What would be a good pronoun for God?
In our patriarchal culture we typically default to the male pronoun “He” when referring to God, but most of us know that is not quite right. After all, who believes that God is anatomically, chromosomally, and hormonally one particular gender or the other? I have known a few diehards on this issue, but most of them tend to lose their rhetorical footing when you begin asking them about the purpose of their God’s reproductive organs. I know this might sound crass, but it does point to the ridiculousness of viewing the creator of the cosmos through a gendered lens.
Beyond ridiculous, a gendered view of God is often implicitly or explicitly demeaning to the gender that is not perceived as best representing the divine. I remember a teenager that came to me for spiritual guidance several years ago. I remember her telling me with tears in her eyes that she really wanted to have a close relationship with God but she felt like she could never be as close to God as a man. This wasn’t a girl who was struggling under the yoke of religious fundamentalism. She grew up in a very moderate church and in a family that very likely had never even considered the issue. She had just grown up in an environment where God was always referred to as male and where almost all of the spiritual leaders who performed the holiest rites and rituals in her church were male. The church that loved her and believed in her had unintentionally taught her that she was spiritually second-class.
That being said, I am also not comfortable with using the non-gendered pronoun “It” for God, as this is typical the pronoun used for an object. So the question remains, what would be a good pronoun for God? Maybe you’ll think of one.
