The Pronoun and the Real: On Language, Sex, and the Idolatry of Gender
Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 19, 2026
Occasion: Last week, in the final editing of the May 13 civil-obedience essay before publication, I caught a paragraph generated by Claude that used the alternating-she convention throughout — a Christian Underground member files her taxes, obeys traffic laws, pays for her business permits, sends her children to school, votes in elections, serves on juries. I rewrote it back into generic-he. The objection was not stylistic. The convention of randomly using she as a generic for human beings strikes me as inauthentic, as a kind of cultural genuflection, and ultimately as something that bows to an idolatry of gender. The deeper charge — that the language convention is theologically idolatrous — is deliberate and asks for development rather than dismissal. This essay is the working-out of why generic-he is the right convention, where the alternating-she practice came from, what it actually commits a speaker to, and where the cultural fight over pronouns sits in relation to the deeper biblical claim about created sex.
The underlying claim of what follows is that language conventions are never neutral. They encode and transmit substantive commitments about the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, and the relations of human beings to one another. The Christian who uses the conventions of the surrounding culture without examining them adopts the culture’s convictions along with its words, however orthodox his explicit theology may be. The pronoun is not just a word. The pronoun is a piece of the world, and which pronoun the Christian chooses to use is a small but real confession.
I. The Question — Is Language Neutral?
The question that runs underneath every dispute about generic pronouns, sex-neutral language, preferred-pronoun conventions, and the rest is whether language is neutral. If language is a value-free tool that conveys propositions without freight, then the choice between generic-he and alternating-she is purely a matter of taste — choose whichever you prefer; the underlying claims are unaffected; the dispute is merely aesthetic. If language is not neutral — if conventions of speech carry implicit theological and metaphysical commitments — then the choice is consequential, and adopting one convention rather than another is a substantive act, whether or not the speaker is aware of it.
The Christian tradition has not generally treated language as neutral. The opening verses of the Gospel of John identify the logos — the Word — as the eternal divine reality through whom all things were made. The act of speaking is the first creative act in the Genesis narrative — and God said, Let there be light: and there was light (Gen 1:3). The giving of names is one of the first acts assigned to Adam, and the act is treated as substantive — and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof (Gen 2:19). Language in the biblical canon is closer to the ontological floor than to the surface. Speech participates in being. Names participate in nature. The rightness or wrongness of a name carries weight: Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isa 5:20). The prophet’s curse falls on the mis-naming — on those who call by one name what is properly called by another. Misnaming is not a stylistic infelicity. It is a participation in the lie.
The principle is not unique to the biblical tradition. Confucius, in the Analects, gave it its sharpest classical formulation outside Scripture: if names are not rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things; if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success; if affairs cannot be carried on to success, the proprieties and music will not flourish; if proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded; if punishments are not properly awarded, the people will not know how to move hand or foot (Analects XIII.3). The chain of reasoning is striking. From the right ordering of names through the right ordering of speech through the right ordering of practice through the right ordering of civil and aesthetic life to the very physical capacity of ordinary people to act in the world. The rectification of names is the precondition of everything that comes after.
Twentieth-century linguistics, working from a very different starting point, reached compatible conclusions. The strong-form Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — that the structure of a language determines the thought-world of its speakers — has been moderated by subsequent empirical research, but the weaker form remains broadly accepted: language shapes thought; conventions of speech tilt patterns of perception; the categories built into a language carry consequences for what its speakers find easy or hard to think. Cognitive science has found evidence that speakers of languages with rigid gendered noun systems perceive objects differently than speakers of languages without them; speakers of languages with elaborate color vocabularies discriminate hues more finely than speakers of languages with poor color vocabularies; even fluent bilinguals describe the same events differently depending on which language they are currently using. Language is not neutral. The question is not whether the convention one uses carries freight; the question is what freight it carries.
So the question of whether language is neutral has, on multiple lines of evidence from multiple traditions, a clear answer: it is not. The next question is what the specific conventions of English generic pronouns — generic-he vs. alternating-she vs. singular-they vs. the contemporary preferred-pronoun framework — actually commit the speaker to. To answer that question we have to look at where the alternating-she convention came from, what its early proponents argued for, and what claims it carries.
