Our Non-Binary God

How patriarchy was built on a lie

The Day Moses Got Smacked Down

A lot of people remember the story from Exodus where Moses climbs the mountain and brings back the Ten Commandments. Some remember the burning bush too, though the burning bush comes earlier. Much earlier.

Before Pharaoh is confronted. Before the plagues. Before the sea parts. Before the long wilderness journey. Before Sinai and the tablets of stone.

The burning bush is not the culmination of Moses’ story. It’s the beginning of his call.

Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when he sees a bush that burns but isn’t consumed. He turns aside to look, and from the fire he hears the voice of God.

God tells Moses to go back to Egypt. God tells Moses to confront Pharaoh. God tells Moses to help lead the Israelites out of bondage.

Moses is understandably nervous. He wants credentials. He wants authority. He wants something he can carry back to the people so they’ll know he isn’t making the whole thing up.

So Moses asks God for God’s name.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty bold.

In the ancient world, to know a name was to have some measure of access. Maybe even some measure of control. Names mattered. Names located things. Names defined things.

Moses asks. God answers.

“I am.”

Moses pushes harder, and God answers again.

“I am who I am.”

Or, if we translate it into the vernacular: “None of your damn business.”

Tell them “I am” sent you.

That’s it. No object. No category. No box. No gender marker. No denominational affiliation. No political party. No nation-state. No theological brand.

Just being itself. Just presence. Just fire that burns and won’t be consumed.

God refuses to be named in a way that can be possessed. God refuses to be defined in a way that can be controlled. God refuses to be reduced to a manageable object in a human sentence.

And yet, down through the centuries, we’ve been trying to finish God’s sentence ever since. God is white. God is American. God is Christian. God is on our side. God is Republican. God is Democrat.

God is male.

And that last one may be one of the most dangerous additions of all.

Because once God is imagined as essentially male, male authority starts to look holy. Male dominance starts to look natural. Male leadership starts to look ordained.

Male power starts to dress itself in sacred robes and call itself order.

That’s the lie.

And patriarchy has been living off that lie for a very long time.

God Is Not a Man

This is the part that still makes heads spin in church. Not just men’s heads. Women’s heads too.

Use “She” for God in a sermon and watch what happens. Heads spin. You can almost hear the grinding of centuries inside the room.

It’s not because people have made a careful theological argument. Most haven’t. It’s deeper than that. It’s visceral. It’s inherited. It lives in the body.

For many Christians, God has been imagined as male for so long that maleness feels like orthodoxy. Father language feels safe. King language feels biblical. Lord language feels normal.

And of course, scripture gives us father language. It gives us king language. It gives us lord language.

But that’s not all it gives us.

Scripture also gives us God creating humankind in God’s image. Male and female, both bearing the divine image.

Not the man alone. Not the woman as an afterthought. Not the masculine as primary and the feminine as derivative.

Humanity, in its fullness, images God.

Scripture gives us Wisdom, Sophia, crying out in the streets. She raises her voice in the public square. She stands at the crossroads. She invites the simple to learn. She was with God in the beginning, rejoicing in creation.

Scripture gives us God as a mother in labor. God as a nursing mother. God as a mother eagle. God as a woman searching for a lost coin.

Jesus himself reaches for feminine imagery. He speaks of longing to gather Jerusalem like a hen gathers her brood under her wings.

The Bible is not nearly as anxious about God’s gender as many Christians are.

The tradition has always known this at its deeper levels. God is beyond gender. God is not male. God is not female. God is not a body among bodies. God is not one more creature inside creation.

The mistake isn’t using masculine language for God. The mistake is pretending masculine language exhausts God.

The mistake is turning metaphor into metaphysics. The mistake is taking poetry and making it policy.

Patriarchy With a Corsage

This lands differently on Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day is one of those holidays we’ve sentimentalized into near uselessness. Flowers. Brunch. Cards. A few sweet words. Maybe a social media post with a soft-focus photograph.

And then Monday comes.

The culture goes right back to questioning women’s agency, controlling women’s bodies, doubting women’s authority, limiting women’s power, and romanticizing women’s unpaid labor.

That’s not honoring mothers. That’s patriarchy with a corsage.

We can’t spend one Sunday praising mothers and then spend the rest of the year defending systems that keep women smaller than they are. We can’t bless motherhood while treating women’s bodies as public property.

We can’t quote Proverbs 31 while ignoring the women who are exhausted, underpaid, unseen, dismissed, endangered, and still expected to hold everything together. We can’t celebrate mothers in church while maintaining theological structures that keep women away from altars, pulpits, sacraments, boardrooms, courtrooms, and ballot boxes.

The problem isn’t motherhood. Motherhood is sacred.

The problem is the way patriarchy uses motherhood as a containment strategy.

It praises women when they nurture, but not when they lead. It blesses women when they sacrifice, but not when they speak. It honors women when they serve, but not when they govern.

It loves the feminine when it’s compliant, decorative, fertile, and quiet.

That’s not love.

That’s control.

The Binary Needs a Boss

Patriarchy depends on a rigid binary. It needs the world divided cleanly into male and female, strong and weak, ruler and helper, head and body, protector and protected.

