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Male Pronoun for God Encourages Wife Beating Say Anglicans

By Hilary White

LONDON, October 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a new twist on an old feminist cliché, leaders in the Church of England have told their parishioners not to use the male pronoun for God because doing so encourages wife-beating.

The Daily Mail reported Monday that a report and guidelines issued by the Church of England says that conceiving of God as masculine tends to “reinforce abuse” of women by their husbands.

The Christian understanding of God as Father and Lord, held by all Christians until the beginning of the incursions of feminist thought, the report called “misguided" and said it is a distorted version of Christian belief. This distortion, the report said, specifically includes the understanding of God as it is derived from the Bible.

The report, titled “Responding to Domestic Abuse, Guidelines for Pastoral Responsibility,” condemned the Christian spirituality of self-denial, calling it a factor in discouraging victims of spousal abuse from seeking help. It signatories included the titular head of the Church of England and the Worldwide Anglican Communion, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed in 2002 by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The report is meant for Anglican clergy as a guide for the use of “gender-neutral” pronouns in Sunday services. It says that "uncritical use of masculine imagery" encourages male violence against women, a precise replication of extreme anti-Christian feminist academic thought. The report suggested another of feminism’s central doctrines that the nature of Christian marriage itself tended to enforce a sense among husbands that their wives are property.

The Daily Mail quotes Graham James, the Anglican Bishop of Norwich, who said that abuse victims “can be locked into a belief that they deserve the punishment that they receive and they link that with the theology that they hear in church where Christ is victim.”

“Maybe even that they think their suffering has redemptive quality to it which justifies it in some way,” James said.

In a section called, “God as Abuser?” the report claims, “…The divine–human relationship may be conceived in terms of domination and submission at the expense of grace, mercy and patient love.”

Today’s Daily Mail carried the outraged responses of Christian clergy who said the report is itself a grave distortion of the true Christian doctrine of self-denial and sacrifice.

Simon Calvert of the evangelical Christian Institute think tank, said, “They appear to suggest seriously that we should ditch many centuries of Judaeo-Christian teaching because of some half-baked feminist theory.”

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