An older campaign by feminists, including those working in the world of liturgy, sought to shun male pronouns — particularly when either gender is meant — in favour of plural they-them-their usage with singular antecedents.

This increasingly common wording is of course grammatically incorrect given the structure of the English language and can be confusing for readers.

That's now combined with the efforts of transgender and nonbinary advocates to suppress gender-specific adjectives by applying that same singular "they" along with newly crafted pronouns.

A list of such neologisms recommended at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — said to be non-exhaustive — covers ae, e, ey, fae, per, sie, tey, ve xe, ze and zie.

So, for example, with "xe," the variants to parallel she-her-hers-herself are xem-xyr-xyrs-xemself.

As you would expect, references to God himself — or is that "themself"? — are now part of this debate.

Religion News Service ran a column last week from one of its regulars, Mark Silk, headlined "Why our preferred pronoun for God should be 'they.'"

He thinks calling God "they," not "he," and similar verbal tactics have become "imperative."

How would other progressives respond? His proposal was immediately publicized in a tweet from RNS' Roman Catholic columnist, Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, and the online comments began flowing.

Silk is the director of Trinity College's Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, former editor of its now-defunct Religion in the News magazine and well-known on the beat otherwise — for instance as a one-time reporter and editorial writer on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of "Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America" (1995).

Your biblical sources could explore the idea as follows:

Theologians would agree with Silk's starting point, that although male singular personal pronouns are used in English to refer to the God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, "God is not gendered" according to the teaching of all three faiths.

Why our preferred pronoun for God should be 'they' https://t.co/neL2e6lOyB via @RNS @directorsilk
— Thomas Reese, S.J. (@ThomasReeseSJ) September 29, 2021

How might we get around this?

"It" instead of "he" doesn't work because God is personal. Silk acknowledges that speaking of God by his preferred plural "they" instead of "he" could seem to "undermine monotheism," the belief in the one and only God that is at the heart of all three of these world religions.

A problem? "No," Silk insists, because in the Hebrew Bible, the plural form Elohim refers to Israel's God and collectively to other gods. He says experts can ponder whether this "signifies an embedded polytheism in ancient Judaism."

The "New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible" is among resources that explain Elohim in plural form "is the usual name of the one true God," expressed "as the plural of majesty," and also serves in Scripture as the common noun for plural divinities in general.

Looking to the past, one such project that pretty much flopped was the production of "inclusive language" rewrites of the standard three-year lectionary cycle of Bible readings by the National Council of Churches that were issued by several mainline Protestant book houses in 1983-1985.

With "his" forbidden, the repeated guttural sounds became almost comical as in, for example, Isaiah 62:8: "God has sworn by God's right hand and by God's mighty arm."

In the effort to shun "kingdom," the NCC's "reign of God" sounded like precipitation, not sovereignty. Eyebrows arched especially when the NCC team began the Lord's Prayer with the alternate reading "O God, Father and Mother, hallowed be your name." As with Silk's "they," critics complained that this seemed to evoke a belief in two deities, not one.

• Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for AP, Christianity Today and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.
• Published in Religion Unplugged. Reproduced with permission.

"Language change is a spectator sport," McWhorter writes.

"It isn't whether but how things will change over time, and getting to witness a major change like what's happening to ‘they' is a kind of privilege, a top ticket."

Not that I have a choice, but I'm down with this particular privilege. And here's a modest proposal: Let's extend it to God.

In contrast to human beings, it has long been accepted that God is not gendered, at least within the main Abrahamic theological tradition.

A phrase such as "God the Father" should be treated as a metaphor — and for those concerned about the embedded misogyny of the tradition, to say nothing of post-binary folks — a deeply problematic one.

As a result, we have been faced liturgically as well as theologically with the imperative of gender-neutral language, which means being obliged to repeat the word "God" where a gendered pronoun would normally be used and to have recourse to the unattractive neologism "Godself" lest, God forbid, we find ourselves saying Himself.

"They," "theirs," "them," and "themself" (or maybe "themselves") solves the problem. As in: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow; / Praise Them, all creatures here below," etc.

But, Mark, I hear some of you protesting, wouldn't this grammatical démarche undermine monotheism, the idea of the singular God that lies at the very heart of the Abrahamic tradition?

Well, no. Monotheistic Abrahamic theology has had to deal with an embedded grammatical pluralism ever since it came into being.

That's because the word for god in ancient Hebrew, elohim, is a plural form, used with reference to both the Hebrew god and any other god or gods — as distinct from the singular form of the Hebrew god's actual name, JHWH (customarily translated into English as "Lord"). Here's how that works at the start of the Book of Exodus' 20th chapter, where God is laying down the 10 Commandments:

And elohim spoke these words, saying. I am JHWH your elohim who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no elohim before me.

Scholars have found cognate words in other ancient Semitic languages — words in the plural form used to denote one divinity and more than one divinity. Whether it signifies an embedded polytheism in ancient Judaism is a question for the experts to debate.

