“God is non-binary.”
Every so often, I see something that reminds me that white Evangelicalism has departed so incredibly far from historical Christianity as to be essentially unrecognizable.
In this case, I was reading a news story on the Texas primary election, and in the discussion of James Talarico’s probable win for the Democrats, there was a mention that Republicans would likely try to make hay out of a statement he made.
What was the statement?
“God is non-binary.”
Um, why is that an issue? Well, presumably, such a statement will infuriate white Evangelicals who insist that God is a man.
At this point, those of us who actually know historical Christian theology and our Bibles are facepalming.
According to historical Christian teaching, God is indeed “non-binary.” And furthermore, God’s pronouns are often “they/them.”
[If you aren’t a Christian, obviously most of this post won’t apply to your belief system. But you might find it interesting…]
***
First of all, the sexual binary only exists because humans (and many living things in our universe) reproduce sexually. We have the female which produces offspring, and the male which contributes genetic material. As I have pointed out in a post on the queer nature of, well, nature, the default - indeed the necessary sex is female. Males exist, evolutionarily speaking, solely for genetic diversity.
The biological reason for “maleness” is fucking. Literally. That’s it.
God is not a human. I think that should be theologically obvious. It literally is the basis of monotheistic religions.
Also necessary for monotheism is that there NOT be a sexual binary.
In polytheism, no big deal. Baal and Asherah, Zeus and Hera, Shiva and Shakti, Ra and Isis, Mother Earth and Father Sky - take your pick.
But for monotheism to work, God has to be non-binary. Because otherwise, where is the other half?
If nature is to be our guide, if a species doesn’t have a sexual binary, it has only females, so to speak. So if a monotheistic god were to have a sex, it would - by definition - be female.
Since males can only exist as a means of providing genetic diversity through sexual reproduction, a male god can only exist with a female counterpart. Otherwise, what are his sexual organs for?
If God is male, then he presumably has a penis. What does he use it for?
Or, to put it more bluntly: “Who does God fuck?”
***
In the very first chapter of the Bible, we see a distinct NON-binary.
“Let US make humankind in OUR image…” And also, “male and female he created them.”
I’ll note that even the word translated as “God” in the passage is a plural: “elohim.”
A quick dive into Jewish thought reveals the switch between plural and singular - God is both plural and singular because humankind is both plural and singular. The use of “us” is more like the use of “they/them” to express a non-binary.
The way I was raised, in the fairly mainstream Evangelical theology of the time, was that God was neither male nor female, but something completely different, outside of human category.
And BOTH men and women were equally in the image of God. Women are as much like God as men are.
This non-binary understanding of God comes out in other places in the Bible, where both male and female metaphors for God are used, the various names for God range from male to decidedly female (El Shaddai - “the god with breasts”), and the idea that God needs a female companion to fuck is decidedly rejected as heresy. (See: literally all of the passages about Asherah…)
You can look through historical Jewish and Christian doctrine and find that God has been consistently been viewed as outside of human sexual reproductive binaries. This isn’t really a debate.
***
So why are Evangelicals so insistent that God is a male?
It isn’t difficult to figure out why.
Evangelicalism has been taken over, co-opted by something that is not at all like Christianity.
It is a political movement, not a theological one.
It is a supremacist political movement.
Specifically, it is centered not on Christian theological beliefs about God, but around the protection of supremacist social hierarchies among humans.
White supremacy - white-skinned humans are better and deserve privileges
Male supremacy - male humans are better and deserve privileges
Mammon supremacy - humans with wealth matter more than those without wealth
It is that second one which applies here.
Feminist theologian Mary Daly observed that “If God is male, then males are gods.”
This is the crux of the issue.
I may have been raised as a normal, mainstream Evangelical in the 1980s, but things shifted as I got older. What was once fringe became mainstream. And Patriarchy became one of the most important doctrines, one that could not be challenged.
That meant that the various Theobros from John Piper on down could literally say that only men were truly created in the image of God, while women were only created in the image of men.
There is actually a pagan source for this heresy: Aristotle taught that women were malformed men. They literally failed to develop in the womb.
This is scientifically ludicrous, of course. But also theologically wrong. It goes against the actual teaching of the Bible and the historical teaching of the church.
But the reason this is so important to Evangelicals is that they need theological justification for their treatment of women as subhuman, unfit for leadership in the church, home, or society.
This is also why it is so important that God have a penis. It seems to be the unspoken belief that God uses his to communicate on a wavelength that can only be detected by another penis, which is why women cannot hear from God directly…
(I’m only half joking here. I’m not sure otherwise how one justifies the “only males can hear from God directly” without it having something to do with the penis.)
It is the need to see women as sub-human that drives the theology of “God is Male.”
***
Of course, we know what else this is about. Talarico made the comment in a legislative hearing regarding transgender rights. And that is definitely something that Evangelicals are opposed to.
It is necessary for Evangelicals to believe in a rigid gender binary, with no shades of grey, because that belief is necessary to maintain the superiority of male over female.
I wrote at length about this in another of my Pride Month posts: The Root of Anti-LGBTQ Bigotry is Misogyny.
Even more than gay and lesbian humans, the existence of intersex and transgender humans is a direct assault on their bigoted beliefs about the inherent inferiority of female humans. If you can’t classify a human is either the superior male entitled to control or the inferior female who is subject to male control, what do you do with them? Well, deny that they exist, or try to exterminate them, apparently.
I think this is a good place to link an excellent article by Parker Molloy about why transgender rights are actually a winning argument. I hope Talarico doesn’t back down on this issue.
“Democrats have a winning message on trans issues if they’d bother to articulate it. Most Americans don’t want the government inspecting children’s genitals. They don’t want politicians interfering in medical decisions between families and doctors. They don’t want schools turned into gender police states. They want kids to be safe and treated with dignity.”
And also a great article about how the Girl Scouts got this one right.
God is not male.
God does not have a penis.
God is non-binary.
You do not need a penis to commune directly with the Divine.
Men, women, intersex, transgender - all are created in the image of God.
All deserve human rights.
***
I imagine some might bring up the analogy of “Christ and the Church” as proof that God is male. There is a lot to unpack there, but honestly, the writer is clearly using a metaphor - which was pretty clearly borrowed from the Cupid and Psyche myth, much like we would use our own pop cultural references to illustrate moral and theological truth.
This passage too has been brutally misused to insist on male domination of women, something I wrote about here. For a far more thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the underlying myth, C. S. Lewis’ book, Till We Have Faces, is one I enjoyed.
Whatever the mysteries of human communion with the divine, reducing it all to “God has a penis” is the stupidest and least imaginative way of looking at it.