Hebrew writers had no trouble using female images for God in scripture. (Photo by Luiza Braun on Unsplash)
Heretic Adjacent | June 3, 2026
Like you, I imagine, I’ve been watching the recent goings on in the Texas Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton. It pits a progressive Presbyterian seminary graduate against an evangelical Christian nationalist with, let’s just say... some issues. (I’ve written about it here.)
But that’s not what I’m thinking about today. Today, I’m focused on the heated reaction to Talarico saying that God is non-binary. Admittedly, he’s walked some of that back by suggesting that he was being intentionally provocative. But he wasn’t quite ready to abandon the claim about God, arguing that God can’t be defined using human categories.
I’m glad he didn’t back all the way down.
Because here’s the question I keep coming back to: When evangelicals insist that God is male, what exactly are they claiming? Because maleness, as we actually experience it, is biological. It’s chromosomal. It’s hormonal and anatomical. So does God have a Y chromosome? Testosterone? A body? Surely, they don’t mean by it that God has a penis? Right?
Saying God is male because God is called “Father” is like saying God has lungs because God breathes life into Adam. We all agree that the latter is a metaphor. The question is why we’re so determined to treat the former as biology.
Most evangelicals would say no, that God is spirit, incorporeal, without physical form. Fine. But then what’s left of the maleness? If you strip away every biological marker, what you’re left with isn’t maleness. It’s a set of cultural associations with maleness. You know, all that male-coded stuff: authority, headship, initiative, dominance.
But the thing is, those are properties of living in a constructed patriarchal social arrangement while calling it “nature.” Those aren’t properties of maleness as such.
And guess what? What’s actually happening is that a constructed social hierarchy is being laundered through theology. Here’s how it works: God is “male” because they’ve already defined leadership as male, not the other way around.
What they seem to be smuggling in is something like this:
a) Authority is male.
b) God is ultimate authority.
c) Therefore, God must be male.
But the whole argument depends on the first premise, and that premise is merely patriarchy trying to remain incognito.
Here’s what makes this obsession stranger: the theological tradition evangelicals claim to defend keeps cutting them off at the knees. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas, and much of the classical Christian tradition insist that God isn’t a body. And once God is understood as incorporeal, claims about God’s maleness can’t mean biological maleness in any ordinary sense.
On this reading, masculine pronouns are conventional, not ontological. Aquinas was explicit that all human language about God is analogical, pointing toward something that exceeds our ability to articulate it coherently. The medieval church knew this. The Reformers knew it, too. Consequently, the evangelical insistence on divine maleness isn’t the vestiges of some classical orthodoxy, but a modern theological innovation LARPing as theological scrutiny.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the Bible, which is to say, the one that evangelicals claim to privilege, keeps selling them out, too. Isaiah compares God to a mother nursing a child, for instance. Jesus describes God as a woman turning her house upside down looking for a lost coin.
Here’s one: The Hebrew word for God’s compassion, rachamim, comes from rechem, the word for womb. The writers of scripture weren’t shy about reaching for female imagery when human language strained toward the divine, because they understood that God exceeds every category we bring.
Talarico said God can’t be defined using human categories, which may sound like radicalism, but it sits squarely inside classical Christian claims about divine transcendence, analogy, and the limits of human language.
The real outrage being kicked up on God’s behalf is about protecting male authority from theological eviction, rather than about protecting God from bad doctrine.
Because once God is no longer the cosmic guarantor of male rule the whole arrangement starts to wobble. If leadership doesn’t have to be male, and authority doesn’t have to be patriarchal, then power doesn’t get to wear only a beard and call itself divinely mandated.
That’s the panic underneath all this. Talarico reminded people that God has always been weirder than the categories we use to limit God and control each other.
So no, God isn’t male in any meaningful biological sense. And if what remains of “God is male” is just a baptized defense of hierarchy, then maybe the faithful thing to say is that God has never fit inside the little box patriarchy built and labeled “Father.”
God is more than male, not less.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent.