外刊精讀｜第十一篇｜原文

God should just tell us Their pronouns – They’re quite powerful, after all

The woke agenda spares no one, not even God. The?revelation?that the Church of England is considering gender-neutral ways to refer to God has caused quite a ruckus this week; very predictably all the?usual suspects?have been foaming at the mouth about wokeness gone mad.?Nigel Farage?(AKA?Mr Brexit), for example, even suggested that you might as well shut down the Church of England if they’re going to go all trendy and politically correct.

Steady on, Nigel! God isn’t coming out as non-binary anytime soon. The Church of England is?considering?moving away from referring to God as “He”. What does that mean? It means they’re going to launch a commission investigating the matter and, if they did decide to make changes, those changes would have to be approved by synod, the Church’s decision-making body. Maybe, once all that’s done, they might develop “more inclusive language” but, as of yet, there are no specifics as to what that language might be. Not all that sensational when you dive into the details, is it? But people like Farage don’t tend to be too fond of details.

While the idea that God might stop being described as “He” has generated a lot of headlines there’s?plenty of precedent?for gender-neutral religious language. “As truly as God is our Father, so just as truly is He our Mother,” Julian of Norwich said in the 14th century. As a spokesperson for the Church of England said: “This is nothing new. Christians have recognized since ancient times that God is neither male nor female, yet the variety of ways of addressing and describing God found in scripture has not always been reflected in our worship.”

As an atheist I don’t have particularly strong opinions about God’s preferred pronouns. However, I do have strong opinions about how language shapes the way we see our world. And the conversation that the Church of England has sparked reveals a lot about how gendered language reinforces stereotypes. “Given that people of faith think of God as another way of talking about ultimate reality, the gendered nature of God language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority in the very nature of things,”?Giles Fraser muses in UnHerd. Yah think?

You can see that superiority complex in comments by the Rev Dr Ian Paul, who thinks God should remain a He. “The fact that God is called ‘Father’ can’t be substituted by ‘Mother’ without changing meaning, nor can it be gender-neutralized to ‘Parent’ without loss of meaning,” Paul told the Telegraph. “Fathers and mothers are not interchangeable but relate to their offspring in different ways.”

There’s a lot to be unpicked in that last sentence. Do mums and dads?really?relate to their kids in different ways? It’s hard to say definitively because there isn’t actually a lot of research on non-maternal caregivers. Until the 1970s?hardly anyone even bothered?to study the role of fathers in children’s development – it was just assumed that dads made the money, and mums did the nurturing. Emerging evidence, however, suggests that parenting roles are flexible. When dads are the primary caregivers, their brains adjust and show similar patterns to those seen in mothers,?one study shows. Fathers and mothers are a lot more interchangeable than some people might think. And yet Paul seems to be suggesting that God could simply never be a “mother”. Why is that, I wonder?

Anyway, I think there’s an easy way to settle this thing. God can tell us about Their pronouns themselves. I hear They are quite powerful after all.

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