New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is a good writer and a deep, earnest thinker whose moral earnestness and sincerity come through in his op-ed pieces and reflections upon injustices and atrocities he has witnessed in travels to places few columnists would bother to travel to.

He can also be preachy and boring in the manner of a long-winded minister, and prone to writing tendentious opinion pieces that read like an inferior Sunday sermon.

This is true of Kristof’s op-ed “God and Her (Female) Clergy” in yesterday’s Times.

“God and Her (Female) Clergy”

By Nicholas Kristof

The New York Times

March 31, 2018

 

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“What we’re seeing before our very eyes is a dramatic shift; in my mind it’s as big as the Protestant Reformation [what an overstatement!],” says Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, who is quoted in the article. “We’re seeing a new day of understanding of who God is. When the people who are representing God, making God present, have female bodies, that inevitably changes the way you think about how God is [a perfect example of bloodless genericspeak].”

“[W]ith a majority of students in many seminaries and rabbinical schools now women, and increasingly leading congregations, it may become less natural to think of God as ‘He.’ ,” Kristof states. “Already, Reconstructionist Judaism … refers to God with gender-neutral language [heaven spare us] or in the feminine.”

 

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Today is Easter Sunday. I do not currently belong to a church. But I am a Christian. By upbringing, core beliefs, and basic makeup. The scriptures, religious figures, and religious holidays are part of me.

Take the Lord’s Prayer. If it were begun with “Our Mother which art in heaven,” this would be disconcerting to me.

Why? Because I am an ultraconservative? A misogynist?

I don’t think so.

What the zealots who are out to retool the liturgy in the name of political correctness do not understand — and have no respect for — is the importance of tradition in religion. And, sadly, they don’t care.

The liturgy is part of that tradition. The language of the King James Bible (for me, at least). Words that, over time, endlessly repeated, have an incantatory effect. I remember a priest making this point to a group of non-Catholics once. He was asked about saying the rosary every day. Didn’t it become meaningless? No, he said, it didn’t. The words, he explained, have an incantatory effect achieved through repetition.

Perhaps they (the self-appointed church language mavens) will be saying “hallowed be her name” next. To make a point. I wouldn’t put it past them.

You may say that I myself am a nitpicker. A curmudgeon who is angry about nettlesome women bent on achieving gender equality.

But, in my view, there is a deeper issue here, and it is the real one. When someone says, “in her name,” referring to God, or “her flock,” they are calling attention to themselves and what they regard as their advanced, fashionable views, and minimizing the importance of tradition, while at the same time deflecting attention from, or severely curtailing the impact of, the sacred words themselves. They claim to be religious. Their religion is only skin deep. They care much more about propagating their own views. It’s actually an in your face type of thing. It’s disconcerting to someone who is used to hearing certain words associated with scripture and religious ceremonies. It’s as if one used an irreverent or flippant phrase with an authority figure such as a teacher, elder, or esteemed person to prove a point — say, that I wanted to be regarded as being their equal — taking them aback and causing befuddlement rather than proving a point.

On Good Friday, just passed, and on today, Easter Sunday, I want to think, to the extent I can tear myself away from petty concerns of the moment, about what these days mean. Not about what Nicholas Kristof has to say, or the woman religious leaders he admires, by way of making hay with their views and using a sacred day as a pretext. With no regard for the views and feelings of most religious people.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018

 

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Postscript:

It is the case — there is nothing feminists and the language police can do about it — that Jesus spoke of our heavenly father and my father in heaven.

I have noticed over the years, without thinking about it much, that in many Protestant denominations there has been a tendency over recent years for one to see women ministers relatively often, whereas there were none that I can recall 40 or 50 so years ago. There seems to be a similar trend with respect to Jewish congregations.

I never thought much about it one way or the other, but it is in no way objectionable, in principle, to me.

But, I feel inclined now, if women (and like thinking men) want to have us worshiping God the mother, to make a suggestion. That women who feel this way start their own church — it could be an offshoot of Protestantism, a new denomination (there have been many in the past) — in which church members would worship a female God: God the mother. A new deity is needed for such a fundamental change.