sin in one context is imported wholesale to another.”

On page 239-240 Rosaria quotes in length a ‘story’ Preston re-tells about two men who have an intimate friendship. He tells of a poem one wrote of the other: “So moving, so intimate, so loving were the words of that poem that some people to this day believe that K.D. and John were gay.”

This is his retelling of King David and Johnathan. I don’t know the whole context of this story within his book Embodied, but the way he portrays it in his own words is irresponsible and misleading of the original text.

He is not willing to say whether or not intersex conditions are a result of the Fall.

In Embodied Preston says, “Maybe using the fall to explain intersex conditions is wrongheaded, to begin with, as many disability theologians have reminded us.”

This is a concerning thing to say, though I don’t have the whole context of this quote. He seems to be affirming teachings of disability theologians. From a brief internet search (because I’m not familiar with disability theologians) it would seem that generally speaking they want to celebrate people with disabilities as if nothing is wrong with them to the point that they will have that disability in heaven.

I would agree with disability theologians in the truth that all people are created in the image of God and should be treated with dignity and respect. Illness and disabilities do not make anyone less of a person.

However, to try to convince someone with severe mental depression, a person who is blind, someone missing limbs, or someone who deals with health issues because of bodily defects that they should be happy to have their disability and that they should be overjoyed to know they will continue to endure it in heaven seems unbiblical.

This quote seems to indicate that disability theologians think it’s wrong to point to the Fall as a reason for an intersex condition and, by extension, other disabilities or illnesses.

Preston said he can’t be sure if we can blame the Fall because “he wasn’t in the garden.”

Rosaria counters: “For Sprinkle, the biblical first principle that sin, death, and illness entered the world with the sin of Adam is not at all clear because he wasn’t in the garden at the time of the fall. In other words, the Bible’s witness as the word of God is not sufficient, but what Sprinkle can see with his own eyes is.”

There is a lot more to unpack here than I have space to, but at first glimpse, this is something to look more into as it concerns Preston and whether or not his teachings should be revered.

He is also a proponent of using preferred pronouns. Rosaria has partly used this book to repent of things she has previously said or believed that she now realizes were sins. Using preferred pronouns was one of them.

She says, “For years, and even as a Christian, I used and defended what are called ‘preferred pronouns.’… I falsely believed that this would aid and abet my ability to bring the gospel to bear on these people’s lives. I failed to distinguish between an illness (gender dysphoria) and an ideology (transgenderism).”

“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.”

While it is not an easy thing to live by, especially if you have a loved one who wishes you to use different pronouns, I agree with Rosaria. If someone is anorexic yet claims they are fat, we don’t also call them fat. We seek to show them reality. Lying to someone by calling them pronouns that do not match their biological sex will not help them see reality but will further impress what they believe.

Again, it’s not an easy choice to make. If I was at risk of losing a relationship with my daughter because of pronouns, I can’t say now what I would do. It’s an impossible choice. I would hope that I would trust God that through truth, he could restore that relationship, but I know it could come at a great cost.

It may seem wrong to some readers that Rosaria would come at Preston and call his book untrustworthy. But that’s really the point of her writing this book. If influential Christians and the church are teaching half-truths, they’re really speaking lies and we need to call them to speak the whole truth even if what they seem to be doing is ‘nice.’

Critiques

Lest anyone see the word ‘critique’ and think it’s a reason to dismiss this book: none of this negates the importance, the relevance, and the truth of this book. Everyone should read this book.

However, there are a few things that I felt would have strengthened certain areas of her book.

We know that it’s important to define our terms so we understand what we are hearing and saying. For the most part Rosaria is clear in her definitions, but there were a few places that lacked clarity.

She doesn’t really define what she means by feminism. She exposes the lie that feminism is good for the world and the church, but I think there are some people that identify themselves as feminists as defined by someone who just believes that women are equal to men and should be treated with dignity and respect and should not be discriminated against. This is not the same definition of feminism as largely held by the culture.

She speaks briefly on the patriarchy and says that biblical patriarchy is not a sin, it’s a blessing, but she doesn’t really explain what she means by biblical patriarchy. She points out that liberal interpretation of biblical patriarchy is wrong but doesn’t clearly refute why.

She makes the point that “a godly woman’s best defense against a potentially abusive husband is church membership in a biblically faithful church.” I agree with this statement but I didn’t feel like she explained the ‘why’ very well. She also could have spoken more on the topic of abuse in general. I feel like that’s a major issue people have when they reject the Bible’s teachings and it would go a long way for her to address that topic and explain how membership should be seen as protection.

In her chapter regarding modesty I really liked how she considered social media’s role in creating a platform for immodesty in the things we post and our attitude when we do it. But based on the title of that lie I wish she would have also addressed how the idea that women revealing their bodies creates empowerment really doesn’t. Relevant here would be the porn industry or platforms like Only Fans where sex work is trying to become a noble occupation. What are the effects of this locally and globally? Other books speak to this and the effects of ‘immodesty’ in the world are great and far-reaching.

