God is Nonbinary

Goo goo g’joob

I live in Tennessee, a white evangelical Christian theocracy, where God, so we are told, despite having no physical body, prefers the pronouns he, his, and him and self-reveals as a man. I have no problem with this, as I don’t believe in him. Given that democracy is merely performative in my state, God will play a minor role in the November midterm elections.

This is not the case in our sister theocracy, Texas, where MAGA mega-star Ken Paxton is running for the United States Senate against James Talarico, a liberal Democrat and seminarian who, in 2021, said, “God is nonbinary,” meaning God falls outside traditional categories of male and female.

This was a mistake on Mr. Talarico’s part, not only because it allows Ken Paxton to call him “James Talafreako,” but also because, as a liberal, Mr. Talarico should know better than to presume anyone’s gender without first asking for their preference. If God prefers masculine pronouns and presents himself almost exclusively as Lord, Father, and King, Mr. Talarico owes God an apology and should take care to speak of God as male, as God wishes and most Texans expect.

But does God refer to himself in the masculine? While the English Bible speaks of God using masculine pronouns and imagery, when God refers to himself, he does so as most of us do when speaking of ourselves: using the first-person pronoun “I”. Of course, there is the masculine term LORD, but this is pure invention on the part of ancient rabbis and their English translators, as we will see in a moment.

When Moses investigates the nature of divinity by asking for God’s name, God doesn’t respond with a proper noun but with a verb—Ehyeh, the first-person form of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God presents neither as “he” nor “she” but as “I.” God says to Moses, “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh… Say to the Israelites, Ehyeh has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). The standard English translation of Ehyeh, “I AM,” erases the verb’s dynamism. A better, albeit awkward, translation of Ehyeh would be I’ing, and of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh would be “I’ing endlessly I’ing.” God is the I’ing of all reality.

In the next verse (Exodus 3:15), Ehyeh introduces Moses to another dimension of divinity: YHVH, the third-person singular form of the very same verb “to be.” Where Ehyeh is divinity within, YHVH is divinity without.

Because YHVH lacks vowels and is literally unpronounceable, the rabbis used pronounceable substitutes such as Adonai/Lord, HaMakom/The Place of all being, and Havayah/beingness when reading the Bible aloud and praying. Sadly, Adonai became the norm, and God became LORD of a male religious hierarchy in the English-speaking world, and most mystics and prophets who seek to reveal the nongendered divinity Ehyeh/YHVH within and around you are either exiled or killed by those whose power depends on belief in the LORD.

Nevertheless, I stand with James Talarico, whose Jesus, a God-realized Jewish mystic, taught “The realm of the divine is within you and outside of you” (Thomas, Logia 3); “I AM (Ehyeh) all. From Ehyeh all has come, to Ehyeh all returns. Split a piece of wood—I AM! Overturn a stone—I AM!” (Thomas, Logia 77); and with the apostles John, who wrote “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you and I am he as you are he as you are me, and we are all together… Goo goo g’joob” (John 14:20; John Lennon, I am the Walrus).