Where is the Love for Women? Language and Intention

“Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks…” Luke 6:45

Nothing breaks my heart more than how the Western Christian Church mistreats women. One of the most pervasive types of mistreatment of women by church leaders takes the form of diminishing women’s self esteem, and men’s esteem for women, through using exclusively male language to refer to God and humanity in worship and sermons.

Much of Christian leaders' use of male-centered language stems from social habit. Lacking any clear conviction that gender-inclusive pronouns and terms make much of a difference for others, it is easy to revert to. Much of it also is the result of lack of thorough knowledge of the Bible, which contains substantial evidence that gender-inclusive language for God and God’s servants was God’s intention from the beginning, as this and other blogs demonstrate.

However, not many Christians discuss this issue from the perspective of how our gender-language affects the welfare of believers, the “sheep” Jesus worked so hard to rescue and heal. According to Judaic law, sin is defined simply as causing harm to one’s neighbor (Romans  13:10), and both God and Jesus make clear that we are to cause no harm to one another, whether by commission or omission (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 18:6,) . So our decisions regarding the language we use for our God, other individuals, and groups of people should be measured by that standard.

 “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” - Romans 13:10

God-Language and the Effects on Self Esteem

One of the ordained ministers who has attempted to research the effects of people’s God-language on their personality traits and self-image is Jann Aldredge-Clanton. In 1983 she conducted a two-part study, sampling women and men from six Christian denominations to survey their gender-concept of God and to determine their personality traits by having them complete the “Adjective Checklist”, by Harrison G. Gough.1 She published the results in her book In Whose Image: God and Gender.

Her study resulted in statistical evidence that women who conceive of God as exclusively masculine were more prone to express feelings of inferiority, self-criticism, guilt, and social impotence than women who conceived of God as both female and male in nature. Women with an exclusively masculine concept of God also were more likely to seek and maintain subordinate roles in relationships, accept dominating behavior, accept blame in interpersonal situations, give up in the midst of adversity, and delay or avoid action than women with an androgynous concept of God.2

However, women who conceived of God as both female and male showed statistically significant increases in self confidence, achievement, ambition, assertiveness, enterprising behavior, independence, imagination and determination than women conceiving of God as exclusively male. The affirmation women experience from a female-inclusive concept of God, developed from female-inclusive God-language, seems to benefit women profoundly on a psychological, emotional, and social level.3

One might be concerned that it would affect men negatively to lose their comfort zone of hearing exclusively male references to God and to make room for feminine images of God in their worship language. Conversely, Aldredge-Clanton’s study indicated that when men’s God-concept deviates from the exclusively male one to include both female and male imagery their self esteem does not suffer and their personality traits do not develop the negative characteristics of abasement and deferment that women with an exclusively male image of God suffer from. In fact, their personality traits seem to benefit from an androgynous image of God, scoring higher in qualities like confidence for risking change, perceptiveness, imagination, versatility, independence, autonomy, and spontaneity compared with men whose image of God is exclusively male.4

In other words, exclusively male God imagery is correlated with the development of low self esteem, lack of assertiveness, lack of independence, under-confidence, passivity and self blame in women. These are the very traits that are cited by domestic-abuse prevention research literature as predisposing women to physically abusive relationships and encounters. 5  However, by comparison, men have nothing to lose by including the feminine in their image of God, since they continue to also associate their own gender with God when they see God as androgynous. In fact, not including femininity in their concept of God may even be somewhat detrimental to men, since men with an exclusively male image of God demonstrate a proclivity towards equating themselves and other men with God to the exclusion of women, reinforcing personality traits of pride and control.6

Low Self Esteem as a Precursor to Relationships with Abusive Partners

Jann Aldredge-Clanton’s study is not the only one to find a correlation between low-self esteem in women and an exclusively male God image. In Women and Self Esteem, Sandford and Donovan cite exclusively-male God imagery in patriarchal religions as a major contributor to the low self-esteem  and lack of self-affirmation of women in our culture.7

