I have a confession. I have struggled for years to talk about God using inclusive language. I have rolled my eyes as womanist theologians have referred to God by female names like “Sophia” and I have been marked down on almost every paper I wrote while attending a very conservative seminary for saying: “mankind” when I should have said: “humankind” (a somewhat horrifying reality as I considered myself an undercover progressive Christian being corrected by a Seminary I saw as the Patriarchy itself). Language is hard. Pronouns are hard, and for years, I found them senseless and arbitrary. Though I gleefully earned the nickname “feminazi” during my Bible college years for refusing to embrace a woman’s inferior role in vocation, marriage, or society at large as “biblical,” I am still very clearly part of the problem.
I want you to hear me when I say, if the words “patriarchy, feminism, womanist…” and the thought of applying the pronouns “she” or “they” to God, is making your skin crawl, I’ve walked a mile in your shoes. I was raised in a staunchly republican, upper-middle-class, white-evangelical, American home. I have scoffed at the idea of feminism and I thought that I had the corner market on who God is and what HE is really like. That was my foundation. That was my starting point. Most importantly, I’m not mad at evangelicalism. I’m thankful for what my evangelical faith has taught me about God, about the Bible and the ways that it has prepared me to join a hard conversation so that we can collectively know God more.
My earliest memories of the church include potluck Sunday, the older church kids who would find me before service and make me say “Cheboygan” for reasons I’m still not really privy to, and of course, the hug lady (shoutout to Nanti!) who sang just slightly off tune and always made sure you knew you belonged. I remember, my dad, a former rockstar party-boy turned evangelical, playing guitar in the worship band and my mom near tears almost every Sunday morning as she fought to get her four kids to church on time (it never happened). In our (the kids) defense, everyone knew which seats were ours and no-one was going to take them.
I also remember the first “image” of God I ever had. After reciting the salvation prayer for the first, of maybe 1,000 times (just to be sure), I imagined this little tiny Jesus coming into my heart with what looked like a big toothbrush and scrubbing away all the bad things about me. If you grew up in the church in the 80’s and 90’s… picture: blue-eyed, blonde-haired, flannel graph Jesus with an oversized toothbrush scrubbing away at my heart constantly. It was an image I would see hundreds of times over the course of my childhood. To be clear, my life needs as much scrubbing as the next person. I’m a hot-mess and I desperately need Jesus. However, as I have grown in my knowledge of God, I think a more helpful starting point would not be my badness, but God’s goodness because it’s God’s goodness that’s draws us to redemption(Rom. 2:4). (Sidenote: for those of you who assumed I “threw out the Bible” for this conversation or that I could not possibly have arrived at my conclusion by reading the Bible, please know that I hold more reverence and love for the Bible today, than I ever have.)
As I grew into both my faith and my so-called “femininity” I both loved Jesus, and quietly resented the women in the Bible that I was told to emulate. I now realize, I resented the modern, binary conception of gender and the interpretation of the women of the Bible that I was being presented with. I did not in fact, resent the women of the Bible. I resented them because I couldn’t emulate them. I couldn’t find a woman in those Sunday school stories I wanted to be like, or I felt I could be like! I was not meek, gentle, quiet, submissive, I had no aspirations to play supporting roles for “real” characters. Perhaps what concerned me more than what I wasn’t, was what I am. I am strong physically and mentally, stubborn, outspoken, bold, willing to fight for a cause I think is just, no matter what it costs me. I’m a leader, I enjoy risk, I’m scrappy, intuitive, and I will not be intimidated. I come by these things all on my own. If you are familiar with the enneagram, I’m as enneagram 8 as they come, and not a soul who knows me is surprised by that fact. When it comes to the old conception of women, and the virtues upheld by the old evangelical gender norms constructed and reinforced by books like Captivating, I. simply. can’t. relate.
In spite of who I am, who I was knit together the be… the pictures I was presented with in church reinforced one thing to me. I was broken. The more I was baptized into the old picture of gender identity and the more I was told I needed to be more gentle, or more quiet, or more supportive, or more nurturing… the more I pictured little Jesus going to town on my heart. More than I wanted to be me, I wanted to love Jesus well. I mean that from the more sincere corner of my heart, rubbed raw by little Jesus and his oversized toothbrush. I internalized a message that my femininity, and the ways I most vulnerably and honestly presented myself to the world were morally broken because I did not meet the gender norms of evangelical Christianity.
I’m not trying to sway you with pictures of sad little Hannah feeling like she didn’t fit in the world. That totally happened, but I think my experience of not fitting the mold is actually more common to the human experience than we think. Worse, I think we’ve totally missed the point of God creating them “male and female, in His image” and I think in missing the point we have alienated, and excluded people from the faith, while simultaneously creating our own images of God that are a pitiful replacement for who God really is and what He/She/They are truly like.
If we want to know about our femininity, we have to stop seeing it as something that we accomplish. Something that we can add to our moral checklist. Your gender is not a choice, it’s a gift. If we truly want to discover this gift, the femininity we all possess, we should stop looking at receivers of the gift, reflectors of femininity and we should start looking at God. We should start exploring the Divine Feminine. After all, it is her image.
