Reading "Beyond a Binary God"
Marv Waschke | third-year participant, St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle
Reading Tara K. Soughers’s Beyond a Binary God for the EfM Interlude was a moving experience for me. Her work prodded me, of all things, to contemplate the periodic table of the elements. Below, you will find out just how much of a nerd I am, and, I hope, something about the gift of creation.
In Beyond a Binary God, Soughers forces us to consider gender and sex as revealed by biology and experience in the face of the pain that traditional theology has caused for the LGTQIA+ community.
I neither apologize for nor take pride in being a cis-gendered privileged white male near the top of the traditional heap. It’s a fact. I grew up cleaning barns and milking cows on a small farm where every penny counted, but doors have opened for me and I benefited from rare opportunities.
Soughers concentrated the clash for non-binaries in her question “How, then, is our understanding of theology different in a context in which there are people who do not fit the idea of traditional gender binaries?” Soughers’s answer is a richer theology which is built on a wide view of the biological creation.
Although far different from LGBTQIA+ experience, many people of my generation and experience have struggled with the creation revealed by the physical sciences and traditional theology.
I love the periodic table of the elements. For years, I pinned a periodic table poster on my office wall. A few years ago, I added a periodic table shower curtain.
I was about twelve years old when I fell in love with the periodic table. The love story began with a book published two years before I was born that I read in junior high (middle) school: One, Two, Three, Infinity1 by George Gamow. I brought home a copy from the library. Gamow expounded mid-twentieth-century scientific cosmology. I was fascinated. My world changed.
A section of the book is devoted to the periodic table, which orders the elements by their number of protons. The table reveals deep and elegant patterns in nature like the richness of sex and gender in modern biology.
On the left of the table are harsh and active elements: hydrogen, lithium, and sodium. On the right, the inert noble gases: helium, neon, argon. The elements of the left explode and fuel fires, the elements on the right put fires out. A middle column contains copper, silver, and gold; electrical conductors, easily shaped and decorative. Gaps in the table pointed to undiscovered elements.
But the table holds secrets. Chemistry, nuclear physics, and quantum theory show the table to be fiercely complex. The more we study and learn of physical creation, the more elegant the table and the creation it describes becomes.
The creation I live in today is not the clearcut creation taught in Sunday school sixty-five years ago. There, primordial chaos became an agriculture and herding society in 144 hours, about the time it takes for radishes to sprout or a third the gestation of a house mouse. Adam and Eve, sin in the Garden of Eden, David’s conquest, virgin birth, death on a cross, and resurrection were taught in a few dozen easy chapters with monthly quizzes. Arithmetic was harder.
How could these transparently didactic tales stand up to the universe of chemistry and physics?
My Sunday School universe has survived, but not as my ten-year-old self could have thought. I still believe in the truth of creation and life in Hebrew and Christian scripture, but creation’s canvas is no longer didactic stories. My canvas for truth has become the complex and elegant creation scientists study for lifetimes and are still in awe of what’s left to learn.
Now I will explain my reaction to Beyond a Binary God.
Sex and gender permeate our thoughts. Biologists explore sex and gender as they study organisms. Like the periodic table, sex and gender superficially appear simple. Not unlike the on-off, 1-0, and set-reset underlying computers.
However, a glance at a biology textbook, even Wikipedia, blows simplicity away. For example, Wikipedia lists four chromosomal patterns for sex differentiation. External influences, like temperature or food scarcity, cause sex to change in some species. Like the periodic table, the deeper we look, the more astonishing sex and gender become.
Archeology further complicates sex and gender. When I studied archeology in graduate school, women questioned patriarchy, but it was accepted as the default human social organization, which was self-reinforcing.
Archeologists looked at bone shapes and proportions to determine sex, which is often ambiguous even when viewing complete modern skeletons, let alone decayed ancient skeletons. Archeologists resorted to rules like “women are buried with jewelry, men with weapons and armor,” which are cultural, not physiological. No surprise: patriarchy was confirmed when patriarchy was assumed to determine sex.
In the last decade, techniques like the composition of dental enamel and trace DNA have been applied to archeological skeletons revealing armed bronze-age women and jewel-bedecked men.
Like the stately columns of the periodic table, the simple male-female dichotomy of the 19th century has been replaced by a tapestry of variations.
However, as Soughers points out, society and theology still plays catch up. The lens of patriarchy distorts even the immediate past.
Although we don’t all share in the LGBTQIA+ milieu, Soughers has advanced theology to match the world described by Paul in Galatians: “There is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Although still in print, the book is out of date and I don’t know a 21st century equivalent.