Let’s stop referring to God as He, says bishop (who’s a she)

REFERRING to God only as ‘He’ and never ‘She’ risks alienating the public from religion, a woman bishop has claimed.

The Right Reverend Rachel Treweek – who broke through the ‘stained-glass ceiling’ to become the Church of England’s first female diocesan bishop three years ago – spoke out after a survey found that almost half of young Christians think God is male.

The Bishop of Gloucester added: ‘I don’t want young girls or young boys to hear us constantly refer to God as He,’ stressing that it was important to be ‘mindful of our language’.

She suggested that non-Christians could feel alienated from the Church if its public pronouncements used solely male language to describe God. ‘For

me particularly in a bigger context, in all things, whether it’s that you go to a website and you see pictures of all-white people, or whether you go to a website and see the use of “He” when we could use “God”, all of those things are giving subconscious messages to people, so I am very hot about saying can we always look at what we are communicating,’ she told The Sunday Telegraph.

Bishop Treweek was responding to research from YouGov which found that only 1 per cent of British Christians believe God is female.

The poll of 1,292 people – conducted last month – found that 41 per cent of Christians thought God does not have a human gender at all. But 36 per cent thought God was male, 19 per cent didn’t know, and 3 per cent thought God had a completely different gender.

Some 46 per cent of 18 to 24year-old Christians believed God to be male, with one in three over-6 s believing the same. Although God is male in most versions of the Bible, St Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, called God ‘the great mother’.

‘Important to mind language’