II. The Convention We Are Examining — Where Alternating-She Came From
Generic-he was the unchallenged English convention for several centuries. The Authorized Version (1611) uses generic-he. The Westminster Confession (1646) uses generic-he. The Declaration of Independence (1776) speaks of the rights of man and all men are created equal. The Constitution uses he and him generically throughout. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural (1865) employs generic-he. Twain, Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Faulkner, Tolkien, Lewis — generic-he throughout. Until the 1960s no one was confused; no one wrote think-pieces about whether man in the rights of man included women; no one argued that the convention silenced the female half of humanity. The convention was understood as exactly what it was: a grammatical universal that comprehended both sexes when used generically, and a specifically male reference when used particularly.
The change came in the late 1960s and 1970s, riding two waves of intellectual development that converged.
The first wave was second-wave feminism. The major theoretical works of the movement — Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1973) — held in common a particular thesis about language: that the structures of patriarchal society were encoded in the structures of language itself, and that liberation from patriarchy required liberation from the linguistic forms that carried it. Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (1975) gave the thesis its most influential academic treatment. Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women (1976) and their Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (1980) brought it to a popular audience. Their argument was straightforward: generic-he was not an innocent universal but the linguistic manifestation of a worldview in which the male was the human-default and the female was the exception, the deviation, the supplement to the universal. To use generic-he was to participate, however unwittingly, in the patriarchal structure. To liberate language was to displace generic-he — first by alternating it with she, then by neutralizing toward singular-they, eventually by abandoning binary pronouns altogether.
The second wave was post-structuralist linguistic philosophy, particularly the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, refined by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The post-structuralist claim, stated baldly, was that the meaning of words is socially constituted rather than referentially fixed, and that the categories of language create rather than describe the categories of experience. Combined with feminist linguistics, this produced a powerful proposition: if language constitutes reality (not merely describing it), then changing the language is changing the reality. Generic-he did not merely reflect a patriarchal world; it constituted one. Replace the pronoun and the patriarchal world begins to unmake itself.
The institutional adoption of the new conventions followed quickly. The American Psychological Association adopted alternating-she and singular-they in its style guide in 1977. The Modern Language Association followed in 1983. The University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the major American university and trade publishers moved through the 1980s. Government style guides, corporate communications departments, and journalistic stylebooks followed in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, generic-he in formal academic writing was treated as either intellectual sloppiness or — worse — ideological hostility to women, and the convention had inverted. What had been universal in 1965 was disreputable by 2000.
The further developments — (s)he, generic-they as singular, neopronouns like ze/zir and xe/xem, the demand for pronoun-disclosure in professional and educational settings, the cultural normalization of declared-pronoun signatures in emails — all grew from the same root system. If language constitutes reality, and if binary male/female categories in language participate in oppressive social structures, then the work of linguistic liberation is incomplete as long as binary pronouns persist. The current proliferation of pronoun conventions in 2026 is the late-stage development of a trajectory whose early phase was alternating-she. To use alternating-she now without examining its origins is to inhabit a halfway house on a road that goes considerably further — a road that ends in the abolition of any pronoun convention grounded in created sex.
III. The Theological Claims Embedded in the Convention
The feminist-linguistic project of the 1970s carried four claims that are, in their substance, theological. They were not always presented as theological — most of the project’s early advocates were secular — but the claims occupy the territory theology occupies, and they cannot be evaluated without reference to assertions about the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, and the nature of the created order. Let me name them.
(1) Male and female are constructs of culture rather than realities of creation. This is the foundational claim. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) gave it its famous early formulation: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) extended the claim radically: gender is performative, constituted by repeated acts of social signaling rather than grounded in any prior biological reality. On this view, the categories male and female are not given by biology or by creation; they are imposed by culture, and they can be uncreated by cultural intervention. Language, as one of the primary instruments of cultural imposition, is also one of the primary instruments of cultural uncreation. Change the language, and the categories begin to dissolve.
