Gendering God: The Pronoun Problem

 

Wisdom and her trinity of daughters: Faith, Hope, and Love

    About twenty years ago, the priest of a Catholic church in Kentucky held a series of round-table discussions about doctrine after mass. In the first few weeks, he addressed provocative questions such as the church's stance on homicide and explained its opposition to capital punishment, acknowledging that the non-violent church had been compromised after Constantine aligned it with the state. Self-defense, he said, was a moral right, but it might still be a personal sin. He might well elect not to defend himself if no innocent party were involved. 

    Things were going swimmingly until the subject of gender came up—referencing my wife’s involvement in an advisory committee toward an updated catechism. The draft document’s wording assumed that women would be the ones nurturing children, not men, an assumption contradicted in families we knew. In our own marriage, we'd always tried to balance duties. When our sons were toddlers and demanded constant attention, we assigned each other blocks of “sheltered time” for undisturbed study and writing, and I did a full share of the cooking and housework. The priest became uneasy as we challenged sexism. What did biological gender have to do with raising children?

    Then I remarked that it was silly to talk as if God has a penis. Isn’t this what “he” and “father” mean: a person so hung? Aren’t gender pronouns assigned based on genitalia? (The trans movement was not on the horizon twenty years ago). On what basis, I wondered, could anyone seriously consider a penis a prerequisite for priesthood and assign one to God? You can imagine the size his eyes became. His brief answer, a perfectly correct one, was that the masculinity of God was not literal but analogical, but the next Sunday’s discussion was cancelled. I take credit. I imagine that I cut a little too deep and knew better. Of course, all positive traits of God are analogical, but analogy doesn't eliminate the problem. Using masculine pronouns for all-powerful Being supposes male supremacy and the subjugation of women. And an analogical penis is still a prick. Once you see it you can't unsee it. It tells a wife that her husband is more Godlike than she is. It's like a planter telling his slaves that God is white.

    English has pronoun dilemma. More than forty years ago, I noted the patriarchal legacy embedded in English pronouns in my article, “Singular Pronouns and Sexual Politics" (College English, May, 1977). There are, of course, three genders of singular pronouns, masculine, feminine, and neuter (he, she, and it) and one common-gender plural (they). While grading essays for a statewide writing exam on the topic “teacher evaluation," I noticed a concentration of pronoun errors after the word teacher. At the time, grammar handbooks prohibited they in reference to singular nouns, and often prescribed he as a correct common-gender singular, along with man as a gender-free noun. Students were obviously uncomfortable with this and wrote sentences like, “A teacher is usually respected, even if they can’t teach,” to avoid referencing a teacher—usually female in their experience—with a masculine pronoun. My prediction in 1977 was that they would become “correct” (at least in speech) for singulars of unspecified gender, and it has. Writers may revise around this tendency, but that seems universal in the rush of speech and has become a tool of gender identity.

    When I was teaching English comp, I told students that there was a hole in the language, a idea for which there is no grammatically correct pronoun—namely the idea of one person of unspecified gender—and that all they could do was write around it. My favorite example: “Somebody left ___ car in my driveway.” Patriarchal grammar defaulted to his as if all drivers were male, but many speakers used their without intending a car with plural owners. Both forms were either politically or grammatically off, so I taught five tactics for revision: (1) go plural (people leave their cars), (2) discover gender (a woman left her car), (3) sidestep pronouns (left a car), (4) use his or her (awkward) or (5) alternate genders if feasible as Dr. Spock did in a late edition of his baby book, switching baby genders with each new paragraph. None of these works for the Christian God.

    They may quietly function as a singular after teacher but plural won't work with a monotheistic God. The second tactic, specifying gender, simply reverses the error, and the third, avoiding pronouns, works by repeating the noun (God’s will instead of His will), but this can become awkward, like the fourth tactic (he or she). Feminist theologians use the fifth tactic, a political reversal of custom, using She as gender-neutral for a change. But gender-neutral He, during the centuries that it seemed to work, was grounded in near-universal acceptance of patriarchy, and that has evaporated, leaving no pronoun to signify dominance, no equivalent in its place,

    Younger people may need to be reminded that married women of my parent’s generation signed something like “Mrs. George Reynolds" (Mary to her friends), but it would have been unthinkable for George to sign “Mr. Mary Reynolds.” The wife lost both of her names. This was one of many ways in which men ruled by virtue of genitalia. The penis wearer was “head of household,” a role often assumed by his oldest son on his father's death. The presumption of male rule was centuries old when Jesus lived and Christian scripture was written, and it made the idea of a she-God seem disrespectful, understood as low rather than high, dominated rather than dominant, overpowered rather than powerful—this despite many references in scripture to feminine aspects (nourishing breasts, for instance) of a theologically sexless God.

     Of course, all descriptives of God in human terms are analogical. The creator God, the presumed ruler of the universe is said to be “good,” but this good cannot be understood in human terms. God’s good, sometimes capitalized, is an incomprehensible extension of human good, starkly transcendent. This obvious when we consider, as one example out of thousands, Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in 2005, killing well over a thousand people. Many disasters, such as wars and famines, can be blamed on human sin, but hurricanes are unquestionably “acts of God” and elements in the design of an omniscient creator; therefore, they must be good (or at least Good) if God is. But such death and destruction would be very bad—evil even—if a human inflicted it. God must transcend human concepts of good and evil, so God can't be “good" in the human sense. This is the sense of Eckhart’s bold declaration: “God is not good. I am good.” We falsify God if we apply human descriptives. In classical theology, the term good is analogical, a figure pointing beyond our understanding of "good." We cannot literally characterize God on a good-evil scale or in a male-female dichotomy. “He is good,” is a figure of speech. Neither He nor good is literal.

     This kind of analogy is illustrated in the amazing tenth book of the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna, speaking as an incarnation of the Godhead, describes himself analogically as excellence pervading all creation. In a long series of metaphors, he tells Arjuna, for instance, that he is, among lights, the sun; among stars, the moon; among bodies of water, the ocean; among weapons, the thunderbolt; among fishes, the shark; and, among men, the monarch. In the same sense, the Christian God is, among inhabitants of a kingdom, the king; among those on a great estate, the lord; in a law court, the judge; in the context of slavery, the master; in the context of pottery, the potter; among species, human; among male supremacists, male; among members of a patriarchal family, the father; and among strata in ancient cosmology, heavenly.

     These are not real traits, but rather are aspects of mundane experience projected analogically, and they become false if mundane values change. For instance, the trope of God as all-powerful king is corrupted if popular imagination associates kings with corrupt dictators. With the fading of patriarchal gender roles in the West (in my view, an overdue implementation of the Golden Rule), male-chauvinism in old-fashioned divine analogies become tools of oppression, not because God has changed, but because of changes (advances, I think) in human values applied to gender relations. If religious language does not change, it takes on unsavory flavors never intended by older writers. It has a use-by date, and after that, it spoils.

     Calls for gender-inclusive language have been implemented in the liturgy of much of the Episcopal church, including the 299-year-old one I attend in Fredericksburg, Virginia. When I was a youth in the Anglican communion, services were read from an edition of the Book of Common Prayer last revised in 1790, but I’m looking now at last week’s handout for the 9:30 service, a very different text. The eucharist, in general, is a prayer addressing God as "you," so there’s little call for “he” except in in reference to Christ, who presumably was privileged with a Lacanian signifier, so pronouns flow pretty easily. However, in the old prayer book (I’m looking at a 1945 printing), the phallus-implicit term Father appears repeatedly—in the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and invocations—and current liturgists are clearly well aware of the concerns with which I vexed a priest twenty years ago in Kentucky. 

     God is referenced by gender-neutral terms such as “creator of the universe and giver of life.” In place of the traditional translation of the Apostle’s Creed (“God, the Father Almighty” and “Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds), St. George’s uses an adaptation from the Ionia Abbey Worship Book: “We believe in God above us, maker and sustainer of all life . . . . We believe in God beside us, Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, born of a woman’s womb,” and so forth. The Holy Ghost of the old prayer book is “God within us,” paralleling God above and beside. The sole concession to sexist language is the Lord’s Prayer, which remains in its centuries-old form, archaic grammar and all—“Our Father, who art in heaven”—as if to distance contemporary liturgists from the sexist overtones of this sacrosanct text. The antique wording says, in effect, “Don’t blame us."

     Even if Father may be rephrased as Source and Son kept because women have those too (though the metaphor of physical gestation may be distracting), the pronoun gap seems a rough spot on the road of good style. He and She both falsely attribute gender to a being transcending gender, It implies subhuman thingness, and They sounds pagan. There’s no clear solution. Like the eucharist handout, I've avoided using the masculine pronoun for God in this post except when referencing its use. I have swerved around rough spots in the pronoun road, but it is inconvenient. Pronouns are convenient, and their alternatives—repetitiveness or grasping for synonyms—can be stylistic vices, so in other posts I’ve succumbed to the sexist error of He.