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There's a new Bible coming out to join bookshelves already crowded with them. This one is quite different, though: it's gender-neutral, or, as its publishers and advocates claim, "gender-accurate."
The country's best-selling modern Bible, called "Today's New International Version," will issue the New Testament in April. The Old Testament is expected to follow in 2005. The publishers say this Bible will "include generic phrases for instances in which the meaning of the original text was intended to include both men and women." Things like "sons of God" will morph into "children of God," and "brothers" will yield to the politically correct and syntactically ugly "brothers and sisters."
Conservative religious groups are heavily criticizing this new Bible, and this is the first time in recent memory I've agreed with them. Keep in mind I'm an atheist, friends. My agreement with intellectual bullies and philistines like Ralph Reed has to be one of the Seven Seals. Throw the Southern Baptists into the fray, and it looks like a few more seals are popping loose. Hell, at this rate, none of us will live to see 2010.
William Merrell, an executive for the Southern Baptists Convention, said: "No one is authorized to treat the Bible like silly putty." As much as I don't buy into what the "Good Book" says, I have to agree. Political correctness and sociopolitical agendas have no place inside a religious text, regardless what faith the text represents.
Proponents of the new Bible say that the language has changed, and there needs to be a text that reflects that. I submit that the English language has not changed nearly as much as it has been changed by the agendas of groups who seek to advance their causes thru semantics. "Man" has been used to refer to humanity, both men and women, for thousands of years. It fell out of favor with the Hippie Generation, though, and the women's lib movement back then has passed that silly baton off to the PC crowd of today. The world would end if everyone didn't feel included in everything, apparently, and the clarity and aesthetic quality of the language has suffered as a result. As a former English major, these things matter. People twist and shape the language to advance their inane agenda, whine and cry until people take them seriously, then think nothing of the euphonic damage they've caused. "He or she" is both unnecessary and ugly. The English language has never been free of clutter, but it has never been more cluttered than it has become in the past forty years. This is the price of trying to make everybody fell good about themselves.
I suppose the "Son of Man" will become, "The Child of Humanity." Or when Jesus talks to his Apostles and calls them "brothers," it will become "brothers and sisters," thus casting serious aspersion on their dressing habits. The publishers say God and Jesus will still be referred to in the masculine case, but apparently, nothing else will.
Neither side is blameless in this one, though.
The publishers and their proponents are, of course, guilty of yielding to a politically correct agenda and mucking the language as a result. The fact that they cite the language's malleable nature is comical, since it's people like them who usually wield the hammers.
The religious groups aren't holy here, either. Their protests of the gender-neutering of the Bible do nothing to hide the history of their organizations. Are we supposed to forget that religion is a sexist, patriarchal institution? They're hoping that by crusading on tradition, people will forget how much they've repressed women over the years, and generally not given two pins about the fairer sex. It's consistent that they wouldn't want the Bible cluttered with female pronouns beside the masculine ones, but the traditions they're professing to uphold aren't the ones they're really interested in preserving.
Aren't clashing agendas fun? Perhaps neither group sees the beam in their own eye past the mote in their brother's eye . . . er, their brothers and sisters' eyes, I mean.
Dr. Tom
1 February 2002