There is much to admire in her views on church and community, but also much to find troubling in her new polemic.
If Rosaria Butterfield’s courage “waned and waxed” in writing Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, as she reports in her acknowledgements section, you wouldn’t know it from the text. Her tone is urgent and earnest, and she conceives of her work as a charge by a “church militant” against a powerful enemy who is sure to lose the war, but is now winning many battles.
Butterfield’s aim, as her title indicates, is to identify five norms that are both false and ascendant in contemporary American culture. Her positions will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her personal history, as detailed in her previous books about her conversion and Christian hospitality.
But though Five Lies covers some of the same territory, it is less memoir and more direct assault. In her tour of the front lines of the culture war, Butterfield makes a compelling case for a high view of biblical and ecclesial authority, and she not only commends but models repentance. Alongside these and other merits, however, Five Lies offers some questionable views on the Bible’s connection to Jesus, the faith of Christians who depart from Butterfield’s conclusions, and the extent to which major institutions are committed to undermining Christian values.
The five lies
“God’s will,” according to a remark Butterfield cites from John Calvin, “is that Christ’s kingdom should be encompassed with many enemies, his design being to keep us in a state of constant warfare.” Her primary audience is Christian women, and she wants them to join her fight.
Thus, contra the advice of fellow Christians like Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option, it isn’t “sufficient to leave well enough …
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