Faith & Spirit Quote by Carol P. Christ

Christ’s question is a tidy rhetorical trap: it accepts the usual theological escape hatch (we don’t literally mean God is male) and then asks why that escape hatch only opens one way. If “He” is merely metaphor, tradition, or grammatical convenience, then resistance to “She” can’t be about accuracy. It’s about comfort, authority, and who gets to feel at home in the sacred.

The intent is less to “feminize” God than to expose how supposedly neutral language quietly organizes power. Masculine God-talk has long operated as default plumbing in Western religion: it disappears into the walls until someone tries to renovate. Christ forces the reader to admit that objections to female pronouns are not theological housekeeping but ideological policing. The subtext is blunt: if your faith insists God transcends gender yet clings to masculine imagery, you’re not defending transcendence; you’re defending a hierarchy that borrows divine prestige.

Context matters. As an educator and a major voice in feminist theology, Christ is speaking into institutions where language shapes who is imagined as authoritative, worthy, or divinely “like.” Prayer, liturgy, scripture translation, and sermons aren’t just descriptive; they’re formative. Her line also anticipates the predictable backlash: claims that inclusive language is a “distraction” or “political.” She preempts that by showing the politics were already there, embedded in habit.

It works because it doesn’t demand assent; it demands consistency. Either pronouns matter, or they don’t. If they do, then “He” has been doing real work all along.