Pronouns Are the Devil

Or, Mind Your Antecedents, Your Manners, and What You Call God

Note: This is the fourth in a series of editorial observations and writing advice garnered from my first year back as a full-time professional editor and writer. Forewarned: I may or may not bring Jesus into it. (Reader: She does bring Jesus into it.)

Use pronouns sparingly. And remember: a pronoun needs a clear antecedent—the name or noun the pronoun represents—before it. 

While an antecedent-less pronoun can be used for effect— to create mystery in the beginning of scenes (His eyes met hers as he clawed through the spiderweb…) for instance—once we have names, use them. Don’t make the reader go back and figure out who’s talking or doing the thing. Reading should be a pleasure—not a chore. Writing is the chore (albeit a pleasurable one!).

So for years, I’ve attributed a quote, “Pronouns are the devil,” to Stephen King. I thought he wrote in his absolute masterpiece, On Writing. Apparently, King did not. Google will not show anyone who said this—so perhaps the phrase is mine.

King does write this about pronouns, however: “I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal-injury lawyer” (p. 214). 

I mean, that’s good too. But “pronouns are the devil” is better, right? At least for those of us who understand how the devil works, sneaking and sliding his* evil into this world.

*Picasso recently convinced me that the devil has male parts. I had been using she/her for Satan recently—just for personal kicks—but will go back to masculine pronouns based on this masterpiece. As shown hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago.

But my little phrase has a big problem: Much like an antecedent-less pronoun, my phrase can be misconstrued. 

In fact, I can imagine the delight of some—those who told me the presence of “she/her” in my old church email signature “promoted sin,” for instance—thinking that I have acquiesced. That I now agree that including pronouns in bios or on nametags is not about hospitality but about an allegiance to Satan—or something like that.  

Alas, while I haven’t changed my mind on the good hospitality that pronouns afford, I do agree that the devil is to blame for the current pronoun hubbub.

Contrary to what that devil has convinced many faithful folks of, however, pronouns may cause literary problems, but they don’t cause personal or theological ones. 

At least, they shouldn’t. Especially not for people who use pronouns—male or female—for a genderless God. 

In Scripture, God’s only requested pronoun is I (Am). However, since Jesus calls God Father, we learn something important—and it’s not that God has genitalia or XY chromosomes or that God the Father teems with testosterone.

Instead, we learn that it is right and proper to address our good, merciful God—one without male parts, one without male chromosomes, one without male hormones—as Father. A him. 

But that’s not all. In Luke 13:34, Jesus famously sees himself as a mother hen longing to gather her brood under her wings. Now, Jesus had rooster parts (note: I’ve recently learned that roosters have different sorts of parts, but you get the gist…), and yet in this moment, the circumsised Jesus identified as a girl bird. A her. 

Now, we don’t have to understand everything about a genderless Father God or a male Mother Hen to use these terms. We do it, we go with it, because that’s how Jesus identified them. We call God Father and don’t ridicule Jesus for describing himself as a Mother Hen out of courtesy, out of love and consideration.

So those who think it is not “of God” (as I’ve heard preached) to use pronouns for people whose parts (at birth or at present) don’t match who they know themselves to be is or those who refuse to use those pronouns because we “don’t understand” or are disgusted would do well to reconsider. 

We need to wonder why Jesus, the Son of God, had no problem identifying as a lady bird and why Jesus attributed a gender to God that does not line up with God’s “biology” or his physical or spiritual composition. 

Why was this? 

Did Jesus succumb to some ancient cultural gender pressure? Did Jesus’s library not ban enough books? Were the bathroom signs not clear enough?

Or was Jesus showing us that sex and gender and how we identify in accordance with parts are actually not huge issues to God?** 

That despite what the poets wrote in the creation accounts, Paul would be on to something with his “...nor is there male and female, for you are one in Christ” bit. 

That perhaps what matters is that as long as we identify as God’s children, as long as we know we bear the image of God, and as long as we recognize that God, the Creator, the Father, the Mother Hen, the Crucified, the Risen, the Advocate, the Hoverer, the Spirit, the Three in One—the he, she, they, it—love us and long for us to understand the depths of this love and the lengths to which this God will go to show it (really, that’s the story of the Bible!). 

But again, like antecedent-less pronouns, the devil lives to misconstrue. And the devil wants us to forget that unrelenting love of God. The devil wants us to forget that God longs for our company, our presence, our prayers. The devil wants us to forget that no matter the parts, no matter the pronouns, we bear God’s image.

And so, cue the pronoun conflict.

Cue the lie that we need to understand before we respect or love.

Cue more reasons to hate our neighbors. To see them as other. To mock them. To torment them. To live contrary to the way Jesus told us.  

All in the name of “God”? All because of Genesis 1:27, in which an ancient who thought the flat, domed earth was the center of the universe tells us that there’s a male and female form of mankind? That’s more important than being made in God’s image?

Yes, the devil convinces. That’s why.

And when that hate takes hold (and oh, it’s taken hold!), the devil rejoices when a child gets murdered in their bathroom because they identify as they. 

The devil celebrates when community members hope to silence and shame public school districts from kind and inclusive policies. 

The devil cheers when “Christians” proclaim that to be queer is not to be made wonderfully or in the image of God.

And then—aaah—the devil sits back and relaxes, hands behind his head, feet up, when he realizes he’s convinced half a mighty nation and so many people who claim to love Jesus, that though God’s beloved are sexually abused in churches, in prayer rooms, and at “Christian” camps and although God’s image-bearers are getting murdered in bathrooms and shot in schools, in churches, in parades, in the streets, in you-name-it, pronouns that may or may not match parts are the bigger threats in our day.

***

It’s funny how we change as we get older. I’ve spent most of the past two decades avoiding pronouns for God—because God is neither male nor female and because “they” feels correct but awkward.

But I think I’m going back to him. Maybe sometimes her. Because when we use him (or her) for God, we acknowledge that pronouns do not need to match the plumbing—or lack thereof, in God’s case.

But pronouns do need to match a recent antecedent. 

**And here we get to the root—because if they aren’t, so many gender-related power plays in the church and home and everywhere are at stake! This is the reason people care. If gender is fluid, so is power. And those in power gotta hold on to that power!