Who Gets to Write God? Gender Bias in Religious & Academic Interpretation
For millennia, humans have turned to myth and religion to understand their origins, purpose, and identity. But within those grand narratives lies a question few dare to ask: Who wrote these stories, and what did they choose to leave out? In When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone confronts this silence head-on, uncovering the political motives behind the transformation of divinity from female to male and the enduring consequences of that shift.
This article will examine how gender bias, ingrained in both religious doctrine and academic interpretation, has influenced our collective spiritual heritage. It asks a vital question: Who gets to write God?
The Disappearance of the Goddess
Before the God of Abraham, there was the Goddess.
Across Neolithic and early historic societies—from Catal Huyuk to Sumer, from Canaan to Egypt—archaeological evidence shows widespread worship of female deities. These goddesses were not only creators of life but lawmakers, healers, warriors, and symbols of cosmic order.
Yet by the time we reach the first chapters of Genesis, this history is erased. The biblical Eve, created from man and blamed for the fall of humanity, is a sharp inversion of earlier female creators like Tiamat, Nammu, or Isis. This is no accident. As Stone argues, the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t a neutral myth—it was a political narrative designed to legitimize patriarchal power.
Religion as a tool of patriarchy
The emergence of male-dominated religions wasn’t simply a shift in belief—it was an aggressive campaign of cultural erasure. The Hebrew Bible, for instance, commands the destruction of goddess temples and the execution of women who participate in “pagan” rituals. The result was not just the suppression of the goddess but the demonization of femininity itself.
Even the language of the Old Testament reflects this bias. The word Elohim, though plural and historically gender-fluid, is rigidly translated as “God” in the masculine singular. Meanwhile, no word for “Goddess” appears in the Hebrew scriptures.
The theological implications were enormous. God was male, and man was made in his image. Woman? An afterthought—created to assist, tempt, and submit.
This transformation didn’t occur in a vacuum. It coincided with periods of conquest, empire-building, and the centralization of power into male hands. As patriarchal tribes moved into regions where goddess worship flourished, they brought with them not only swords and laws but also new stories—stories that replaced female divinity with male supremacy. These weren’t just religious preferences; they were tools for domination. A god who commanded obedience to male leadership legitimized the subjugation of women in both private and public life.
Religious texts became legal blueprints. The myth of Eve wasn’t just a tale—it justified a woman’s inferior legal status, her exclusion from priesthoods, property rights, political voice, and spiritual authority. The sacred feminine was not only stripped of her temples and titles but rewritten as a source of danger. Wisdom, sexuality, intuition—traits once revered in goddesses like Isis or Inanna—became suspicious or outright sinful when embodied by real women.
In Christianity, this ideological turn was institutionalized through Church doctrine and practice. Women were excluded from positions of religious power and relegated to roles of obedience and silence. Even the Virgin Mary, the only significant female figure in the Christian pantheon, was honored more for her purity and passivity than her power or wisdom. By contrast, earlier goddesses were celebrated for their agency, complexity, and commanding presence.
And perhaps most revealing: the male monopoly over divine speech. Prophets, priests, scribes—those who claimed to speak for God—were overwhelmingly male. This monopoly ensured that the divine voice would echo the priorities of men, validating their leadership and marginalizing anyone who challenged it.
Academic Blind Spots and Male Narratives
If religion wrote women out of godhood, academia kept them buried.
Stone describes her struggle to access information on goddess worship, much of it hidden in obscure archaeological texts and university archives. When scholars did write about female deities, they often reduced them to “fertility cults”—ignoring their political, social, and intellectual significance.
This was not due to a lack of evidence but to cultural blind spots. Many early archaeologists were trained in Christian or Jewish traditions and unconsciously projected their religious values onto ancient civilizations. Male gods were described as “sovereign” or “noble.” Female deities? “Sensuous,” “orgiastic,” or simply “primitive.”
The result was a gendered hierarchy of importance, where male deities symbolized order and rationality, and female ones were relegated to the realm of bodily functions and emotional excess. This wasn’t objective scholarship—it was the repackaging of ancient evidence through the lens of contemporary patriarchy. Scholars who should have questioned the erasure instead participated in it, often unknowingly, by perpetuating outdated assumptions.