(2) Hierarchical patterns of relation between male and female are unjust. The Pauline patterns of headship (Eph 5:22-33, 1 Cor 11:2-16), the Genesis patterns of distinct creation and complementary calling (Gen 2:18-25), the ordering of household and church in the New Testament (1 Tim 2:8-15, Titus 2:1-5, 1 Pet 3:1-7) — these are read, on the feminist-linguistic framework, as instruments of oppression that must be dismantled. Generic-he, on this reading, is a small but persistent reinforcement of the male-headship pattern, and displacing it is part of dismantling the pattern.
(3) Language constitutes reality rather than reflecting it. This is the post-structuralist contribution. If language merely reflects reality, then changing language without changing the underlying reality is a confusion of cause and effect. But if language constitutes reality — if the categories of speech are also the categories of being — then changing language is changing reality. The pronoun is not just a word; it is a piece of the world. This claim is not always stated explicitly by users of the convention, but it is presupposed by the practice; otherwise the practice would have no point.
(4) Justice requires linguistic intervention. Given (1), (2), and (3), the conclusion follows: justice requires deliberate linguistic intervention to displace conventions that carry oppressive structures. The individual writer who uses generic-he, even when he intends no oppression, contributes to the maintenance of the oppressive structure and must therefore be persuaded or coerced into displacing the convention. Linguistic intervention is not optional or preference-based; it is morally required.
These four claims are theological because they make load-bearing assertions about the nature of created reality (claim 1), the moral structure of human relations (claim 2), the metaphysics of language (claim 3), and the obligations of speakers (claim 4). The Christian tradition has, on its own grounds, made very different claims at each of the four points.
Genesis 1:27 asserts that male and female are created realities, made in the image of God in their distinction: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. The biblical pattern of male and female is grounded in creation, not in cultural construction. The two sexes carry different vocations in marriage, household, church, and civic life (Eph 5, 1 Tim 2, 1 Cor 11), but they share equally in the image of God and in the dignity proper to image-bearers. The biblical pattern of headship in marriage and elder-rule in the church is presented as a created ordering for human flourishing under God’s design, not as an instrument of oppression invented by men. The biblical doctrine of language locates speech as participating in created order rather than as the constitutive ground of it — Adam named the animals that God had already created (Gen 2:19-20), and the naming was a recognition of given reality, not a constitution of new reality. The obligations of Christian speakers are governed by the law of charity (1 Cor 13) and the law of truth-telling (Eph 4:25, Col 3:9-10), not by an obligation to intervene linguistically in service of ideological projects.
The alternating-she convention, then, carries claims that are at every point in tension with biblical claims. Adopting the convention without examining what it carries is adopting the implicit claims along with the explicit pronouns. The Christian writer who alternates she with he throughout his prose without thinking about it is, at the level of language convention, performing the feminist-linguistic confession even if his explicit theology is orthodox.
IV. The Biblical-Canonical Grounding for the Generic Masculine
If language is not neutral, and if the alternating-she convention carries claims in tension with biblical claims, what does the biblical canon itself do? The answer is that the biblical languages — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — all use the masculine as the generic, and the biblical writers use the convention without apology or qualification.
In Hebrew, adam is the standard noun for humanity, mankind, human being. The word is grammatically masculine, and it serves as the unmarked-universal for humans of either sex. Genesis 1:26-27 uses it precisely this way: and God said, Let us make adam in our image, after our likeness… so God created adam in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. The adam in this verse is plainly inclusive of both male and female — the verse says so explicitly — but the noun is masculine, and the verbs and pronouns agree with the masculine gender of the noun. The masculine serves as the universal. The Hebrew also has ish, which is the specifically male noun for man, and ishah, which is the specifically female noun for woman. The system is exactly what the Christian tradition’s English convention preserves: the masculine functions as both the generic-universal (when comprehending both sexes) and the specifically male (when contrasted with the female). There is no third register; the universal does not require neutralization.
