In this episode, Trent talks about a popular Lenten reflection that refers to God as “she” and explains why Christians refer to God as “he” and why this matters so much. He also takes a close look at feminist theologies that promote false views of God and his revelation.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
So, I’m off social media right now for Lent, but that’s really difficult because Catholic Twitter usually gives me a lot of ideas for podcast episodes. And this episode is no exception. So, welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we talk apologetics, theology, how to explain and defend our Catholic faith. On Fridays though, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. It’s free-for-all Fridays. Those are always a ton of fun.
Today, we’re going to talk about our faith, and what inspired me to do this topic was a post from Father James Martin, which is always usually an easy source for something that is… It’s not formally heretical, but it gets you on that slippery slope right down to heresy. That is really the genius of Father Martin, that he always has a kind of plausible deniability with the controversial things he posts. If it’s very controversial, what he’ll often do is, he just retweets it without commentary. Or he will say something and then backtrack and say, “Well, it’s just a perspective I think that we should look at”. And this is no exception. And it deals with the issue of God’s pronouns.
So… I forget the data, it’s a little while back, it might’ve been during my social media fast, and I broke my fast, mea culpa. I’m not posting on social media, I’m always resisting the urge to log on. Honestly, I probably waste too much time on social media. I have been thinking about making a little social media timer, like an hourglass I keep on my desk, that only lets me be on social media for maybe 10 minutes at a time… Not at a time, a day. Because it’s so easy to waste your time on there.
And it’s really sad, actually. I see some people… We talk about Catholic Twitter, #CatholicTwitter. It’s not a good place because human beings weren’t meant to spend that much time on the internet communicating with people. I find the more someone spends time on social media, the more they begin to devolve as a human person and treat others in rude or even inhumane ways. So I see some people who are very critical, both on the far Catholic right and the far Catholic left. One thing I noticed about them is they are constantly on social media. The most vicious critics, both on the far Catholic left and the far Catholic right, I’ll just see post after post after post, and they’re just tweeting and replying and engaging. It’s like their life is on social media. And if that’s your life, to quote one of my favorite figures, Dave Ramsey, “You don’t have much of a life.” If being on Twitter changes your life, you don’t have much of a life.
So, in any case, here’s what happened. Father James Martin tweeted or shared a Lenten reflection from Vickey McBride. She is a campus minister at Saint Martin de Porres High School. I don’t know much else about her besides that, I think she’s a writer and a speaker. And she had a reflection for the second Sunday of Lent and… The reflection, from what people have told me who’ve read the whole thing, is that it’s fairly innocuous except for the fact that it uses female pronouns for God. One excerpt here that Father Martin shared that you could just see in a picture graphic is, “Settle in. Say to God, ‘Here I am’. Sit and be with God,” It’s like the Psalms “Know that I am God. Be still and know that I am God.” “And God will let you glimpse Her power.”
Some people will say, “Well, Trent, if the rest of the reflection is not bad, why do you got to make a big deal out of one pronoun?” Well, it is a big deal if it fundamentally misunderstands who God is and is also not respectful of God. A lot of other people have made this observation, but I feel like I should make the observation as well. When we live in a culture, especially those on the far Catholic left or the [inaudible 00:03:56] Catholic left. Now, I don’t want to divide the church into left and right, but you can kind of see, especially on the internet, a polarized version of people on the left and the right within the Catholic sphere talking about things. Those on the left tend to be much more open to using pronouns that people want to use, even if they are the incorrect pronouns.
Whereas, my position on the whole transgender issue, names and pronouns, is this; I don’t care if you want to use a new name. People change their name all the time, and some names are more masculine, some are more feminine. I know there are some men who become priests or religious brothers who take Mary as a name, actually, to talk about their Marian consecration. Whatever, that’s fine. There’s that old song, “A Boy Named Sue.” Names I don’t care about. You could change your name however you want. I don’t care.
