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Many theorists contend that one of the most powerful influences in molding gender and maintaining gender oppression is language. The words that religions use to talk about the divine are especially powerful in shaping the ways we think about men and women. Any language we use to talk about deities is of necessity metaphorical. We create images that can only partially represent the full reality of this concept. Unfortunately, those images sometimes become understood in literal, rather than metaphorical, ways. So, instead of thinking, for example, of God as Father, we may come to think God is Father. Throughout Jewish and Christian history, the preponderance of images for God have been masculine— Father, King, Lord, Judge, Master—and the effect has been that many people imagine God as male even though, intellectually, they might know this is not true. God is often imagined as white too. In ancient times, the image of the Great Mother Goddess was primary in many cultures, but as war-centered patriarchal cultures developed, the life-giving Goddess had to be defeated by the warring God. In ancient Babylonian mythology, Tiamat was the Great Mother, but she was eventually slaughtered by her son Marduk, the god of war. Yahweh, the god of the ancient Israelites, was originally a consort of the Canaanite Mother Goddess, but, as the Israelites moved toward a patriarchal monotheism (belief in just one God), Yahweh became prominent as the Great Father God, and worship of the Goddess was harshly condemned by Yahweh’s priests. The prominence of a single masculine image of deity then became reflected in the exclusion of women from the priesthood and eventually from the concept of Israel itself. In response to the hegemony of masculine images of God, feminist theologians have constructed alternative feminine images of deity. Some theologians, such as Virginia Mollenkott, have returned to the Jewish and Christian testaments to point out the existence of feminine images within scripture. Other theologians, such as Sallie McFague, have challenged people to develop new models of God such as God as mother, God as lover, and God as companion. And yet other women have returned to the ancient images of the Goddess herself. Others have reimagined God as transgender—the One who transcends, transgresses, transforms, crosses over. The political nature of the decision to challenge normative God-language does not go unnoticed by traditionalists wishing to cling to male images. The Southern Baptist Convention issued a statement declaring that God is not like a father, but God is Father. And a group of mainline churchwomen created a furor within their denominations when at a conference they chose to call God “Sophia,” a biblical, but feminine, name for deity. REINTERPRETING, RECONSTRUCTING, AND DECOLONIZING TRADITIONS For those feminists who have chosen to remain in religious traditions, the task of reworking oppressive elements has been great. Theology itself has been constructed with male experience as normative and has not taken into account the experiences of all genders. Since the 1960s, feminist theologians have undertaken the task of rethinking traditional theological notions from the perspective of women’s experiences (across their intersecting differences of race, sexuality, social class, etc.). Elizabeth Cady Stanton started this work over a century ago, as the reading, “Introduction to The Woman’s Bible” shows. For example, the traditional notion of sin expressed in the story of the Fall in Genesis is that of pride and the centrality of the self. Redemption in the Christian testament then involves the restoration of what humans lack—sacrificial love. Yet the normative experience for women is not pride and self-centeredness, given that women are generally socialized to be self-negating for the sake of their families—and, in fact, encouraging women to be self-sacrificing as a form of redemption simply exacerbates women’s situation. Feminist theology brings women’s experiences to the center and reconstructs theological concepts in keeping with those experiences. Because of the predominance of Christianity in the United States, the Bible and its various interpretations play a large role in shaping women’s lives. Given this importance, feminist re-examinations of religion fall on a continuum: from reinterpretation to reconstruction. Reinterpretation involves recognizing the passages that are particularly problematic for women and highlighting and reintegrating the passages that extol equality across genders. Proponents of such reinterpretation include Christian feminists who maintain a positive view of scripture as they continue to accept scripture as an authority in their lives. The goal of reconstruction, however, is to move beyond reinterpretation and recognize the patriarchal underpinnings of various interpretations and the ways they have been used to oppress women. As an example of a reconstructionist account, Christian testament scholar Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza encourages readers of scripture to look for the presence of women in the margins and around the edges of the text. She calls for biblical readers to re-create the narratives of women who were left out of (but hinted at) in the text. In a similar fashion, for example, Jewish feminist scholar Judith Plaskow calls for a reconceptualization of notions of God, Torah, and Israel that are inclusive of women. Other reconstructions of scripture include “womanist” biblical interpretations of women of color that analyze the Bible in light of the intersections of sexism and racism. In these accounts the Bible itself is subject to scrutiny in terms of its expressions of justice and injustice. Readers of the Bible with this perspective focus on the moral and ethical imperatives of justice contained therein and with an eye toward struggle for liberation for women of color. Similarly, LGBTQ readers of the Bible read to “queer” the text, looking for fissures in hegemonic gender and creating disruptions of heteronormative assumptions. Women have begun to challenge and reconstruct religious traditions as well as scripture. For example, Jewish women have developed feminist Haggadot, texts containing the ritual for celebrating the Passover Seder. These feminist Haggadot commemorate the women of the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. In one Haggadah, the four sons of the traditional ceremony become four daughters, and the lives of the women celebrating Passover are inserted in the ceremony to create a living history and a new story. Perhaps one of the most contentious reconstructions of religious traditions is the ordination of women and LGBTQ people. Although feminist church historians have recovered a long tradition of women as rabbis, priests, pastors, bishops, and evangelists, most Christian denominations did not ordain women until the latter part of the twentieth century. Many still do not. One exception to this is the Quakers, who have a long and unique history of women’s equality in the congregation. Although Quakers do not ordain anyone, some groups of Quakers do record ministers, and women have always been among the recorded. In silent Quaker meetings, women as well as men are assumed to be able to receive and speak a word from God. Beginning in the 1960s, many mainline Protestant churches began to ordain women ministers, although men still make up the larger percentage of senior pastors in almost every denomination. The Episcopal Church elected the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori as its presiding bishop in 2006. Roman Catholics still prohibit women from becoming priests, although there is a growing movement within Catholicism, particularly American Catholicism, to change this policy. The Church of England first ordained women as priests in 1994, but the Church only consecrated its first woman bishop in 2015. Several churches—such as the United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the Episcopal Church—ordain openly LGBTQ clergy, although in the case of the Episcopal Church, this has caused tension between churches in the worldwide Anglican fellowship inside and outside the United States because many of the latter resist such ordination of LGBTQ clergy. In 2004, the church invested the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson, an out gay man, bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire and in 2010 consecrated the Right Reverend Mary Douglas Glasspool as its first openly lesbian bishop. Although both the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) and the United Methodist Church began ordaining women in the 1950s, full acceptance of LGBTQ people as ministers has come much more slowly. The PCUSA voted in 2011 to allow the ordination of people in same sex relationships, but the United Methodist Church still excludes people in samesex relationships from ordination and prevents Methodists ministers from performing same-sex weddings. Particularly for women in the global south and women of color in the United States, neither reinterpreting nor reconstructing go far enough in examining and challenging the colonial underpinnings of religious traditions. Postcolonial feminist theologians confront and call out the legacies of empire in religious texts and practices and the ways religions have been used as colonizing influences. For example, writers such as Musa Dube of Botswana point to colonial beliefs in “God, gold, and glory” as intersecting theological and economic supports for the conquest of Africa and its subsequent pillaging by colonizers. In response, women around the world have begun to develop their own spirituality, recapturing older religious traditions as a way to “decolonize” themselves from the influences of the religious traditions their people were forced to adopt during the colonial period.