In addition, exclusion of women from group and religious language, as well as the group behaviors towards women that this language encourages, resemble behaviors that are recognized by social science professionals as psychological and emotional abuse. Professional domestic-violence research literature cites the following behaviors as psychological and emotional abuse: “subtle conveyances of the lack of importance of the victim”, ignoring the victim when she tries to talk to him, “forbidding her to make decisions or offer an opinion”, “emotional deprivation”, “social isolation”, “intimidation”, “use of male privilege”, and “infantilization” (treating or speaking about someone as if they are a child). These behaviors are cited as ones that prime individuals for physically abusive relationships by contributing to a larger cycle of social abuse. 8

Quite simply, church language that ignores biblical female imagery for God by referring to God with the generic pronoun “he” is not only scholarly inaccurate- it also harms women in multiple ways and potentially even harms men. Similarly, language that ignores women by using the generic terms “men” , “he” or “brothers” to refer to humanity and believers harms women by withholding minimal affirmation of their existence and spiritual contributions to the community, giving the impression that they deserve to be ignored and taken for granted. This language also harms men by indicating that they can afford to ignore women’s existence and participation in the group and that no negative spiritual or social consequences will result from excluding women from their consideration in social and spiritual decisions.

Our generic male wording for humanity and God sends a message, subliminally as well as slightly consciously, that women are devalued compared to men by those who claim to speak for God. As women tolerate this mistreatment for the sake of preserving social unity- in their marriage, in the church- they internalize these messages and it affects their sense of social inclusion, right to self-expression, and social confidence poorly. It not only damages their sense of affirmation and acceptance in their own relationship with God, but their sense of support from God and others in protecting themselves from controlling and abusive people.

Creating Unity Between Women and Men in Christian Community

Some Christians might fear that affirming and empowering women would somehow create division between men and women and lead to increased divorce. On the contrary, when women depend on men for their identities and survival for lack of self confidence and self esteem they often blame those men for their lack of fulfillment, which leads in turn to alienation and divorce.9 Corporate and spiritual language that devalues women encourages men, subliminally and consciously, to ignore and devalue women’s self-expression and contributions to their social and spiritual lives; how can that possibly result in authentic unity and intimacy between men and women in Christian communities?

So, if changing our Church-language to include women in our references to humanity and to God’s nature increases women’s self-esteem so that it more closely resembles the healthy levels of self-affirmation among male congregants, so be it! If recognizing women in Biblical history and in God’s maternity protects women psychologically and emotionally against dominating and potentially abusive partners, and encourages Christian men to do the same, so be it!

If the people of the Christian Church claim to have God’s and Jesus’ love for women in their hearts, let them demonstrate such concern for women’s safety, welfare, and social inclusion by actively changing their words and jargon to reflect that women are as important to them as men are. If not, they aren’t representing the God of the Bible.

Footnotes:

1. “The Adjective Check List” is a standard tool in psychological practice for assessing participants’ psychological traits. See Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 137.

2. Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 86-87.

3. Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 82-83, 102.

4. Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 98.

5. Packota,2000, P.18; Chang, 1996.

6. Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 92-93.

7. Tschirhart Sanford, L. and M.E. Donovan. 1985. Women and Self-esteem: Understanding and Improving the Way We Think and Feel About Ourselves. N.Y.: Penguin Books, Pp.3, 165.

8. Packota,2000,P.4.

9. Aldredge-Clanton, 2001, P. 114

References:

Aldredge-Clanton, In Whose Image? God and Gender (New York: Crossroad, 2001)

Chang, V.N. (1996). I just lost myself: Psychological abuse of women in marriage. Westport, CT:Praeger.

Follingstad, D.R., L.L. Rutledge, B.J. Berg, E.S. Hause, and D.S. Polek 1990 The role of emotional abuse in physically abusive relationships. Journal of Family Violence 5(2):107-120.

Tschirhart Sanford, L. and M.E. Donovan. 1985. Women and Self-esteem: Understanding and Improving the Way We Think and Feel About Ourselves. N.Y.: Penguin Books

Packota, V.J. (2000), Emotional Abuse of Women by Their Intimate Partners: A Literature Review, Education Wife Assault, Toronto.