Bisexual or Convert?

Recently I was reading the story of a woman who converted to Christianity. She was gay and discontinued the practice upon converting. Today she is happily married with four children. In responding to the story, one columnist suggested that she did not abandon homosexuality because of her conversion. Rather, she was living out her bisexual preference.

According the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, “bisexuality is the potential to feel sexually attracted to and engage in sensual or sexual relationships with people of either sex." Interestingly, there are several theories about different models of bisexual behavior. J. R. Little is a psychologist whose extensive research identified at least 13 types of bisexuality.

However, none of Professor Little’s categories defined the experience of former leftist lesbian professor Dr. Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. Did Professor Butterfield transition to heterosexuality because she was bisexual, or because of conversion?  

As a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, Dr. Butterfield cared about morality, justice and compassion. In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, she says, “I used my post (as a professor) to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful and full. My partner and I shared many vital interests: AIDS activism, children’s health and literacy and our Unitarian Universalist church, to name a few.”

“I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track – the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, in 1997 I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers.”

According to Dr. Butterfield, “the article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk – one for hate mail, and the other for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind of inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire – How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn’t argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn’t know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.”

“Later that night, I fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview... Ken’s letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.”

“With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen...He did not mock me. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward – surely this will be good for my research.”

“Something else happened. Ken, his wife Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken’s God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.” 

Dr. Butterfield started reading the Bible. “I read the way a glutton devours. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations...I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired...It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. Conspicuous with my butch haircut, I reminded myself that I came to meet God, not fit in.”

Then, “one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked...Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess...the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me “wife” and many call me “mother”.”

Dr. Butterfield’s story reminds me of the words of the apostle Paul to the Corinthians. He was itemizing specific negative behaviors with which they were identified. With clarity he stated, “...and that is what some of you were, but you were washed...” (1 Cor. 6:11). This statement was not a description of bisexualism. Like Dr. Butterfield’s story, it was a statement of conversion and its effect on behavior.