The Seduction of the Church

How the Concern to Create Gender-Neutral Language in Bible and Song Is Being Misused to Betray Members' Faith

Malcolm C. Doubles

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608994625
  9781498256278
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876302
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

ABBREVIATED FOR THE COVER. Full synopsis has been copied over for use on the web. JT -------------------------- The importance of the use of gender-inclusive language in today's world is generally accepted, especially in the religious domain. In The Seduction of the Church, Doubles demonstrates, in a popular treatment free of technical jargon, how this important activity is being misused to redefine the Christian faith.

1

Introduction

Some years ago, I was surprised when singing one of my favorite hymns, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s God of Grace and God of Glory, that as I sang from memory in verse four,

Gird our lives that they may be

Armored with all Christ like graces

In the fight to set men free,

the hymnal read,

Gird our lives that they may be

Armored with all Christ like graces,

Pledged to set all captives free.

Then I began to notice similar changes in a lot of hymns. In addition, the reading of the recently introduced New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible sometimes sounded peculiar. About the same time, I became conscious of strange, almost non-native, English being used in church liturgy and speech, as pronouns disappeared from language about God. As I examined what was happening, however, I concluded that these changes were more than simple efforts to eliminate gender-specific language. Instead, I began to think that the historical Christian faith itself was under attack, but I could see little to do about it myself, as no one seemed particularly interested in matters of language.

I changed my mind when language issues were recently catapulted onto the public stage with the 2004 publication of Lynne Truss’ best-selling book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.1 Suddenly, matters like comma placement and grammatical structure became worthy topics of conversation and even sources for jokes. I would point out, then, that in any consideration of language, choice of vocabulary exists as an essential element. Furthermore, the ways people choose words about gender have become increasingly divisive. In what follows, I will address the religious significance of some of the verbal choices made when talking about gender, as well as the changing theology being masked by them in some contemporary translations of the Bible and in the lyrics of many of the hymns we sing.

Ours is a generation that has already incorporated into its educational system an awareness of the power of particular words. For instance, hosts of students around the country now exit secondary school never having encountered any works by Mark Twain, our nation’s pre-eminent raconteur of nineteenth-century America. But after all, his use of the “N-word” in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn makes him an unsuitable author for today’s impressionable youth. Life on the Mississippi, then, with all that it teaches about the need for better relations between the races and about our nation’s roots, as well as Twain’s other works, have remained closed books now to several generations of high school graduates. Although the “N-word” does not appear in the Bible or in the church’s hymnody, many claim that the continued use of masculine-specific words to make gender-neutral references evokes similar negative responses in some readers. And while schools can ignore Mark Twain, churches cannot ignore the Bible or the great hymns of the faith.

In addition, we must note that human beings are only able to intellectually analyze and process those thoughts that can be effectively communicated with words. Art and music may be able to express ideas that cannot be verbalized, but even discourse about art or music is trapped in the “package” of language. Therefore, if language itself assumes a certain ideological or cultural perspective, ideas discussed with that language automatically ground themselves in those same perspectives.

I like to illustrate this truth with the story told by a linguist friend of mine who, in the late 1940s, spent a sabbatical year in Germany. This was a time when the backyard swimming pool was appearing there. Now, German has a perfectly good word for swimming pool, “die Badeanstalt,” but the German people called these new pools, “die Swimmingpool,” thereby bringing the two English words into German as a single new word. This friend of mine traveled around Germany showing people photographs of such pools and asking what they called them, was regularly told, “die Swimmingpool,” and then always asked why they used the article “die,” which indicates the feminine gender. He said that invariably the response would be, “What else could it be?” Yet those of us whose birth language is English would say it should have been “das Swimmingpool,” that is, neuter, rather than the feminine gender assumed by those whose birth language was German. All of which is simply to note that the structure of a language influences the culture of its native speakers, often in ways beyond their awareness.

The recognition of this helps us understand that the translation of a document involves more than simply word-for-word equivalency from one language to another. When the document under consideration is a sacred text, the urgency of the matter becomes more extreme, as translators wrestle with the cultural challenge imposed by the task of moving with accuracy from one linguistic milieu to another. The Jewish community attempted to address this issue by retaining the reading of the original Hebrew language in its synagogue services and providing a verse-by-verse translation into the vernacular, a practice which can be attested at least as early as the time of Jesus. Christians, on the other hand, faced with an original biblical text in three languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, have never seriously considered this option, having chosen instead to rely entirely upon translations. What happens in these translations, therefore, is of great importance to believers as they study the words of these Scriptures and sing hymns based upon them.

As far as gender-inclusive language is concerned, Julia Penelope addresses the issue with these words in her book, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues:

Understanding how the structure of English controls the way we think and act is crucial to our welfare . . . Words hurt us, but languages are much more than the words in their vocabularies. They are systems of rules, rules which speakers find useful for saying what they want to say . . . English does more than hinder and hurt women; it proscribes the boundaries of the lives we might imagine ourselves to live.2

And Christian religious language in English is particularly onerous, based as it is on the Bible, which is thoroughly androcentric, that is, male centered and oriented. Our hymns, consequently, also reflect this linguistic orientation.

Furthermore, that more than language skews life in favor of the males of the human species has been increasingly recognized. For the most part, however, men tend to be unaware of their privileges as men, even when they may grant that women are disadvantaged by what has been termed our “patriarchal system.” It has been argued that such privilege comprises an invisible package of unearned assets that any man can count on each day, but about which most men are oblivious. Such privilege is “like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”3 Many of these privileges are unearned, and men tend to be oblivious of them.

It is men and not women who make the most money; men and not women who dominate the government and the corporate boards; men and not women who dominate virtually all of the most powerful positions of society. Furthermore, it is women and not men who suffer the most from intimate violence and rape; women and not men who are the most likely to be poor; women and not men who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick. While men may be harmed by patriarchy, women are oppressed by it.

For instance, a man’s odds of being hired when competing for a job against a female applicant are probably skewed in his favor, unless a civil rights quota is at issue, and the more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed. In addition, a man can be confident that his co-workers won’t think he got the job because of his sex—even though that might be true! And the decision to hire a man will never be based on assumptions about whether or not he might choose to have a family sometime soon. Finally, the odds of a man’s encountering sexual harassment on the job are so low as to be negligible.

If a man seeks political office, his relationship with his children, or whom he hires to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press. Furthermore, chances are that his elected representatives are mostly people of his own sex, and the more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more likely this is to be true. A man can be somewhat sure that if he asks to see “the person in charge,” he will face a person of his own sex, and the higher up in the organization the person is, the surer he can be, testimony to the continuing presence of the so-called “glass ceiling.”

As a child, the chances are that a boy was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than his sisters. In addition, he would not have been taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces. Beyond that, a boy could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Gender-Neutral Language in the Bible
• Chapter 2: God Talk
• Chapter 3: How to Handle Adam
• Chapter 4: The Son of Man
• Chapter 5: Impersonality in Psalms and Proverbs
• Chapter 6: O Brother, Who Art Thou?
• Part 2: Gender-Neutral Language in Song
• Chapter 7: Beautiful Savior
• Chapter 8: Hymn of Joy
• Chapter 9: The God of Abraham Praise
• Chapter 10: Make Love Not War
• Chapter 11: What’s with Our Christmas Carols?
• Chapter 12: Praise, My Soul, the King (God) of Heaven
• Chapter 13: Conclusion
• Bibliography