Is God Nonbinary? ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/yF2ZatqNcgM/maxresdefault.jpg) Is God non-binary? Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And that is something that Texas State Representative and current Democratic candidate for the US Senate, James Talerico, said a while ago. And a bunch of Christian nationalists are pulling out their rhetorical fainting couches as conspicuously as they can and performing apoplelexi about the notion that God would be non-binary. And a lot of folks have been arguing about the theological propriety of this claim. And I want to point to a few different things to consider when talking about this. The first is that our concept of God is really a conceptual category. It is discursively reified, meaning it is created by discourse. So God is whatever people agree God is. So there's a sense in which the folks who insist God is non-binary are right for whoever agrees. And there's a sense in which those who insist God is not non-binary are right for whoever agrees because they're just a part of the group that agrees with that claim. They're a part of that discursive community. So there's a sense in which they are both right and there's a sense in which they are both wrong. according to the groups that don't agree with that claim. There's another way to look at it as well. Who is closer to what's going on in the Bible? And there's an additional way to look at it because the Bible is not univocal. You can't really extract a single authoritative or consistent divine profile from it. It always requires negotiation. Which passages and conceptualizations are we going to center and give priority to? and which passages and conceptualizations are we going to subordinate to the tradition which provides the unifying frameworks that we impose upon the Bible in order to guide that negotiation. So there is not just what's in the Bible, but there's also what our tradition tells us we're allowed to find in the Bible. And what I'm going to suggest is that James Tarico's position is not clearly represented in the Bible, but is actually closer to the unifying frameworks of the majority of Christians. And the folks who are uh nashing their teeth at Representative Terarico are actually departing from the unifying frameworks that they would normally assert as governing their approach to the Bible. So it's a bit of a mess, but I want to start with what's going on in the Bible. Again, the Bible is not unocal. It does not present a single notion of God. It presents a variety of different notions of God. In fact, that is precisely the topic of the trade book that I just started working on that's going to be coming out in 2027, God's Biography of Biblical History, where I'm going to talk about how and why the God of the Bible changes from the earliest literary layers through to the latest literary layers. But overwhelmingly, God is represented not just as corporeal and anthropomorphic, but as male presenting. And there are reasons for that, including the fact that just intuitively we tend to anthropomorphize non-natural agents. And this is actually something that the cognitive science of religion has demonstrated. There's this wonderful paper from the '9s by Justin Barrett. And it's part of a series of experiments about theological correctness where Barrett and colleagues shared stories about non-natural entities that would be rather counterintuitive entities, people you don't encounter on a day-to-day basis, like Superman and a supercomput and God. And then they had to recall details about it after a certain amount of time had passed. And what they were looking at was how the u participants recall altered the stories whether they rendered these individuals more or less anthropomorphic. And what they found was for uh God particularly there was a tendency to anthropomorphize to attribute human characteristics and features to God. And then they repeated these experiments, but then before they asked them the follow-up questions about their recall, they reminded them about a survey that they uh filled out regarding their theological beliefs. And the idea here was to cue them or prime them to these ideas about theological correctness to see if their recall was tempered or was governed by their belief about what was theologically correct. And the anthropomorphizing fell way off. In other words, uh what this experiment demonstrated for uh the authors of this study was that when we're not actively thinking about what is theologically correct based on the credences that we have signed on to and accepted, our tendency is to think about and talk about God in thoroughly anthropomorphic terms. But when there is a heavy presence of concern for theological correctness, when we are contemplating what is theologically correct, we tend to move away from that because most at least Christian and Jewish theological correctness tries to uh tamp down and subdue and overcome that tendency towards anthropomorphism. We tend to want a less anthropomorphic deity when we're talking about theological correctness. So in the Bible we actually see representation of all sides of this spectrum but the majority of the Bible leans in the direction of anthropomorphism. In fact if we want to take the Hebrew Bible as representative God not only is anthropomorphic and corporeal and male presenting but probably has a functioning penis. Um, in fact, there is an early rabbitic tradition that when Adam was created, Adam was created circumcised because Adam was created in the image of God. And God has a perfect male body and a perfect male body is a circumcised body. So, uh, if we're looking at what's going on in the Bible, the weight of the evidence supports a male presenting deity. Now, this