The pronoun, though, is different. I’ll call you by whatever your name is as long as it’s not some kind of ridiculous or offensive name. But when it comes to pronouns though… When it comes to a transgender individual saying I need to refer to them as “she” or “her”, even if this is a biological male, I am not going to do that because I consider that lying. I’m not going to lie about that person. I’m not going to say a man is a “she” or “her”. I’m willing to compromise in this individual. I’m willing to use the singular “they” to refer to this person or I’ll use their name. But I’ve noticed online that people identify as transgender, they get mad even if you use singular “they”. Or you use their name, for example, instead of a pronoun. They get mad, because it’s not just about tolerance, it’s about, “I want you to believe exactly what I believe.”
There was a time where, when people disagreed, especially about the so-called LGBT issues, they would say, “Well, we just want tolerance. We just want everyone to be able to get along. We want tolerance of different viewpoints.” Now it is not about tolerance. It’s “If we don’t see that you believe what we believe, we’re going to ostracize you.”
So, in a culture, especially those in the Catholic left who are in favor of using transgender pronouns, I find it… It’s just baffling that they’ll say it’s hurtful to not use the pronouns people say they want to be used by. And yet, God has made it very clear what his pronouns are. That he has revealed himself as a male person. And you might say, “Well, Trent, what is the big deal here?” Well, I’ll tell you the big deal.
What if in this Lenton reflection Vickey McBride had instead said, “Here I am. Sit and be with God and God will let you glimpse its power”? We’ll talk about this here a little bit later when we talk about different kinds of pronouns we could use for God. What if she said, “God will let you glimpse its power”? Not he or she, but it. “It”, we’d say, “Well, wait, that’s confusing. God is personal. He’s a trinity of persons.” “it” implies a mere force or an idea. If I say, “I am a servant of justice and I’m going to carry out what it requires”. Well, that makes sense because justice is an abstract idea. We talk about Lady Justice. So, you might even say “she” if you mean “I’ll carry out what she desires” in an anthropomorphic way.
But “it” is a pronoun that’s more acceptable for an abstract concept. It’s unacceptable as a pronoun to use for God. God is not an abstract concept. God is not an impersonal force. God just is. He is perfect being itself, which means God contains the perfections of being including intellect and will. God is not the nuclear force or something like that. And so, the language of faith uses pronouns that refer to persons, and in particular pronouns that refer to male persons to fully communicate what God is like, using the limits of human language to be able to accomplish that.
So, what I want to talk about today is why we use these particular pronouns. Why the language of faith uses these pronouns. It’s not hateful, it’s not misogynistic. Why it’s important. And then also to be concerned about feminist theology, which is really the source of individuals who try to push female pronouns for God. And what are the troubling things, really troubling things that lie within this particular branch of theology. So, let’s talk then about what the catechism says about pronouns and God and language of faith. It says, “By calling God ‘Father’, the language of faith indicates two main things, that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority. And that he is at the same time, goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood”. So, we see this in scripture, but it’s not nearly as common as the images of fatherhood that are used to refer to God.
Also say that God… We have limited human language to understand what God is like. We’re always speaking in metaphor and analogy about God. So, you’re right. We use male and female human metaphors for God, but we also use animal metaphors for God and scripture. That doesn’t mean that God is an animal, or we should refer to him in that way. For example, here are two examples, one that includes both. Hosea 13:8 speaks of God, and God says, “I will fall upon them,” Israel’s enemies, “like a bear robbed of her cubs. I will tear open their breasts, and there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild beast would rip them.” So, here God is compared, not just to a female, but to a female bear. A mother bear, because mother bears are so vicious. They’ll claw your eyes out if you go after their kids. And that’s what God will do for people that go after his chosen people. So, I like it.
