“Let us recognize in witnessing the Gospel to people who identify themselves within the LGBT community that a major part of our conversation should deal with one’s deep commitment to an identity, not only of his or her person, but also being part of a people. We see its manifestation also in identity (or group) politics with a bullied loyalty never to betray a belonging by reversion.”
In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert,[1] Dr. Rosaria Butterfield compares her Christian conversion experience to “an alien abduction or a train wreck.”
As she shares about her very public Christian “coming out” while a tenured university English professor specializing in “Queer Theory” (which she explains is a postmodern form of gay and lesbian studies) who also lived an open lesbian lifestyle while a leader in LGBT advocacy, it seems not so unnatural that her own reaction and that of her peers and students to her new profession would initially be heard as a foreign language or approached like the scene of an accident. For, as with all of us sinners, if our salvation proves genuine and lasting it will ultimately be an abrupt and violent altering of our personal and collective identities by being derailed from self and cults and coupled into Christ and His Church.
Let us recognize in witnessing the Gospel to people who identify themselves within the LGBT community that a major part of our conversation should deal with one’s deep commitment to an identity, not only of his or her person, but also being part of a people. We see its manifestation also in identity (or group) politics with a bullied loyalty never to betray a belonging by reversion. Entertaining such peer pressure is actually an exhausting identity crisis that only can be relieved in conformity to Christ’s image.
Dr. Butterfield writes, ” … being a lesbian was a case of mistaken identity … Whatever God’s providence for me, it was his to lay out and mine to obey. No longer did I have to invent myself.”
Alan Shlemon and Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason ministries offer a fascinating article sharing empirical evidence that people who identify as homosexuals are not a product of their biology, but often rather their environment; in particular, their sexual identity is directed mostly by with whom they confusedly identified while growing up.[2]