would seem to agree with the critics of representative Talorico. However, those critics are not going to endorse a deity with a functioning penis. Uh, in fact, they are going to vehemently reject that because they overwhelmingly think of God as transcending that kind of thing, that kind of base anthropomorphism, corporate reality, uh, and stuff like that. In fact, we can look at some authoritative literature. For instance, here's the official catechism of the Catholic Church. We can go to paragraph 370. In no way is God in man's image. He is 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 reflect something of the infinite perfection of God, those of a mother and those of a father and husband. And then in the margins on the left, you can see references to paragraphs 42 and 239. Let's check those out. Paragraph 42, God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image bound, or imperfect. If we are not to confuse our image of God, the inexpressable, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable, with our human representations, our human words always fall short of the mystery of God. And then we have paragraph 239. 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 which emphasizes God's imminence, 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. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinctions between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman. He is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood. Although he is their origin and standard, no one is father as God is father. So there's a degree to which one could say this is a non-binary conceptualization of God because God transcends the sex binary or the gender binary of male/female, man/woman. God transcends that and that is a legitimate conceptualization of what it means to be non-binary. even though the way it is usually used doesn't uh perfectly align with that. So we could say that representative Torico's position is far closer to what is considered theologically correct uh at least according to the Catholic Church as we see in the catechisms. But this is not far off from how most Protestants conceptualize God as well. both Catholicism and Protestantism ultimately are descendants of a philosophical tradition of negative theology that God transcends these categories and can't really be spoken of in ways that attribute qualities to God because to attribute quality to God is to divide God or is to limit God. There are a lot of reasons that Christians and also Jewish folks over the centuries have denied that we can lash God to specific qualities or characteristics or accidents or even that we can conceptualize God's true essence. Uh so there's a sense in which representative Talorico's claim is far closer to what the authoritative tradition says about God and gender. So, why would people be so upset about Representative Talerico saying this? Well, obviously because to say God is non-binary is to make a statement about God's relationship to a specific group of people today who are marginalized, who are minoritized, who are being oppressed by the people who are in authority. and Christian nationalists overwhelmingly are concerned with structuring power and values and boundaries in ways that serve their interests. And they are overwhelmingly the ones who are at the levels of power that are minoritizing, marginalizing, and oppressing non-binary folks. So for representative Torico to say God is non-binary is to create kind of a rhetorical problem here for Christian nationalists because their conceptualization of God is obviously far closer to a non-binary concept than it is to the notion of God walking around with a functioning penis. But to say God is non-binary is to give ammunition to this particular cultural war over and against their own interests. And they don't want to do that. And so while they are usually going to avoid the intuitive uh slippage into treating God as anthropomorphic, their priority here is structuring power and values. It's their identity politics. And so their concern for protecting their access to power and resources is going to take priority. So they are going to slip into that more intuitive cognition when it comes to protecting their boundaries and their access to power and resources. So there's a sense in which they are rejecting what's in the Bible to protect their theological correctness. And there's another sense in which they are rejecting their theological correctness and appealing to what's in the Bible in order to protect their access to power and resources. And when it comes to what's more important, their access to power and resources is usually going to outweigh their actual concern for theological correctness. Which makes clear that the folks who are apoplelectic about Representative Talerico saying God is non-binary prioritize their access to power and resources, their right-wing authoritarian identity politics, their Christian nationalism over and against their theology. they're willing to let go of their theology in order to win a cultural war. And so in that sense, I think Representative Talorico's position actually betrays that they are praying on the street corner to be seen of men, that their concern is power, that they are worshippers of power. And James Tarico comes closer to being a worshipper of Jesus, at least the way Jesus has historically been understood. When it comes to what's actually in the Bible, I would say James Terico is a little further away from that. But his priority seems to be helping the poor and the needy and the vulnerable rather than worshiping power. And that's where I would fall on that debate. And the fit for this video is still the dark knight., Is God Nonbinary?, YouTube, 01kk9yjpxs408jmg09dp9hegka.