Lastly, she spends a lot of space trying to talk about the nuances between ‘accepting’ vs ‘affirming’ which was mostly helpful. However, as she also indicates how some words are not neutral words and should be avoided I wonder if ‘accepting’ is one of them? The way she defines it makes sense but the larger population won’t use or see the distinctions she makes and I wonder if it isn’t so helpful. It’s one of the top words associated with this discussion so maybe she spent so much time on it because it’s a word we just can’t avoid so we might as well define it better?

Recommendation

Rosaria’s book tells the truths everyone’s afraid to commit to. She forces us to recognize that a ‘Christian’ label does not automatically make something true and we need to be diligent in the ideologies we espouse to make sure they align with the whole of Scripture.

Aligned with God’s Word, Five Lies is an essential read to learn how a Christian should understand these topics and respond when/if their loved ones join the LGBTQ community.

I think it will be a hard and challenging book for some, but one I would encourage you to wrestle with. It is not an easy thing to resist the pull of the culture, the pulse of the loudest voice. But we are called to fear God, not man. We are called to love Jesus more than our loved ones. And entrust them into his care because he loves them more than we ever could, and his design and boundaries he calls us to live in are because of that love.

It’s easy to throw this book away, to criticize it and nitpick, but that’s not an honest response. Be willing to consider this even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it means you have a lot of changes to make. Allow his Word to speak to you through Rosaria.

[There are also other books that speak more into what she cumulated here. I have read almost every book she quoted and I list my reviews and other resources below.]

“When it seems like we are living at ground zero of the Tower of Babel, when the whole world seems to have gone mad, we need to cling to Christ with courage, read and memorize our Bible with fervency, be active members of a faithful Bible-believing church with passion, sing psalms of joy, and pray for our enemies with humility.”

“God calls us to live our Christian lives with courage, tell the truth, and fear God and not man.”

More Quotes

“Asking people in pain to define their own problem without stable, objective standards is the height of irresponsibility and cruelty.”

“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.”

“Our humanity is not in our feelings. Our sense of self is not in our sin. It is in Christ… The only way you can hate your sin without hating yourself is through union with Christ.”

“Lies cannot be tamed. Lies do not coexist with truth but rather corrupt it.”

“Our redemption is from the curse of God’s law, not from our duty to obey it.”

“The law of God is an anchor, and the only way to know if we are anchored to Christ is by our obedience to the word. It is not enough to say that you have a high view of Scripture. Faith is not measured by what you affirm or how you identify. You can affirm that you are a Christian, but if you do not obey God’s requirements as revealed in the Bible, then you are proving your affirmation false. Obedience does not make you a legalistic or a fundamentalist. Obedience to the word of God reveals that you are a Christian.”

“A genuine Christian who experiences the indwelling sin of homosexual desire or transgenderism will find both the world that says, ‘Do what feels good,’ and a church that says, ‘You are a sexual minority and need a voice and platform in the church,’ as equally dangerous.”

“People driven by the sin of envy gather enablers.”

“This problem of assuming that we are in God’s favor because all the other ‘Christians’ around us are equally embracing heresy does not make it safe.”

“God’s people need to care more about what is in the mind of God than what is in the heart of culture.”

“Sometimes we just want someone to say that we are okay just the way we are. But that is not what Jesus offers. Are we willing to be healed on Jesus’s terms? Or are we insisting that Jesus heal us on our own terms?”

“Even when sin clouds the reality of God’s good plan, men are men and women are women, and even for those people who wish that they had a different sexual anatomy, the struggle is with the reality of physical and bodily truth. The struggle is with the sin of envy, not the God who made them.”

“Jesus never encourages us to sin to preserve life.”

“No one told me to pray the gay away. Because every sermon told me to drive a fresh nail into every sin every day, no one needed to.”

(She references Side A and Side B a lot so here’s a brief explanation she makes of them:)

“Side A is ‘gay affirming’ meaning that it invents biblical support for gay marriage and full inclusion of people who identity as LGBTQ in the leadership and membership of the church. Side B is ‘non-affirming’ of gay sex. Additionally, it elevates celibacy and singleness as God’s highest calling while heartily embracing homosexual orientation… Side B redefines gay sin merely as sexual action and denies that sin acts with affections, feelings, attractions, and desire. Both Sides A and B believe that homosexuality is fixed and that the gospel might change people in smaller ways but never in the deep matters of sexual desire.”

Books She References or Quotes from:

Torn by Justin Lee (Justin believes the Bible affirms homosexuality. Rosaria quoted this as an example of the opposing view. She also recommends THIS REVIEW of that book.)

Surviving Religion 101 by Michael J. Kruger

Men and Women in the Church by Kevin DeYoung

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez (as mentioned in my review, Rosaria takes several pages to talk about the problems of this book)

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier (this is a secular book that is super enlightening on the reality of the transgender craze that is manipulating and harming our children.)

Finding the Right Hills to Die On by Gavin Ortlund (I agreed with Rosaria that the the role of women in the church should be a first tier issue because what you believe about that is based on your view of the inerrancy and authority of Scripture which is a top tier issue. Ortlund did not which was basically my only critique of this book)

Transgender to Transformed by (this is on my TBR)

Out of a Far Country by Christopher and Angela Yuan (this is now on my TBR- it’s a mother/son writing team and their journey through the son’s LGBTQ experience)

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian AgeBy: Rosaria Butterfield