The Future Belongs to the Feminine

On Wednesday, megachurch pastor Kevin DeYoung published an article on The Gospel Coalition titled “It’s Time for a New Culture War Strategy.” In what can only be described as the evangelical version of The Handmaid’s Tale, DeYoung called for the weaponization of a woman’s womb to win the culture war “one baby at a time.” In an ironic twist, women are needed as litter bearers to bring babies into the world; they just can’t be trusted to preach the Gospel to those same children once they’re born. We’re not sure which aspect of the article was more disturbing—the promotion of an already-defunct culture war mentality or the patriarchal theology that spawned it.

The social media response from throngs of ex-evangelicals who walked away from faith due to this type of theology was heartbreaking.

DeYoung’s strategy, or rather the theology that supports it, isn’t new at all. The culture war mindset dates all the way back to the fourth century when Constantine wedded and bedded the church at Nicea in an unholy union between Church and State, priests and power, salvation and domination. Suddenly, God looked a lot less like Jesus and much more like the emperor. 

In fact, the Roman Empire became the model for the Church’s structure, thereby forming the God to whom the Church paid homage: an all-powerful, dominating alpha male who takes no theological or political prisoners. According to Elizabeth Johnson, the author of She Who Is, “It is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman.” 

Early church fathers like St. Augustine only furthered the patriarchal gaze by deeming men the crowning point of God’s creation. Men were made in the perfect image of God while women were, at best, a distant second. Why? Because everyone from North Carolina to Nicea knows God is a guy. And according to Sister Joan Chittister in her book Woman Strength, the consequences are devastating: “The world and the church are both guided only by the masculine half, by masculine means, for masculine meanings alone. And as a result, the world walks on one leg and sees with one eye and thinks with only one-half of the human brain—and it shows.” 

And since our view of God is out of balance, so is the world. It should be clear by now that our over-reliance on the idealization of the masculine at the expense of the feminine has global consequences. Authoritarian, male dominated regimes are now in vogue. The nuclear arms race is back, and more dangerous than ever. Globally, we lack a cohesive plan to care for creation. We’d rather subdue the planet than steward it. Worse, females continue to be victimized, trivialized, and made invisible by public policy arrangements built on their inferiority. 15 million adolescent girls worldwide have experienced forced sexual trauma at some point in their life.  72% of all human trafficking victims are female, and 4 out of 5 are sold for sexual exploitation. Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adult population are women. The system isn’t broken, it was built this way. 

So what would happen if we regained a better balance and reclaimed the role of the divine feminine in the world? Would we be able to tip the global scales away from coercion, control, and pragmatism and toward compassion, creativity, and emotional intelligence? Thankfully, centuries of seeing the world through this patriarchal lens haven't been enough to bury the wealth of God's feminine characteristics found in the biblical witness.

Genesis 1 declares, “God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female.” Here at the very beginning of the biblical text we get a glimpse of the totality of God, balanced eternally with divine masculine and divine feminine attributes. In his book The God We Never Knew, theologian Marcus Borg candidly wonders, “How can women be made in the image of God if God cannot be imagined in female form?” 

The Hebrew Scriptures then unfold, giving us glimpses of God as a gentle and compassionate caregiver. God is described as a birthing mother who formed Israel in her womb. In Deuteronomy we read, “You forget the rock who begot you, unmindful of the God who gave birth to you.” The prophet Isaiah quotes God as saying, “I groan like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.” Later on Isaiah gives even more explicit language to God: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?” 

Yet, the most consistent female attribute of the divinity is found in the wisdom literature where “Sophia,” or divine wisdom, speaks with a female voice: “Wisdom shouts in the streets. She cries out in the public square.” In Proverbs 8 Sophia tells us she was with God even before the creation of the cosmos, the master worker through whom God created. 

And lest we think these scandalous images of the divine feminine only exist in the Hebrew texts, John’s gospel proves otherwise. As Father Richard Rohr explains:

In the first chapter of John, what the author says about “the Word of God” was said about Sophia in the Jewish tradition. Like the Word, Sophia was present with God before creation. Just as the Word was with God and was God, so Sophia was. And when John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus, he could just as well have said that Sophia became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus. Jesus is the Wisdom/Sophia of God incarnate.

Yes, God became flesh in the form of a Jewish male, but Jesus takes on motherly attributes on several occasions, not least of which over the lamentation of Jerusalem: “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” Jesus’ extraordinary treatment of women in a male-dominated society reveals the subversive tenderness of God.  Jesus is the ultimate model of human wholeness, offering the world a strong, passionate, nonviolent champion of the poor while simultaneously embodying gentleness, meekness, sensitivity, and compassion.

Now before you burn us at the stake, please do not hear what we are not saying. God is not female. Yet just as significant, God isn’t limited to masculinity either. As orthodox understanding teaches, God is beyond gender. We see God obliquely, as through a mirror dimly. But since Western Christianity (and frankly most world religions) primarily worship male images of God, we are long overdue to reclaim and honor the divine feminine. To quote Joan Chittister again:  

It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.

The macho model of God has run its course. The idealization of aggression, the urge to turn every public conversation into a culture war, and the desire to dominate those with whom we disagree must end. It’s time for a new recognition of the sacred. With all due respect to Pastor DeYoung, the future doesn’t “belong to the fecund,” it also belongs to the feminine.