It needs men to be one thing and women to be another. It needs hierarchy to feel like nature. It needs nature to feel like God.

That’s why trans and non-binary people provoke such panic in patriarchal systems. Their very existence tells the truth that patriarchy can’t survive.

The world is more fluid than the system allows. The human person is more mysterious than the categories admit. The image of God is wider than the binary can hold.

This is why the current backlash is so fierce. The attacks on transgender people aren’t just about bathrooms or pronouns or sports. Those are the surface arguments.

The deeper panic is theological and cultural.

Trans and non-binary people expose the fragility of the whole arrangement. If gender isn’t rigid, then hierarchy isn’t inevitable. If hierarchy isn’t inevitable, then patriarchy isn’t sacred.

And if patriarchy isn’t sacred, then a lot of men have been pretending to speak for God when they were really just protecting their own power.

That’s why this moment is so charged. It’s not just about gender. It’s about who gets to define reality.

The Theology of Control

The Roman Catholic Church is hardly alone in this, but it’s one of the clearest examples.

For centuries, its sacramental hierarchy has rested, in part, on the maleness of Jesus. Jesus was male, so priests must be male. Priests stand in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, so only men can fully represent him.

That logic has always seemed thinner than its defenders admit.

Because if Jesus’ maleness is essential to representing Christ, then what about his Jewishness? What about his first-century body? What about his ethnicity, his language, his location under Roman occupation?

The church has never required priests to be Galilean Jewish peasants. It has required them to be male.

That tells us tells us that the issue has never been only representation. It has been about power.

The maleness of Jesus has been used to sanctify male authority. The fatherhood of God has been used to reinforce father-rule on earth. The language of divine lordship has been mapped onto human systems of domination.

This isn’t just bad anthropology. It’s bad theology.

Jesus didn’t come to reinforce patriarchy. He came through the body of a woman. He learned from women. He healed women. He defended women.

He appeared first, in resurrection, to women whose testimony the culture didn’t trust.

Again and again, the Gospel undermines the very hierarchy the church later tried to baptize.

The Current Backlash

We’re seeing the consequences of this lie all around us.

We see it in renewed talk about repealing the 19th Amendment. Not from the political mainstream, perhaps, but close enough to it now that the idea no longer feels buried in the dustbin where it belongs.

We see it in fantasies about “family voting,” where a household would cast one vote, presumably through the man. We see it in proposals that risk making it harder for married women, especially women whose legal documents don’t neatly match after name changes, to register and vote.

We see it in the trad wife aesthetic, with its soft lighting, homemade bread, carefully curated domestic bliss, and quiet invitation back into submission. We see it in attacks on reproductive freedom and in the demonization of transgender people.

We see it in the grotesque commodification of women’s bodies. We see it in the failure to pursue, with relentless seriousness, the full truth around powerful men and sexual exploitation.

This is not a random collection of cultural grievances.

It’s a pattern.

The pattern is patriarchy reasserting itself.

Sometimes it comes dressed as religion. Sometimes it comes dressed as family values. Sometimes it comes dressed as nostalgia. Sometimes it comes dressed as protection.

But the goal is the same. Put men back at the center. Put women back in their place. Erase everyone who makes the binary harder to police.

Then call it God’s design.

The Burning Bush Still Burns

This is why Exodus 3 matters so much.

The burning bush is not just an ancient story about Moses being called to courage. It’s a warning about the human desire to name God too quickly and then use that name to control others.

Beware the systems that claim to possess divine certainty. Beware the people who turn metaphor into law and mystery into machinery.

Moses asks God for a name. God gives him a verb.

“I am.”

Not “I am male.” Not “I am father only.” Not “I am king only.” Not “I am the divine warrant for men ruling women.”

Just “I am.”

To call God non-binary isn’t to squeeze God into a modern label. It’s to confess that every label finally fails.

It’s to say that God is not captured by the categories we use to control one another. It’s to say that God contains what we call masculine and feminine, and also exceeds both.

It’s to say that the Divine is not threatened by the fullness of human embodiment.

Any theology that requires the diminishment of women, queer people, trans people, or non-binary people is not defending God. It’s defending an idol.

And that idol has done enough damage.

The Sham Beneath the Shrine

Patriarchy survives by pretending to be ancient, sacred, and inevitable.

It’s none of those things.

It’s a human system. It was built. It has been defended. It has been preached, legislated, romanticized, monetized, and enforced.

But it’s not God.

Once we see patriarchy as a human construction, we can stop treating it as divine architecture. We can stop confusing domination with order. We can stop mistaking control for love.

We can stop pretending that women’s subordination is holiness, that men’s authority is destiny, or that the erasure of trans and non-binary people is faithfulness.

The call now isn’t to replace one domination with another. It’s to come back to wholeness.

To honor the masculine without worshiping it. To honor the feminine without containing it. To honor every human being as a bearer of the divine image.

To let God be God.

The bush is still burning. The voice is still speaking. The answer is still refusing our cages.

“I am.”

Not yours to own. Not yours to define. Not yours to weaponize.

Just “I am.”

And if we ever really heard that, the whole patriarchal lie would begin to fall.

May it be so.