Consider how often the word cult is used to describe goddess-centered religions—loaded with implications of irrationality and fringe behavior—while the same scholars use “faith,” “worship,” or “religion” to describe belief systems centered on male gods. These subtle distinctions in language shape our perception of legitimacy. What is described as sacred in one tradition is dismissed as superstitious in another, almost always along gendered lines.
Even the interpretation of physical artifacts has been skewed. Statues of goddesses with exposed breasts—meant to represent life-giving power and cosmic fertility—were often labeled obscene or lascivious by Victorian and early 20th-century archaeologists. Temples dedicated to the Goddess were dismissed as centers of sexual indulgence, their priestesses slandered as “ritual prostitutes,” despite linguistic evidence that titles like gadesh and qedesha meant “holy woman” or “consecrated one.”
And when goddesses were acknowledged as powerful—warrior-like, wise, sovereign—some scholars went so far as to describe them as possessing “masculine traits,” as if strength and strategy were unnatural for female figures. This framing not only distorts our understanding of ancient societies, it reinforces the notion that intelligence, courage, and authority are inherently male.
Perhaps most troubling is the long-standing academic resistance to re-evaluating these perspectives. Even today, mainstream historical narratives rarely address the widespread and systematic destruction of goddess cultures. Much of what we know comes not from official textbooks but from the tireless work of feminist historians and scholars, often working on the margins of the academic establishment to reconstruct the truth from scattered remains.
The Power of Naming
Bias doesn’t always scream; sometimes it whispers through capital letters. In many texts, “He” and “God” are capitalized, while “goddess,” and “she” are not. These small choices subtly reinforce a hierarchy of divine authority—one that privileges the masculine and marginalizes the feminine.
These linguistic choices are more than stylistic—they carry centuries of embedded cultural power. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, capitalization signals reverence. “He” is divine. “She” is not. A sentence about God is instantly imbued with weight and sacredness simply by the presence of a capital letter. A sentence about a goddess, lacking that typographical sanctity, reads as lesser, even fictional. The result? The divine feminine is continuously relegated to the margins of seriousness and, in turn, the margins of reality.
Merlin Stone recognized this and deliberately flipped the script. In When God Was a Woman, she capitalizes “Goddess,” “Her,” and “She,” forcing the reader to encounter the female divine on equal grammatical footing. This isn't just a rhetorical device—it’s a reclamation of respect. It disrupts the reader’s assumptions and demands reconsideration of how reverence is constructed through language.
Language shapes consciousness. When a young girl hears that God is “He,” that prophets are “He,” that wisdom, judgment, and authority speak in male voices—she internalizes a script in which her own gender is excluded from ultimate power. Over time, this becomes invisible. Not questioned. Not challenged. It simply is. Capital-H He becomes synonymous with omnipotence, while she—lowercase, passive, invisible—drifts into irrelevance
This is no small matter. The way we name things reflects what we value—and more importantly, what we do not. Just as history was once told only through the lives of “great men,” divinity too has been linguistically shaped to exclude half the population. Even in academic or literary texts, a male god is always treated as a proper noun. A female deity? Frequently treated as a curiosity, a local tradition, a lowercase footnote.
And the erasure doesn’t stop at gods and goddesses. In ancient texts, priestesses and prophetesses were often unnamed or mistranslated. Titles that denoted power—like “High Priestess” or “Queen of Heaven”—were dismissed or mischaracterized. The act of naming carries authority. When women were stripped of titles, or when those titles were reduced to caricatures (such as turning a “sacred priestess” into a “temple harlot”), it wasn’t just misrepresentation—it was a reordering of cultural power through language.
By restoring the dignity of the divine feminine in our language—through naming, capitalization, and acknowledgement—we begin to unravel centuries of silent erasure. We begin to tell a fuller story.
Reclaiming the Narrative
To rewrite the present, we must reread the past.
This does not mean abandoning all religious traditions, but it does require critical examination. We need to question the “truths” handed down to us and seek out the voices—divine and human—that were silenced. Scholars must be held accountable for their biases, and students encouraged to engage with history from multiple perspectives.
The goal isn’t to replace a male God with a female one, but to understand that divinity has always been plural. The Goddess once held the world in Her hands. She ruled the heavens, healed the sick, made laws, gave life—and for thousands of years, humanity honored Her.
