The power of words!

The Church of England recently issued guidelines which tell teachers that children should be permitted to wear tutus, tiaras or superhero capes “without judgement or derision”. It’s good to see the church preaching tolerance. We need some more of that.

The Church of Sweden has gone one better in the equality stakes, urging its clergy to use gender-neutral language when referring to the supreme deity, refraining from using terms such as “Lord” and “he” in favour of the less specific “God.” This is a step further than the feminists saying that God is a woman. A spokesman said, “Theologically, for instance, we know that God is beyond our gender determinations, God is not human.”

Of course, there has been criticism. Some people say it undermines the Trinity. Although “Parent, Offspring and Holy Ghost” does not quite have the ring of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost”, it should still be possible to keep the basic idea. Similarly, the Lord’s Prayer (which would need to be renamed to avoid use of the word “Lord”) could begin “Our Parent, which art in Heaven, ...”. Of course, hymns would be a bit of a problem. Imagine singing, “Jesus, good above all other, In a stable born our sibling”.

It could all get to resemble discussing how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. I think that perhaps they should just quietly forget the whole idea. By which, I don’t mean forget about being tolerant and egalitarian but about changing the terminology. It’s like the business of using ‘they’ and ‘their’ to avoid saying ‘he or she” and “his or her”. Or calling actresses actors.

Tolerance and equality are, of course, absolutely essential in the world but the semantics just gets silly!

And yet use of language is so important and can be so influential. We have seen so many arguments in recent years about the use if regional and minority languages. And here is a link to an article about a dispute over use of the Irish language threatening the political gains of Northern Ireland’s peace process.

In future years, people look back on us and think we were all crazy.