Also, though, we see this tenderness and compassion that is really expressed well in motherly imagery in Isaiah 49:15, where the prophet is speaking and referring back to God. It says, “Will God forget us?” It says in Isaiah 49:15, “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb. Even these may forget, yet I, the Lord, will not forget you.” So, here God’s mercy and his love for his children is compared to a nursing mother who will never forget her children. But notice, of course, we’ll see this as a pattern, when scripture talks about God and it uses these female descriptions of God, it stresses that these are metaphors and comparisons. Whereas God’s… The male pronouns that are used are more explicit in identifying God. That does not mean God is a man. The catechism is very clear on that. We’ll get to that shortly, but let’s continue.
So… Let’s see. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s eminence, the intimacy between creator and creature. The language of faith, thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. So, it’s clear if you want to relate to God and we call God our father. If you have a hard relationship with your father, it’s going to be very difficult to have that relationship with God.
We did a retreat… Not a confirmation retreat. It was a retreat for teenagers once when I was a youth ministry leader. I wasn’t the youth minister, I was a college volunteer. And we did a whole retreat themed on the prayer, “Thee, our father”. And the first session was for the teens to talk about their relationship with their own fathers. And we were ready and it was emotional. It was incredibly emotional. Those who had strained or absent relationships. And so, whether it’s our mother or father, if those relationships with our parents are disfigured, we’re going to have a disfigured view of God. That’s why catechism says, continuing in paragraph 239, “We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman. He is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood. Although he is our origin and standard, no one is father, as God is father.”
We go forward in the catechism to paragraph 370. It says, “In no way is God in man’s image. He’s neither man, nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes, but the respective perfections of man and woman reflects something of the infinite perfection of God.” So, God created everything. God is pure goodness itself. So, if you see something in this world that is good, that’s good. Not something that’s sinful, not something that’s bad, but something that is good, that is always a faint shadow or reflection of God. Anything we see that has goodness in this world, that’s not made of God, that’s pantheism, which we’ll get to here shortly. But it reflects God’s goodness. If it has being or essence, God is keeping it in existence. A friend of mine, who is a very snarky theological fellow, used to make fun of me by saying, “You know what Trent, if I were God, I would stop thinking about you”. Which means I would cease to exist.
So, the respective perfections of man and woman reflects something of the infinite perfection of God, those of a mother and those of a father and husband. So, as we said about the language of faith, as the catechism makes clear in paragraph 42, “God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited image bound or imperfect.” So, that’s why any pronoun we would use to refer to God, “he”, “she”. [ski 00:13:18]. Anything, “thee”, “thou”. Any pronoun we come up with is… Any language we use to describe God, usually theology has a better time talking about what God is not than what God is. God is not made of matter. He is not bound by time. He doesn’t lack knowledge. He doesn’t lack power. He doesn’t lack being. He can’t fail to exist. God is the full… We talk about him being fullness of being. More so he doesn’t lack any being or goodness.
So, it gets difficult then to talk about God, because these pronouns, if we take it too literally, even using “he”… Mormons would say… Mormons believe that God is an exalted man. Mormons will say that, “The God of this world used to be a man, like you or me. And now he lives on a planet near a star, somewhere out in the galaxy. Then he kind of runs this universe.” We don’t believe that. We do not believe God is a man obviously. Or that God is merely a person with a ton of powers. God is not this. And he’s not that. Go back to my episode on divine simplicity. God is not this kind of being or that kind of being. God just is being. So we have to use analogical language, the language of analogy to talk about God, what does that mean?
So, I have an example here. If I ask you, “Do you see what I am talking about?” I’m not being literal, unless I’m asking you, “Can you see this YouTube video right now?” I use the word “see” here in its literal sense. But if I talk about, “Can you see what I’m saying?” What I mean is, do you see it in your mind? The sense of understanding by analogy, it’s like vision in the mind when we have a clear thought. It’s like we’re seeing a thought. It’s similar, but it’s still really different from seeing with our eyes. So, that’s why when we use pronouns, we have to say, “Okay, none perfectly captures God’s essence, but which one should we use?” Now, the default is going to be the one God told us to use and revealed himself. That’s going to be the default, but there’s other arguments as to why we shouldn’t use different pronouns when talking about God. So, is God “it”? Well, no. As I said before, that kind of communicates the God is merely an impersonal force.