Greek does the same. Anthropos is the standard generic noun for human being, person; the word is grammatically masculine; it comprehends both sexes when used generically. Aner is the specifically male noun for man; gune is the specifically female noun for woman. Anthropos serves as the universal in countless New Testament passages — the Sabbath was made for anthropos, not anthropos for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27); what is anthropos that thou art mindful of him? (Heb 2:6, quoting Ps 8); there is one God, and one mediator between God and anthropos, the anthropos Christ Jesus (1 Tim 2:5). The Greek pattern is the Hebrew pattern: the masculine is the universal, and the specifically-male is a narrower subset of the universal-masculine.
Latin does the same: homo is the generic-universal (and masculine), and vir is the specifically male. The Latin theological tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, the medieval scholastics, Calvin in his Latin works, the post-Reformation continental dogmaticians — uses homo generically and vir particularly throughout. The Apostle’s Creed in Latin confesses Et homo factus est — and he was made man (generic, in the sense of incarnate as a human being) — using the universal-masculine where contemporary English translations sometimes neutralize to and became truly human.
The Indo-European pattern is consistent: the masculine functions as the unmarked-universal across the languages from which English descends. English inherits this pattern from its Germanic, Latin, and Greek influences, and the inheritance is preserved in generic-he, generic-man, mankind, brethren (now archaic but historically the generic for people-of-the-church), and the related conventions. To displace generic-he in English is to break with the linguistic pattern of every language in the European Christian tradition for the entirety of recorded Christian history. This is not a small breakage. It is the deliberate severing of English from its Indo-European inheritance in pursuit of a project that the Indo-European tradition does not support.
The biblical writers themselves did not seek to neutralize the masculine. Paul, writing in Greek to communities that included substantial numbers of women — Romans 16 alone names at least ten women who labored in the gospel alongside him — uses adelphoi (brothers, grammatically masculine plural) as the generic address to the church. Some recent English translations have moved to brothers and sisters in certain passages to communicate to a contemporary readership that women are included; the underlying Greek is uniformly adelphoi. Paul did not feel obligated to neutralize his masculine generics, because the masculine generic was the unmarked-universal of his language and required no neutralization. He named the women by name when he wanted to honor them particularly (Phoebe, Priscilla, Junia, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus’s mother, Julia, Nereus’s sister, Mary); the generic comprehended them automatically when he addressed the whole church.
The biblical pattern, then, is the generic-masculine pattern. The Christian who uses generic-he in English is using the convention that biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek use natively, and that the Latin Christian tradition used for fifteen centuries. The Christian who replaces generic-he with alternating-she is innovating against the convention of the entire Christian-canonical and post-canonical tradition in favor of a recent secular cultural movement. The presumption of authority lies with the historic convention, not with the innovation.
V. What the Feminist Critique Got Right — and Where It Went Wrong
It would be unfair, and ultimately ineffective, to engage the feminist-linguistic project as if it had no legitimate concerns. There are real concerns in the historical record, and a serious Christian engagement must name them before proceeding to disagreement.
What the critique got right. Women had, in certain historical periods and certain particular institutions, been treated as less than full image-bearers — denied education, denied property rights, denied access to professions and trades, denied participation in civic and political life, treated by their husbands as instrumental rather than as persons. The historical record contains real injustices, and Christian institutions have sometimes participated in them. The medieval and early-modern legal codes treating wives as property of husbands, the long denial of women’s access to higher education, the practical exclusion of women from many professional and trade positions, the assumption in many corners of the church that women’s spiritual gifts were less serious than men’s — these are facts, and a Christian engagement that minimizes them is dishonest.
Moreover, generic language in some historical periods was sometimes used as a vehicle of practical exclusion. When 18th-century American legal documents wrote about all men being created equal and then practically excluded women from voting, holding property in their own names, sitting on juries, and accessing higher education, the generic men in the documents was being read by many of its users as practically referring only to men. The disjunction between the theoretical universality of the language and the practical exclusion of women was real. The feminist critique, in pointing this out, identified a genuine pattern.
Where the critique went wrong. It diagnosed the problem at the wrong level. The historical injustices to women were caused by injustice — by particular human acts of exclusion, by particular legal codes, by particular cultural patterns of disregard. They were not caused by the convention of generic-masculine grammar. The biblical writers used generic-masculine grammar and treated women with notable seriousness, dignity, and honor. The medieval scholastics used generic-masculine Latin and produced rich theological reflection on the dignity of Mary, on the spiritual gifts of women, on marriage as the image of Christ-and-Church. The Reformation theologians used generic-masculine grammar and produced the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that elevated the spiritual standing of every Christian, male and female. The historic Christian tradition married generic-masculine grammar to a high doctrine of women’s dignity without contradiction.
The injustices to women came from failures of the Christian tradition to live by its own doctrine, not from the language convention. When 18th-century American men wrote about the rights of man and practically excluded women, the failure was in their practice, not in their grammar. Other societies with the same Indo-European generic-masculine grammar — and the same biblical canon — produced different practical outcomes. The variable was not the grammar; the variable was the practice of the people speaking the grammar.
The feminist-linguistic project, then, proposed a remedy that addressed the symptom rather than the disease. Changing the grammar does not change the heart. The man who has contempt for women will have contempt for them whether he writes he or she or they or any other pronoun; the man who honors women will honor them in any grammar. The language convention is downstream of the underlying disposition, and changing the language convention without changing the disposition produces a kind of theater — the appearance of justice without its substance.
Worse, the linguistic project carried with it the deeper claims (1)-(4) of Section III, which the historic Christian tradition cannot accept. By bundling a real diagnostic concern (that women had sometimes been mistreated) with a false metaphysical claim (that male/female categories are social constructs, that language constitutes reality, that justice requires linguistic intervention), the project made it difficult to accept the legitimate concern without also adopting the false metaphysics. The Christian engagement has to disentangle these. We can affirm without qualification that women bear the imago Dei fully, that they are co-heirs of the grace of life (1 Pet 3:7), that their spiritual gifts are real and to be exercised in their proper context, that they have legitimate vocations in marriage and household and church and civic life, that historical exclusions were sometimes unjust — and we can refuse to adopt the linguistic conventions of a project whose deeper claims undermine the very categories of male and female that biblical anthropology rests on.
VI. The Broader Cultural Project — Where the Convention Stands in 2026
The alternating-she convention was the early phase of a longer trajectory. The trajectory has continued, and the convention now sits in a particular cultural location that did not exist in 1975.
In 1975, the alternating-she practice could plausibly be presented as a marginal innovation pursued by a small number of feminist writers with limited cultural consequence. The substantive metaphysical claims behind it were held by relatively few people; most users of the convention adopted it as a polite social gesture without examining the theoretical framework.
In 2026 the cultural location is different. The substantive metaphysical claims have moved from the academic margins to the cultural center. The categories of male and female as cultural constructs rather than created realities are now the working assumption of most major American institutions: the universities, the major media, the federal civil service, large corporations, the public school system, the medical and psychiatric professions in their official organs, the Democratic Party as a political institution, and the soft-progressive wings of every mainline Protestant denomination. Children as young as five are taught in public schools that biological sex and gender identity are separable categories and that one can be assigned one sex at birth and discover oneself to be a different gender. Surgical and pharmacological interventions are performed on minors to alter their developing bodies in pursuit of an inner-felt gender identity that the child claims and the medical profession affirms. Pronoun disclosure has become normative in professional and educational settings; failure to use a person’s preferred pronouns is treated as a form of harassment in many corporate human-resources frameworks; in some jurisdictions, deliberate misgendering is treated as a civil-rights violation. The recategorization of biological males as women for purposes of women’s sports, women’s prisons, women’s locker rooms, and women’s professional and educational scholarships is now common; the consequences for women in those spaces are visible in the news cycle weekly. The rise of adolescent gender dysphoria, particularly in young women, has produced a clinical and pastoral crisis whose dimensions are still being measured.
This is the cultural location in which alternating-she sits in 2026. It is the early phase of a much larger project; the metaphysical claims its early proponents made are now mainstream; the practical consequences of those claims are visible in the bodies of children, in the legal frameworks of major institutions, and in the daily life of every workplace where pronoun-disclosure is a norm. A Christian who in 2026 uses alternating-she without examining the trajectory is not making a small stylistic choice. He is occupying a position on the trajectory whose endpoint is the dissolution of created sex as a meaningful category.
This is what the phrase the idolatry of gender names. Idolatry, biblically, is the worship of the created in place of the Creator — the elevation of something that is itself made and contingent into the place that belongs only to what is uncreated and necessary. The contemporary cultural project elevates gender, understood as an inner-felt subjective identity, into the place that biological sex (as a created reality reflecting God’s design) properly occupies. The created reality (sex, given by God) is denied or relativized; the constructed category (gender, claimed by the self) is exalted. This is, in its precise structure, idolatry — the worship of the made-thing in place of the Maker. The phrase is exact.
The language convention of alternating-she is a small but real participation in the larger idolatry. It accepts, at the level of grammar, the framework in which sex must be neutralized or balanced rather than recognized as a created given. It signals deference to the project even when the speaker is not aware of signaling anything at all. It is, in plain terms, a bow — small, polite, and theologically corrosive.
VII. The Christian Response — Consistent Practice without Performative Polemic
The Christian response to this is twofold: consistent practice, and the avoidance of performative polemic.
Consistent practice. The Christian writer uses generic-he as the unmarked-universal; uses man, mankind, humanity, human beings as the generic forms; refers to specific women by she and specific men by he; honors women genuinely and substantively in the pattern of the biblical witness; and does not engage in the linguistic theater of the surrounding culture. The convention is held quietly, without commentary, because the convention is the historic English convention and requires no defense. The innovation requires defense, and where the innovation lacks defense, the historic convention stands on its own ground.
The fellowship’s writing — essays, sermons, newsletters, books, correspondence — should reflect the consistent practice. The same applies to spoken language in fellowship meetings. The same applies to the formation given to children. The same applies to the convention used in family conversation, professional life, and civic engagement. The convention is not a battle to be fought publicly. It is a discipline to be practiced quietly. The fight, if there is one, is in the practice. The world will notice if our convention is consistent, just as the world noticed when the early Christians refused the small sacrifice to the emperor’s genius. The refusal was the witness; the witness did not require a tract explaining the refusal.
Avoidance of performative polemic. It is tempting, having seen what the alternating-she convention carries, to denounce its users and to treat the convention’s use as itself a sign of theological compromise. This temptation should be resisted, for three reasons.
First, many users of the convention adopt it as a polite social gesture without examining its theoretical origins, and they are not deliberately performing the feminist-linguistic confession. Treating them as if they were collapses charity into ideology. The convention’s meaning at the systemic level is one thing; an individual user’s intention is another. Both matter, and a thoughtful engagement holds them separately.
Second, polemic about pronouns tends to be heard, by the broader culture, as small-minded, reactive, and obsessed with trivia. The Christian witness is more effectively borne by the consistent quiet practice of the convention than by tracts denouncing the alternative. The witness is in the practice; the practice carries the doctrine; the doctrine is what eventually transforms hearts. Tracts denouncing the convention tend to harden the users of the convention rather than move them. Quiet consistent practice over time tends to move them, because it presents the alternative as livable and ordinary rather than as a position one has to be argued into.
Third, the larger work of the Christian Underground — articulated in the May 13 civil-obedience essay’s Section X — is the patient soul-by-soul conversion of the world through witness, love, good works, and the reasoned defense of Christ. Linguistic-convention polemic is poorly fitted to that work. The convention should be used; the underlying theological claim should be available when asked about; but the convention should not become a flag the speaker waves. The work is to win souls, not to win the pronoun fight.
VIII. The Pastoral Question — Brothers and Sisters Who Disagree
A real pastoral question follows. Many sincere Christians, including many in the fellowship’s broader circle, use the alternating-she convention without thinking about it. They have absorbed the convention from their academic, professional, or denominational formation, and they do not see themselves as making a theological statement. The fellowship’s engagement with such Christians should not assume the worst about them.
The right approach is twofold. First, in the fellowship’s own writing and speech, use generic-he consistently without ostentation. When asked, articulate the reasoning briefly and without polemic. Second, do not require other Christians to adopt the convention as a condition of fellowship. The convention matters, but it is not the foundation of fellowship. The foundation is shared confession of Christ as Lord, the Lordship of Scripture, and the basic patterns of Christian life. Brothers and sisters who use alternating-she while holding orthodox views of creation, marriage, sex, and personhood are brothers and sisters. Their pronouns are downstream of formation they did not choose, and they can be brought to a different practice over time by example rather than by argument.
The cases that do matter for fellowship boundary are different. When a Christian’s pronoun usage signals adoption of the deeper metaphysical claims — when they is used for someone who is biologically male in a context where biological reality is at stake (a women’s locker room, a women’s sport, a hospital ward), when neopronouns are used as a sign of allegiance to the project, when pronoun-disclosure is treated as obligatory ethical practice — the issue is no longer the surface convention but the underlying claim. There the fellowship needs to be clearer and firmer, because the underlying claim is in direct conflict with the biblical doctrine of creation.
The discernment is not always easy. Some Christians use they as singular in informal writing because it has long-standing precedent in English (Shakespeare uses singular-they, as does Jane Austen) and they have no particular metaphysical claim behind it. Others use they with full adoption of the contemporary framework. The difference is in the underlying confession, not in the surface word. Pastoral discernment asks about the confession, not just the word.
The cardinal rule: charity to those who use the convention without adopting the framework; clarity with those who adopt the framework; gentleness in either case, because the goal is not to win the argument but to win the soul.
IX. Crescendo
The Christian project of speech is not a project of neutralizing language. It is the project of naming the real — of using words that correspond to the reality God has made, in a manner that honors both the reality and its Maker. Adam named the animals; the names were not arbitrary; they were recognitions of given creatures. The Christian writer’s task is the continuation of Adam’s task, on a more limited scale: to name what is, in the words his language gives him, with the fidelity that the truth requires.
Male and female are real. They are created realities, given by God, reflected in body and soul, complementary in their distinction, equal in their dignity, irreducible to constructs of culture or to performances of social signaling. The languages of the biblical canon — Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek — name this reality through their grammar: the masculine as the universal-when-comprehending-both-sexes, the masculine-as-particular when distinguishing-from-female. The Christian tradition inherited this pattern through Latin and into the European vernaculars. English carried it for centuries, in the King James Bible, in the founding documents of the republic, in the literature of the language’s greatest writers.
The recent innovation of alternating-she and its successor conventions is the linguistic phase of a larger cultural project that denies the created reality of sex, claims that gender is socially constructed, and demands that the body conform to the inner-felt identity rather than the identity to the body. To adopt the linguistic phase is to participate, however unwittingly, in the larger project. To refuse the linguistic phase is to refuse participation. The refusal is small, almost invisible — a pronoun in an essay, a he where a contemporary expectation would put a she — but the refusals add up over time into a witness that the convention of historic Christianity is livable, ordinary, and faithful.
Generic-he is not a battle the Christian Underground fights publicly. It is a discipline the Christian Underground keeps quietly. The witness is in the consistent practice. The practice carries the doctrine. The doctrine is what eventually changes the surrounding culture. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). The Word made flesh names things rightly. The disciples of the Word do likewise. The pronoun is small. The pronoun is real. The pronoun, used rightly, confesses creation as God made it — male and female, in his image, both bearing his likeness, both honored, both irreducible to constructs of culture. The convention is the confession. We will keep it.
X. What Remains Open
Several threads in this essay deserve fuller treatment than I have given them.
First, the rich biblical-theological literature on the imago Dei — what it means for man and woman to be created in God’s image, the equality of dignity within the distinction of vocation, the ways the biblical pattern of marriage images the relationship of Christ and the Church (Eph 5:22-33) — deserves a fellowship essay of its own. Filed for CRF derivation work and for the Christos Logos module.
Second, the contemporary transgender movement, the rise of adolescent gender dysphoria, the medical and surgical interventions performed on developing bodies in pursuit of gender identity, and the pastoral questions these raise for Christian families and communities deserve a separate engagement. The questions are urgent and the fellowship has not yet addressed them in writing at the depth they require. Filed for distinct essay development.
Third, the question of male headship in marriage and church — what it actually means, what it does not mean, how it is exercised faithfully, what the relevant New Testament texts actually require, and how it has been distorted in both the patriarchal-abuse direction and the egalitarian-collapse direction — has been minimized in much of the contemporary American church and deserves recovery. The CGG tradition (which produced the Reid civil-obedience essay engaged in the May 13 piece) holds male-headship with greater seriousness than most American evangelicalism; their work on the question is worth engaging. Filed for fellowship discussion and CRF work.
Fourth, the recovery of biblical womanhood — what it means for a Christian woman to flourish in her distinct calling, the rich pattern of Mary, Esther, Deborah, Ruth, Hannah, Lydia, Priscilla, Phoebe, Anna, Dorcas, and the Marys — would balance and complete the work of this essay. This essay has dealt with what we refuse; an accompanying essay should deal with what we affirm. The biblical witness on women’s dignity and calling is rich, specific, and underdeveloped in much contemporary Christian writing, and the fellowship would benefit from a positive articulation. Filed for fellowship study and essay development.
Fifth, the broader question of language as Christian discipline — beyond pronouns, into the territory of how Christians should speak about politics, sex, money, race, nation, and the various other contested vocabularies of contemporary public discourse — is real and deserves systematic treatment. The pronoun is a particular case; the principle generalizes. Filed for substantive future essay.
Sixth, the pastoral question of how fellowship members should handle pronoun-disclosure norms in their professional and educational settings — when they are required to list pronouns in email signatures, when they are asked to address persons of one biological sex by pronouns of another, when they are pressured into linguistic compliance in professional contexts — is concrete and important. The principle of consistent practice articulated above does not, by itself, resolve every concrete case. Filed for direct pastoral conversation and for case-by-case fellowship discussion.
Seventh, the philosophical and theological work on language as participation in the logos — Augustine’s De Magistro, Aquinas on signification, the broader Christian metaphysics of language as creaturely participation in divine Word — is a deep well that this essay has only gestured at. The CPP framework, which holds consciousness and intelligible structure as primary, provides a metaphysical ground for the doctrine of language-as-participation-in-reality that the secular post-structuralist tradition cannot provide. Filed for CPP-CRF integration work and for Christos Logos module development.
Closing Reflection
The pronoun is a small thing. The Christian Underground operates by small things — small witnesses, small refusals, small consistencies, small acts of love and good works and reasoned defense of Christ done daily over decades. Most of the work that converts the world is done at this scale. The grand cultural battles draw attention; the small daily disciplines do the actual work.
My flag on the she pronouns in the civil-obedience essay rewrite last week was, in itself, a small thing. It became this essay because the small thing turned out to have substantial roots — roots that went down through cultural history, through linguistic theory, through metaphysical claims about the nature of male and female, through the biblical doctrine of creation, all the way to the question of whether language is neutral or whether it carries freight. The roots are the reason the small thing matters.
The fellowship’s practice on this will be consistent generic-he as the unmarked-universal, man and mankind as generic for humanity, specific she and her for specific women, charity toward Christians elsewhere on the question, clarity against the deeper metaphysical project, and the quiet faithful discipline that holds the line in writing and speech without polemic. The convention is the confession. The confession is biblical anthropology, biblical creation, biblical theology of language, biblical patterns of male-female complementarity. We will keep the convention because we hold the confession. We will hold the confession because the confession names the real, and naming the real is what speech is for.
In the beginning was the Word. The Word names. The Word makes. The Word redeems. The disciples of the Word do likewise, in their small ways, with the words their language gives them, in the convention their tradition has carried for two thousand years. We keep the convention not because we are reactionary but because we are receiving. The tradition gave us the convention; the convention names the real; the real is what God made; what God made we honor by naming it rightly. Render unto the Real what is the Real’s, in this small as in all things.
— Thomas