What Are God’s Pronouns?

How’s that for a click-bait title, hmm? But that’s the point. The current assault on trans rights in the United States is a deeply theological issue as a) it concerns the nature of being human and b) a frightening and frustrating number of people who identify as Christian support this assault. What’s so sad is the hypocrisy. God and Jesus should be at the heart of Christian life and anyone targeting the LGBTQIA+ community (or those in need of the help USAID supplies or migrants or women’s bodily autonomy or children’s education etc. and so on) aren’t aligning with Jesus and his mission and message. They’ve abandoned God, choosing instead a totemistic “god” made in their own image. It’s idolatry over faith. So the pronoun conversation is a handy hot topic to enter into talking about all this. Far right Christians get sooooooo angry at the idea of respecting people’s pronouns. The ironic thing is He/Him aren’t the most accurate pronoun choice for God. Rather, any and all pronouns work equally well! Now let’s talk about why.

As comparative religions scholar Huston Smith outlines expertly in his definitive text, The World’s Religions, Judaism adds two groundbreaking concepts to the world’s religious thought – monotheism and God’s character.

[T]he basic contribution of Judaism to the religious thought of the Middle East was monotheism….[but] the supreme achievement of Jewish thought – not in its monotheism as such, but in the character it ascribed to the God it intuited as One…Whereas the gods of Olympus tirelessly pursued beautiful women, the God of Sinai watched over widows and orphans. While Mesopotamia's Anu and Canaan's El were pursuing their aloof ways, Yahweh speaks the name of Abraham, lifting his people out of slavery, and (in Ezekiel's vision) seeks out the lonely, heartsick Jewish exiles in Babylon. God is a God of righteousness, whose loving-kindness is from everlasting to everlasting and whose tender mercies are in his works.[1]

God wants justice. God topples empires to free slaves and ensure justice. God demands God’s people care for the widows, the orphans, the migrants, and the poor. God stands with those on the margins.

This movement to monotheism sees the Jewish conception of God grow from a tribal deity, the God of Abraham, to the King of all gods to the only God to being the Ground of all Being and Nonbeing itself.

This concept of God is shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as all Abrahamic faiths worship the same God. So all Abrahamic faiths understand God as being one, demanding justice for those denied rights and pushed to the margins of society, and being the source of all existence.

Tradtionally, Christians and Christianity defaults to thinking of God in masculine terms, understandable with how often God is called “Father.” As a result, we often see “He/Him” pronouns used for God. Makes sense, right? And there’s nothing inherently wrong with this! Though we must be aware, especially if we like to use He/Him pronouns for God ourselves, it’s not the full picture.

In scripture, we see God referred to as Mother just as we do Father. The Wisdom of God, for example, often personified in scriptures as Sophia, is traditionally understood as feminine.

Even if we’re not taught this during our religious education (I didn’t learn this until college, despite attending religious ed. classes and youth group all through high school) it doesn’t make it any less true. If we want to assert God is male, hence He/Him pronouns, we must also acknowledge God is just as much female, and She/Her would be just as valid. While I’ve rarely used pronouns for God myself since undergrad, I often speak of God as “Her” or “She” when I need to grab a group’s attention ;D.

If God is as we conceive of God to be – meaning the transcendent ground of all being and nonbeing, the source of all existence, of everything that ever was, will be, and could be – than God is BOTH female and male just as God is NEITHER female nor male. In other words, if God is infinite and God is everything than it is factually wrong to presume They are “a man” because you are imposing limits on the limitless, you are putting God in a box when God is infinite.

If God is One, then all possible gender and sexual identities are held within God, all come from God, and all are as deeply holy as God Themself. So any and all pronouns work just as well!

Whatever brings you closer to God and makes you a more loving, kind, and accepting person is beautiful! But we are in danger of losing the Kingdom of God when we fall into the trap of thinking our approach is the right one. Or, in other words, someone may like to think of God as male but they’ve missed the point if they believe God to be exclusively male. And this is where the second groundbreaking piece of the Jewish conception of God comes into the picture – the nature of JUSTICE.

As Adam Serwer outlined in his piece for The Atlantic a month ago, “The Attack on Trans Rights Won’t End There,” “The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others – including many of Trump’s own supporters – much worse.”[2] For all the news Republicans have made about trans people, they are an objectively small portion of the population – less than a fraction of a percent. That’s the point.

Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.[3]

So it is easy for the GOP to target trans people just as it’s easy for Dems to abandon them. Though, as I said at the top of this piece, a frightening and frustrating part of this issue is how many self-identifying Christians think this is the right thing to do, too.

You know, Jesus is a pretty laid back guy. When you read the Gospel, he is quick to extend love and forgiveness. Even hanging on the cross, dying the death of a terrorist against Rome, he still asks, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do” in Luke 23:34. But the one time we do see Jesus clearly condemn it’s on behalf of the marginalized.

As Jesus says in chapter twenty-five of the Gospel of Matthew:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne,

32 and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

33 He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,

36 naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

37 Then the righteous* will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

38 When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

39 When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

40 And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

41 Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

43 a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

44 Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

45 He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

46 And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Empathy isn’t a sin – far from it.[4] It is the lack of empathy, the lack of kindness and compassion that makes one “accursed” and sent “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” for “eternal punishment.” I don’t know about you but when it comes to God’s will, I’ll trust Jesus over Elon Musk any day of the week.

Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.

Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.

It’s hard to find more of a “these least ones” group than less than a fraction of 1% of the population. No matter what rhetoric pseudo-Christian podcasts and priests and pastors who have chosen to worship an idol over the real Jesus may say, to deny rights to trans people is to deny rights to Jesus himself.

I’ll say this again: To deny rights to trans people is to deny Jesus himself.

So, for Christians, the question of where we stand on an issue like trans rights and how we approach respecting others gender and sexual identities is a remarkably clear one.

Do we stand with the God of Sinai? Do we stand with Jesus? If so, then we can only stand with the trans community and stand against those who persecute those society marginalized. After all, God – the God of Sinai, the God of Abraham, the God Jesus called Abba – has been calling Their followers to topple oppressive empires in the name of justice and inclusion for millennia.

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[1] Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 274-275.

[2] Adam Serwer, “The Attack on Trans Rights Won’t End There,” The Atlantic. Published January 29, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/trans-rights-skrmetti-trump/681485/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20250129&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily

[3] Serwer.

[4] James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ), “I have a hard time believing that anyone would say, as

@elonmusk did, ‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.’ In fact, the fundamental weakness is a lack of empathy. Ma…,” Twitter, March 9, 2025, 3:06 pm. https://x.com/JamesMartinSJ/status/1898812766296637801