We see this, for example, in the New World Translation of the Bible of Jehovah’s Witnesses, they say that the Holy Spirit is merely a force. It’s not a person. Though, they have a really hard time getting around passages, like Acts 13:2, where the Holy Spirit speaks and ask for Paul and Barnabas be sent. Only persons speak. Forces don’t speak about anything. So you’ll see, when you read The New World Translation of the Bible, when it talks about the Holy Spirit, the translators usually describe it as Holy Spirit. I will send you Holy Spirit. He was baptized with Holy Spirit. The translators of the New World Translation for the Jehovah’s Witnesses Bible… Remember Jehovah’s witnesses don’t believe Jesus is fully God. Don’t believe the Holy Spirit is fully God. The Holy Spirit is the father, God… The father, Jehovah. It’s like his radar force he sends out into the world. It’s a passive force that emanates from God. It’s not some kind of… An actual person.
That’s why… I remember when we were teaching the teens in our youth ministry program, the first thing we told them about the Holy Spirit was, “It’s a “who”, not a “what”. The Holy Spirit is a “who”, not a “what”. So in the Bible, the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witness Bible, they will always… They’ll try to translate it, Holy Spirit, instead of, The Holy Spirit. Because many times you don’t have the Greek definite article. Like the word [inaudible 00:16:53], for example. So, that’s usually translated “the”, but you translate in English “the”, all the time, even when the definite article is not in the original Greek. Maybe I’ll do a podcast episode about a Greek translation and things like that. That might be a lot of fun.
So, “it”, bad pronoun. “She”, slightly better, still a bad pronoun. Why? To say God is “she”, it really… One, it is used more commonly in pagan religions that worship goddesses, which of course in the first century were direct competitors to Christianity, these goddess mystery religions. But even the modern world, to refer to God as “she” is very common among pantheists. Among individuals who would claim that, “Oh, well. God is the universe. And we came from God. “She” as a metaphor… We think about life arising within a woman’s womb, that the life is a part of her. It’s within her. And so if you think about pantheism, will try to say that, the universe and God are basically the same thing. And we grow within the universe, like an unborn child grows within his mother’s womb.
So, if it communicates a pantheistic element, that’s not good. Whereas “he”… Like a father, when a father begets life, the life grows and moves and develops apart from him. Now, of course we’re not apart from God because God sustains the whole universe. Nothing can exist without God. But the father imagery is better at communicating that the creator is distinct from the creation. Creator and creation are not the same thing. So, there is a radical distinction. An infinite chasm between creator and creation.
I think it was St. Louis De Montfort, who said that Mary is the most exalted of creation, but she is just a mere Adam or a speck compared to God. And that’s actually helpful because some people say St. Louis De Montfort, in his consecration to Mary goes a bit overboard with his Marian language. But even there, he talks about Mary being this mere Adam, compared to God. Just nothing compared to God. Distinction between creator creation, the pronoun “she” collapses that distinction. So, it’s not good.
Also, in scripture, God is never called mother. He’s never called “she”. God is called father. Jesus told us to pray to “our father”. It’s just part of God’s self revelation. So, there’s no reason to use “she” or female kinds of pronouns, when we have this kind of a clear distinction. And finally using these female pronouns for God, I’ve noticed it begins a pattern among theologians and lay people, of relating to God on our own terms rather than on God’s terms. And in fact, people have been relating to God on their own terms from the very beginning of the church’s history.
This is a excerpt from the Acts of Thomas. It claims to be a record of the apostle Thomas’s missionary journey in India, but it was written in the third or fourth century. So, it’s not reliable at all. And it’s tainted with heretical theology. This claims to be, Thomas the Apostle praying during the Eucharistic Prayer, saying things like, “Come the hidden mother. Come, she that is manifest in her deeds and giveth joy and rest unto them that are joined under her. Come and communicate with us in this Eucharist, which we celebrate in thy name.” So, the idea here is Thomas is supposedly praying to the Holy Spirit, referring to the Holy Spirit as “she” or “mother”. And so, you’ve had people who’ve been claiming this erroneous kind of stuff since the very beginning of the church’s history, so…
But what about the Holy Spirit or divine wisdom? Some people say, “Well, aren’t the words in the original Hebrew and Greek languages feminine anyway. So, why can’t we use “she” in order to refer that”. This is a bad grammatical argument, because while in English our words don’t have a gender, in most of the languages, the gender of a word says nothing about whether it signifies a masculine idea or a female idea.
For example, in Hebrew, I believe it’s pronounced [sava 00:20:52]. In biblical Hebrew, sava means army, and it’s a feminine noun. But in ancient Israel, the army was composed entirely of men. And you might’ve had some female judges in the Book of Judges, but you would never say an army was female in ancient Israel. It was masculine even though the noun itself is a feminine noun. The Hebrew word for spirit is… And it’s the same way with [Sofia 00:21:14], divine wisdom. That doesn’t mean that God’s wisdom is literally a woman. There’s different ways to look at it. Most of the church fathers looked at the wisdom as being Christ himself. What it’s speaking about, other people have connected that to the blessed virgin, but at no way can you draw from that, that the Holy Spirit is a female person or that a female pronoun is acceptable.
In Hebrew, the word for spirit is feminine ruach, but pneuma or hagion… We think about a pneumatic drill, for example, or pneumonia, breath or spirit. That’s a neuter noun. And in fact, when Jesus talks about the title for the Holy Spirit, paraclete, or parakletos in Greek. Parakletos, that is masculine. So, the grammatical argument to say that we can refer to God as “she”, because of how the Holy Spirit is described in Hebrew and Greek, it falls flat. What about “he”? As I said, it gets the symbolism right. It’s what God is referred to in scripture. The idea of God being referred to as “she” or “mother”… Oh, one other point to bring up. “He” is the traditional inclusive pronoun. That it’s becoming more popular to use singular “they”, but throughout a lot of, at least the history of the English language, if you were talking about a person and you didn’t know if that person was a man or a woman, it was acceptable to just use “he”.
So, if a person goes down to city hall, he’s going to need to check the hours to make sure it’s open. Nowadays, we usually say… A lot of people are saying “they”, and it’s kind of making a comeback, but “he” is traditionally been something inclusive. That it can refer to either a man or a woman. It just signifies a person. So, if that’s what we’re trying to signify about God, that God is personal. And so to get beyond maleness or femaleness, “he”, which can be used for either men or women in these contexts, will be more acceptable than “she”. There are… When it comes to tradition, by the way, this also has heavyweight among the saints, doctors, the church, theologians. Far more common, the essential norm is to refer to God with these male pronouns. To refer to God as father.
You can find some venerables. I think Saint Anselm of Canterbury might be the one saint who refers to God… Not the one, there’s very few. I think Saint Anselm of Canterbury refers to God as mother. The only other ones I really found that people were sharing that refer to God as mother, were not saints or venerables, like Julian of Norwich or John Paul I. But when you read, people like John Paul II, or other saints that refer to God as “mother”, when they use this language, they’re explicit in saying that God is like a mother. It’s very rare for people to make that direct connection. I think Julian of Norwich said that. And then even said that Jesus is our mother.
The idea that, well, we all come from God, okay? But here we have to respect the limitations of language and use the pronouns and terms that are most appropriate. And especially when it comes to either “he” or “she”, “our father” or “our mother”, it’s very clear. We have to go with what God has revealed to us. Otherwise, we are relating to God on our terms and what we are comfortable with rather than adjusting our level of comfort to what God desires for us.
