Is God a dude?

“God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”

James Talarico during a debate in the Texas House of Representatives

“Nonbinary” was an impolitic thing to say. Talarico allowed a word from the realm of partisan politics to invade the realm of religion. “Nonbinary” is a fighting word, from one side of the culture wars over pronouns, gender expression, and the role of trans people. He might still have gotten in trouble from some had he said that God is so great that the heavenly spirit is beyond gender,” but “nonbinary” was a pure gaffe.

Gaffes aren’t when a politician says something untrue. A gaffe is when one says something that is true, but must not be acknowledged.

Texas’ senior U.S. Senator John Cornyn jumped on the gaffe with a Twitter/X post. Gotcha!

I enter a discussion religion’s understanding of the nature of ultimate truth mostly as an outsider. I’m not religious, but I realize that many people are, and that it has become central to U.S. politics. Some readers feel sure they know exactly who and what God is, and that God is most certainly male. Not “beyond,” not ineffable, not spirit. Male!

I get the willies when I try to get my head around the nature of reality, religious and scientific, especially since Newton is out and now the world is quantum everything. Was there a creative force that predated creation? Who knows? Can anything predate anything if time isn’t real? What with time dilation and that Schrödinger’s cat thing, and superposition, I give up.

As I reflect on the here-and-now world of politics, I feel pretty sure that whatever created the universe was not a being in the form of a physical human male -- a gendered being with upper-body strength, a penis, body hair, and a healthy heterosexual interest in females.

Such gods existed at the time the Bible was put together. Zeus was indeed binary. Greek statues depict a tall, bearded guy. Zeus is hyper-sexual, married to and flagrantly cheating on his wife, Hera. He unleashed lightning bolts in a way that President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unleash bombs on Iran.

The God my parents prayed to, and the one I grew up accepting passively, was invisible, omni-present, and spiritual. It was, as Talarico said, nonbinary because such a god is too big and too ephemeral to be limited by gender.

Within the “serious commentary” arena of Republican media, National Review says that I am wrong and Talarico is spouting nonsense. Of course God is male; how dare Talarico say otherwise?

National Review

Talarico is not retreating. He is pushing ahead, explaining a non-gendered God in public appearances when the subject comes up. The GOP under Trump closed ranks with an evangelical Christian patriarchal and gendered view of Judeo-Christian belief. It is God-the-hands-on dominator, dispenser of harsh, righteous justice, a war god on behalf of his chosen people, the USA, not the empathetic God of the Sermon on the Mount. Talarico’s dilemma is that the Sermon on the Mount version of God is a kind and generous nurturer, a classically feminine expression of gender roles.

The special sauce that makes James Talarico someone who could possibly win election in Texas is that he has openly linked Christian faith to the values that he wants expressed in legislation. Polls show him doing better than either of his two Republican rivals. Talarico’s liberal social gospel version of God, the one expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, is hard to live by. It conflicts with human nature and our instincts of survival. In the context of the current worry over the erosion of American “manliness,” Talarico is on the wrong side. He hasn’t grown a beard. He reads as a choir boy, not a cage fighter. He may not be aggressively masculine enough, and the “nonbinary” word lingers in the air. He is unmarried. And his political message seems just a little bit soft-hearted, too much like Jesus, not enough like Zeus. It is more satisfying to bomb enemies than to love them.