The great 12th-century Jewish theologian Maimonides took a relaxed view of the matter, writing in his "Guide for the Perplexed": "Every Hebrew knows that the term Elohim is a homonym, and denotes God, angels, judges, and the rulers of countries." Less relaxed was the modern Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, who called it "an almost insoluble riddle."

So, sure, it sounds strange to refer to the biblical god with what we have been accustomed to consider plural third-person pronouns, but no doubt there were people who felt similarly when modern English jettisoned the singular "thou art" in favour of the heretofore exclusively plural "you are."

Check out verse 10 of Psalm 86 in your Bible Hub. The King James Version translates it, "For thou art great … thou art God alone." Just about every modern translation has, "For you are great… you alone are God."

If you've not got a problem with that, you should be able to live with Exodus 15:2 as follows:

The Lord (JHWH) is my strength and my song;
they have become my salvation.
they are my God, and I will praise them,
my father's God, and I will exalt them.

Now that would be top ticket.

• Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

No one doubts that the proposal is directed at regular Mass-goer Joe Biden, the nation's second Catholic president.

More significant than the proposal itself, however, is the fact that the leadership of the bishops' conference has moved toward it in the face of Vatican opposition, expressed in a go-slow letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the USCCB president, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, last month.

"The idea that very direct warnings and guidance from the Vatican would simply be seen as an advisory opinion was not part of my experience," John Carr, policy adviser to the bishops from 1987 to 2012, told the National Catholic Reporter's Christopher White, adding that for them, Pope Francis has become "just one voice among many" and now "the question is not whether I agree with the pope but whether the pope agrees with me."

In modern times, such readiness to dismiss papal teaching has indeed been extraordinary.

In his magisterial "Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes," Eamon Duffy titles the section on the popes of the 20th century "The Oracles of God."

This oracular status was, ironically, the result of their loss of temporal power in the 19th century.

Forced to cede their lands and much of their income to the secular powers, the popes established a degree of control over the church that they had never before enjoyed — from the control of episcopal appointments to doctrinal authority that could rise to the level of infallibility.

Where once Catholic monarchs decided much of what happened in the church, by the 20th century the pope's "spiritual role and symbolic power" had grown, Duffy writes, "to dizzying heights."

Now that era appears to be coming to an end, for the U.S. bishops' proposal on the Eucharist is but the latest example of Catholic resistance to papal direction.

Conservatives in the church have been unsettled by Francis ever since his famous "Who am I to judge?" remark about gay people shortly after he assumed the papacy in 2013.

But outright resistance can be dated from his opening the door to Communion for the divorced and remarried, and specifically from the letter effectively charging Francis with heresy that was issued in 2016 by four semiretired cardinals, led by uber-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Similarly, after Francis revised church doctrine to deny the legitimacy of the death penalty under any circumstances, Burke (whom Francis had removed as head of the Vatican's top judicial body) put out a "Declaration of the truths relating to some of the most common errors in the life of the Church of our time," which insisted that capital punishment was licit under church law.

To be sure, Burke's position was not embraced by the U.S. bishops' conference.

But when Attorney General William Barr — past Knights of Columbus board member and recipient of the right-wing National Catholic Prayer Breakfast's 2019 "Christ's Lay Faithful" award — lifted the long-standing moratorium on federal death penalty executions that same year and ordered up one execution after another, the bishops' response was tepid.

Tepid also characterizes the bishops' response to "Laudato Si'," Francis' powerful encyclical on climate change.

Since it was issued in 2015, the number of bishops who have made climate a major part of their teaching and advocacy agenda can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

And let us not forget former U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò‘s discredited letter accusing Francis of covering up former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's history of abuse and calling for Francis' resignation.

As the National Catholic Reporter's White points out, the same American bishops who spoke up for Viganò are the ones behind the current push for a Eucharist document.

Not that they are alone.

Behind the anti-Francis bishops is a media ecosystem ranging from websites like Church Militant and The Catholic Thing to the EWTN television network, whose lead anchor, Raymond Arroyo, is also a regular on Fox News. T

here are, as well, organizations like the Acton Institute and the Napa Institute, which serve to mobilize wealthy Catholics around conservative policy positions.

The moral and financial strength of the bishops has been severely weakened by the abuse scandal.

Money talks, and much of the money for the church and its institutions now comes not from ordinary parishioners but increasingly from rich conservatives.

The term for state control of the church in early modern times was Gallicanism, because it was in France that such control was most clearly articulated and most thoroughgoing.

The term for the new post-oracular papacy might be Americanism, because America is where the authority of the pope is now most seriously called into question.

In the late 1890s, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heretical an Americanism that embraced the separation of church and state and equal status of all religions — a position the church was still decades away from endorsing.

The new Americanism is manifested in libertarian capitalism and a narrow moralism that has little commitment to the common good.

Though progressive on economic policy (he favoured labour unions), Leo XIII was an authoritarian who believed in centralized, hierarchical control of Catholic life.

By contrast, Francis is advancing a philosophy of synodality, which looks to the entire body of the faithful to work out church policy country by country.

Thus far Francis has done little to rein in the Americanism of his time. But his patience may not last for long.

• Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• Image: Salt Lake Tribune