There’s a good section of the catechism that speaks to this. It is paragraph 2779, and it says, this is in the section on the “our father”, “Before we make our own, this first exclamation of the Lord’s prayer or saying our father, we must humbly cleanse our hearts of certain false images drawn from this world. The purification of our hearts has to do with paternal or maternal images stemming from our personal and cultural history and influencing our relationship with God. God our father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area upon him would be,” I love this, “would be to fabricate idols to a door or pull down. To pray to the father is to enter into his mystery as he is. And as the son has revealed him to us.”
So, that’s what I see with this kind of language. To change guys, we want to put God… We turn it down into a fabricated… An idol that we fabricate and end up tearing down in our own accord. But I appreciate the part of purifying the idea of our father. Because as I said earlier, if you have a not great relationship with your dad, it’s going to harm the idea of seeing God is father. Pope Benedict XVI, in a 2012 general audience, he said something about this. He said, “Perhaps people today fail to perceive the beauty, greatness and profound constellation contained in the word father, with which we can turn to God in prayer”. Because today the father figure is often not sufficiently present. And all too often is not sufficiently positive in daily life.
So once again, if people have a hard time calling God, father, maybe fathers, we got to step up. We’ve got to step up and be the leaders of our families. To be the leaders within our domestic church that God has called us to be. But there’s a lot of people who are against that, of fathers having that unique kind of role. And that would be those who practice feminist theology. Now, I discussed feminism with Timothy Gordon, long time ago. And I know that… When I think of all of that and all of the discussions come from that, I do think about this when it comes to feminism. The word feminism is a toxic word. It is a toxic word. It’s like when I try to sift through feminist theology and discourse, it’s really like trying to find a diamond in the rough or a diamond in the [pu 00:26:55]. There are some great insights from female and even some feminist thinkers. But it is… There’s so much bad stuff that the word feminist is so toxic. I just don’t think one can use it.
I’ll also add an addendum to my previous discussion on racism. That’s why I wouldn’t use the term an anti-racist. I would just say I’m against racism. I’m against poverty. I’m against sexism. I am against… So, rather than being a feminist, I’d say I’m someone who is against sexism. I would say Galatians 3:28, “In Christ, there’s neither Jew nor Greek. Slave nor free. Male nor female. We are all one in Christ Jesus.” And so if that is what you mean by feminism, I’ll take it. But I’m just going to… I can’t use the label because it’s just so toxic. The things that you find here. But at the same time there aren’t… You can’t just say, “Oh, all feminist theology is garbage. All feminism stuff is garbage”. Well, there is some stuff in here that’s helpful.
I’ll just give you two examples. One would be recognizing female contributions to theology and philosophy. You might say, “Well, that’s not feminism”. But there was a time where female voices were not heard. They couldn’t get jobs in The Academy. You didn’t hear from them as much. And so we really impoverished. And I have wonderful female voices, like the philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, the theologian, Alice von Hildebrand, and all the female saints and mystics and their writings. So, some may have been heard more than others, but especially teachers at universities, academics… In the past, it might’ve been harder to hear a lot of their insights. So, that is a benefit. And I’ll give you one other benefit from feminist theology, which as I said, most of it is garbage. But look, I try to see things from as wide an angle as I can.
So here’s a basic principle from feminist theology. Try to see things from women’s perspective. And that’s good. For example, here’s a picture of David and Bathsheba. What happened with David and Bathsheba? We often talk about it as adultery or having an affair. But think about it this way, if the CEO of a major company asked one of the secretaries to come into his office and to have sex with him, she’s not really in a position to say no. She’s probably worried that she’s going to get fired. We talk about that as being sexual harassment or even a kind of rape. It’s certainly not okay today. We think about Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood producers that… We don’t say they had sex with actresses. The actresses feel pressured. They can’t say no to a man who has this much power.
