The Non-Binary God of James Talarico

If James Talarico loses in Texas (I pray that he won’t), it might be because he said the wrong thing about God. Texans can presumably take a great deal of discord, but God may mark the border of a no-fly zone. Any hint of irregularity might trigger strong reaction from voters.

It wasn’t, of course, the wrong thing at all. As you may have heard, Talarico said the “N-word”: the God he worshipped was a “non-binary” deity. What I know he meant is that God stands apart. He (?) is an other-worldly entity who is neither male nor female and does not conform to the standard categories. These are the boxes into which we sort our experience and help us make sense of the world we occupy. The problem is that these categories are generally conservative: the traditional, retrograde inheritance from our predecessors who tried their best to give language to their experience.

Naturally they resorted to the hierarchies they knew, and which have marked human history from a very early time. The idea of God collected masculine signifiers, and a cluster of images that communicated male power and authority. The Hebrew Bible knows God as a “Man of War.” The Gospels know God as the Father of Creation who offered the sacrifice of his Only Son. However much we want to open our traditions, to make room for different ideas about God, it is hard to set the traditional language aside. Like some kind of culture hero with a streak of arrogance, I tried for decades to generate egalitarian language, but some of it, at least, ended up sounding forced and hokey. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should give up the effort.

That appears to be one of the reasons for Talarico—the part he plays in American life—to remind us that some things may be doomed from the start, but they are still worth doing or at least trying to accomplish. Besides, he has the tradition on his side. Even patriarchal faiths like Judaism and Christianity work hard to generate theological hacks: ways of circumventing their embedded habits, the default choices they make over centuries. When it is not rambling on about Avinu she-ba-Shamayim, our Father in Heaven, Jewish texts speak about the God who gives birth to the People Israel. For all of its focus on the bond between Father and Son, Christian tradition gives us the figure of Mary, a descendant of all the goddesses who preceded her. I hope “my” readers will not consider that blasphemous, but just the perception of an outsider looking at the obvious.

My point here is that Talarico said a very good thing, that God is somehow infinitely expandable, like Creation itself, like the Universe in Motion. He is not a renegade, a sick-woke clergyman, but a generous, thoughtful representative of his tradition. I, for one, would be proud to have him as my senator.