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Original Article:http://feminismandreligion.com/2011/12/10/the-g-word-by-

carol-p-christ/

THE G WORD By Carol P. ChristDecember 10, 2011tags:Carol P. Christ,God-talk,goddess

byCarol P. Christ

Recently, I saw the following line in a promotion for a book to which

I contributed: This volume includes voices from Christianity,

Judaism, goddess religion, the Black church, and indigenous

religions. The editors of this book are to be strongly commended for

expanding the dialogue in feminism and religion beyond the confines

of the Christian hegemony in which it is still all too often framed.

Nonetheless, I felt hurt and offended. I immediately wrote to the

editors asking how they would feel if a book were promoted using

the words: This volume includes voices from Goddess religion and

god traditions such as judaism and christianity.I am well aware that the conventions of English grammar dictate that

the word God is to be capitalized when referring to the de ity of the

Bible and the Koran and in some other cases where a monotheistic

deity is intended. I have been fighting this battle with editors of my

work for years. Usually they automatically change Goddess to

goddess. When I gained the courage to question this, an exception

would usually be made for me, but the grammatical convention

remained in force for other works by the publisher.

Feminists are well aware that the conventions of grammar are

socially constructed. This is why we said forty some years ago that

man did not include woman and that he did not include she.

This is also the reason that many of us have argued that malelanguage and imagery for God needs to be changed. We must also

insist that Goddess always be capitalized in our own work and in

works under our editorial control. Not to do so is to capitulate to conventions based in patriarchal, hegemonic, and

colonial ideologies.

This brings me to the question of what to do about Gods and Goddesses. Here the issue is not simply the

privileging of the Abrahamic traditions, but also a metaphysical preference for universalistic monotheism. Recently,

I have been reading a number of feminist books on Hinduism. The authors often do capitalize Goddess when

referring to a deity that conforms to monotheistic expectations, but use lower case when referring to localized or

plural female divinities. Here is an example: there is one supreme Goddess who has many forms or who is the

unity underlying all discrete goddesses. In other lines from the same book we find: a particular goddess like

Parvati; and scholarly interest in Hindu goddesses and goddess traditions. As can be seen from these examples,

lower case is used to refer to female divinities with particular names and to groups of female divinities. In books

following these conventions, lower case would also be used to refer to groups of male divinities, especially in the

phrase gods and goddesses, but (inconsistently) not necessarily to named male divinities, such as the God

Krishna.

After the author of an essay I encouraged her to submit to the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion complained to

me that the copy editor had lower cased both Goddess and Goddesses in her work, I spoke with the editors. I

proposed that the standard convention of the journal should be to capitalize God, Goddess, Gods, and

Goddesses in all cases. My argument was that to choose any other convention privileges male divinities and

universalistic monotheism, following conventions that were established when grammarians believed that the

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Christian God was the only true God and extended grammatical privilege to the God of Judaism and the God of

Islam. The editors accepted my suggestion.

It could be argued that all references to deities, including those to the god of Abrahamic traditions, should be

lower case so as not to privilege hierarchical and transcendent understandings of deity. I do not disagree with this

proposal in the abstract; the problem is that we cannot expect Christians, Jews, and Muslims to accept it. Moreover,

if God is the name for God as Tillich once said, then the G words should be capitalized when used as proper

names. But then do we say: Goddess is the name for goddess? And: Goddess in translations of invocations of

Parvati, but goddess Parvati when the name is included and goddess in scholarly discussions of Parvati? Then

do we also say the god of the Hebrews or the Hebrew god Yahweh? I think the simpler and more inclusive

solution is to capitalize all of the G words whenever they occur. This seems to me to be the only practical way to

put all Gods and Goddesses on the same grammatical, metaphysical, and postcolonial plane.

Carol P. Christis a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, womens spirituality,

and the Goddess movement. She teaches in theWomens Spirituality programatCIISand throughAriadne

InstituteoffersGoddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Her books includeShe Who ChangesandRebirth of the Goddessand

the widely used anthologiesWomanspirit RisingandWeaving the Visions.

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