Well, then go back in scripture, how much power did David have? As King of Israel, he had way more power than any CEO today or any Hollywood producer. So, if he brings Bathsheba into his quarters, she’s not really in a position to say no. And if a woman can’t say no to sexual relations, then that’s an act of rape. And so I think that that is a valuable contribution. A way to look at the story that you may not have seen before, if you weren’t ever in a woman’s position. Because I mean… I think of this, so when I am walking through a bad part of town, I sometimes get worried about being robbed or mugged or killed even. But I don’t think I’ll ever be raped. I’ve never been afraid of being raped, but I know many women who have feared being raped.
So, that is a unique threat. A unique feature of women’s experiences. And feminist theology can bring that up when we read scripture to look at it from a woman’s perspective. But my goodness, just… The stuff in feminist theology and to see where it’s bad, you need to go back to the one of the early progenitors of feminist theology. And that would be Mary Daly. Mary Daly was a professor at Boston college until about 1999. And I think she got a lot of controversy, and eventually left the school in 1999, because she was hosting graduate seminars only for women. She would only allow women to be in her graduate seminars. And so she would privately tutor men, but didn’t want… She wanted a female only space. And the university said that violated their policy. So, at Boston college, Jesuit Catholic college, you can have Mary Daly spouting all kinds of wacky, heretical stuff. But as soon as she doesn’t let… That’s the non-discrimination policy they’re worried about.
And so when you look at feminist theology from Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Reuthers, all of these other people, you see they want to reject divine revelation. Obviously, they want to get rid of the male only priesthood, and even the priesthood itself. And this is something even the first way feminists wanted to have a male priesthood, male ministers. I still think they were right about women having the right to vote, women being legal persons under the law, but that’s a strain. But not even just the male priesthood, because there are many people, Mary Daly and other people. This is, I think an argument she makes in her book, The Church and the Second Sex, which was published in 1968. The second sex was a term Simone de Beavoir, part of the second wave feminists, coined in 1949. Daly was saying, “Look, even if women become priests, it’s not good enough because there’s still that patriarchal structure.”
Even if women are priests, that’s not good enough for them. They want to get rid of the priesthood entirely. They want to get rid of the Bishopric. They want… They don’t want a hierarchy. Even if women lead the hierarchy, hierarchies are seen as patriarchal. They want everybody to be equal. And so you see this progression in Mary Daly’s thought, Church and the Second Sex. One of our other books is Beyond God the Father, toward a philosophy of women’s liberation. I think she say in Beyond God the Father, “If God is male, then that means the male is God”. And that’s why she can’t stand the idea of God being referred to in a masculine way. And then finally, we have Gyn/Ecology, G-Y-N. Misygonistic, for example, or gyn, like gynecologist. Is it gyn or gyn. I think it’s gynecology. We think of a gynecologist.
Gyn/Ecology has got a battle axe here on the cover, that’s wonderful. The meta ethics of radical feminism. And it gets more and more radical as you go through a Daly’s writings, but Mary Daly is a good example of feminist theology and just the things that are bad in it. So, this is an example, I think this comes from Beyond God the Father. And so she says, “There is no way to remove male masculine imagery from God. Thus, when writing, speaking anthropomorphically of ultimate reality of the divine spark of being, I now choose to write gynomorphically. I do so because God represents the necrophilia of patriarchy.
Whereas goddess affirms the life loving being of women in nature.” So it’s not even, God our mother. Daily says, “Nope, you can’t say God. It’s got to be goddess. And then you go beyond that. They don’t even want that. They want it to be a purely abstraction that’s not God at all. That’s just an idea. They want to turn God, who reigns in, glory over creation into an idea that fits comfortably in a women and gender studies seminar. They want God to just be an idea for their own movements.
I think this is also… Maybe this is in Gyn/Ecology. Where she talks about the issue of abortion. Of course, the radical pro contraception, pro abortion. That’s a given in a lot of feminist theology. But it goes… Turns up to 11 here. I think… Here’s what Daly writes about men who oppose abortion. She says, “Males do indeed deeply identify with unwanted fetal tissue. For they sense as their own condition, the role of controller, possessor, inhabiter of women. Draining female energy, they feel fetal. Since this perpetual fetal state is fatal to the self of the eternal mother or hostess, males fear women’s recognition of this real condition, which would render them infinitely unwanted.”
I also have to confess to this, I hate a lot of academic writing. I don’t care if it’s feminist theology or regular theology. I feel a lot of theologians need to take an English one-on-one course. It is absolutely painful to read through. That’s why Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica by the way. He hated reading through theology handbooks. He thought they were so poorly written. And so a lot of theology, even theology I agree with, is written so poorly. You can just use a simple sentence please.
And we can understand it’s okay. Subject, verb, object. It’s okay to do that. So, in this part of Gyn/Ecology, Daly, when she talks about how men are basically big overgrown fetuses, notice… I hear radical feminists say things that… Protests like, “No fetus shall defeat us”. I think most people who are in favor of legal abortion, they identify with the pregnant woman. And when they say they don’t hate unborn children, they really don’t. But I think for this radical feminist contingent, they really do hate the fetus. They hate unborn children. When they say things like “No fetus shall defeat us” they see men and unborn children as the same elk. They drain energy from women and they’re the enemy. So, what Daly is talking about in this paragraph, she’s referring to a guy who was suing on behalf of unwanted children. And his lawyer described the fetus as an astronaut in a uterine spaceship.
And that just sent Daly over the edge saying, “Women are not spaceships. Were not mere vessels”. And actually, in my book Persuasive Pro-Life, I make that very point. Because I use analogies to talk about why unborn children are not non persons. If you were an astronaut in a spaceship and you cut off their oxygen, that would be murder. But I’m not saying a woman is a spaceship. In my book. I say, women… We’ve talked about women as a vessel per se. They’re not mere vessels. Rather the language I would use is to say that women and unborn children share intimate, personal space. They share intimate, personal space and both should be cherished and respected under the law. But when you have stuff like this, “Men are draining female energy, it makes them fetal”.
And so when we see an unborn child being aborted, we think of ourselves as little tiny fetuses women are out to get next. Give me a break about this. You want to defend the killing of human beings before birth because of your selfish attitudes and your women and gender studies department. You know what? Get on the debate stage with me and put out these ideas and I’ll have the arguments and the indisputable evidence that abortion is homicide. We’ll have a little… We’ll let the sane audience see who is the Barbar…. And it’s just mind numbing to me. That women have been de-humanized throughout history and considered non persons because of alleged cognitive differences between men. And those same arguments are used to disqualify unborn children by these very so-called feminists. Give me a break. And of course, no one’s good enough for them.
When Pope Francis released Fratelli tutti, we are all brothers. They were in an uproar because they didn’t want the word fratelli. I think they wanted [sotelli 00:38:06] in there also, because brother is too gendered for them. So, not even Pope Francis is good enough. I want to recommend a book for you all. If you have thoughts about feminism and how modern feminism has really dropped the ball here, Mona Charen wrote a book called Sex Matters, really good book. Charen does not describe herself as a feminist, but I think she and I… And I don’t describe myself as a feminist either, it’s a toxic word. I’m not going to use it. Men who described themselves as feminists are usually creepy. You look online, stories about male feminists, usually they’re trying to sexually harass women in the… College girls and the women in gender studies class. So, be wary of a guy who calls himself a male feminist. I won’t use that term.
I’ll talk about human equality. So Charen does not describe herself as a feminist, but I think she and I would be on a similar page in talking about some benefits of early feminism, but how third-wave feminism just went totally off the rails. And why sex, both male and female, and sexual relations, why they matter and how modern feminist just don’t get it. The book is called Sex Matters by Mona Charen. Very good. I’d recommend it. Maybe I’ll have her on the podcast soon to do an interview. Thank you guys so much. I hope this was a helpful episode for you all. And if you want to support us, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you guys so much. Have a blessed day.
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