Reclaiming the narrative is an act of both scholarship and soul work. It’s not about romanticizing the past or imagining a utopia that never existed—it’s about restoring balance where there has long been erasure. It’s about telling the stories that were left in the dirt, behind the museum glass, or between the lines of patriarchal texts. It's about recovering knowledge deliberately buried and recognizing the systems that worked to keep it hidden.
To do so means unlearning. It means challenging the internalized beliefs we’ve been taught as universal: that authority wears a beard, that wisdom speaks in a deep voice, that sacredness is tied to masculinity. It means asking why we were taught that a god who creates and destroys is powerful, but a goddess who gives birth and governs is merely symbolic. It means making space for new questions: What if our creation stories had been centered on cooperation instead of control? What if our divine archetypes weren’t warriors and kings, but mothers, weavers, judges, and healers?
Reclaiming the divine feminine also means listening to the present. Around the world, women—and many men—are engaging in a spiritual reawakening that honors goddesses, reinterprets sacred texts, and builds communities that challenge patriarchal assumptions. These movements are not fringe—they are part of a global reckoning with centuries of spiritual and social imbalance.
And in doing so, we move beyond the binary. The goal is not to trade one form of domination for another but to recover wholeness. To see the sacred not as something gendered and fixed, but as expansive, inclusive, and deeply human. Reclaiming the narrative means recognizing that divinity can wear many faces, speak in many voices, and be found in many bodies.
We are not powerless in the face of ancient texts or institutional histories. We are the new scribes, the new myth-makers. With each word, each question, each uncovered truth, we inch closer to the wisdom that was once buried—and in doing so, we reclaim not just the past, but our right to imagine a future shaped by equity, reverence, and shared humanity.
Further Reading: Books to Deepen the Journey
If When God Was a Woman left you with a burning curiosity—or maybe even some righteous anger—you’re not alone. These books are a great next step. They dive deeper into the history, myths, and power structures that have shaped how we understand gender, divinity, and the stories we've been told to believe.
Whether you’re new to this conversation or already halfway down the rabbit hole, there’s something here that will challenge you, inspire you, or just make things finally click. From scholarly research to poetic manifestos, from ancient goddesses to modern feminist theology, these works help piece together a past that was buried—but not lost.
You don’t need to be an academic or a spiritual expert to read them. Just come with an open mind and maybe a highlighter. Some of these books might frustrate you. Others might feel like coming home. Either way, they’re worth the journey.
The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
Best for: A hopeful, research-backed look at how we got here—and where we could go.
Eisler argues that human history hasn’t always been about domination. In fact, early societies were often based on partnership, not patriarchy. This book blends archaeology, social theory, and feminism to show how the shift to male-dominated systems wasn’t inevitable—and how rebalancing those systems could change everything from politics to relationships.
The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor
Best for: The bold, the mystical, and the ready-to-rage.
Equal parts historical study, mythic journey, and feminist manifesto, this book explores goddess cultures across continents and centuries. It doesn't hold back in its criticism of patriarchal religion, and it paints a vivid picture of a time when the Earth—and the sacred—was female.
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
Best for: Those who want depth, beauty, and a sweeping historical timeline.
This gorgeously written book traces the image of the goddess from Paleolithic times to today, showing how She was systematically pushed aside. It’s richly illustrated and dives into myths, symbols, and sacred stories from around the world. Think of it as the elegant, scholarly companion to When God Was a Woman.
Signs Out of Time: The Story of the World’s First Symbol System by Marija Gimbutas (and the documentary film of the same name)
Best for: Visual learners and anyone curious about the “pre-history” of patriarchy.
Gimbutas, a pioneering archaeologist, uncovered evidence of peaceful, goddess-centered civilizations in Old Europe—long before war and hierarchy took over. Her work, once dismissed, is now being revisited as crucial to understanding how deeply rooted feminine power really was.
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation by Mary Daly
Best for: Feminist thinkers and anyone questioning the limits of traditional theology.
Mary Daly doesn’t just critique patriarchal religion—she rips it apart. This book challenges Christian doctrine from the inside out, asking what spirituality could look like without a male God at the center. It's sharp, radical, and not for the faint of heart.
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
Best for: Fast, fierce insight into how women’s wisdom was erased and punished.
In just a hundred pages, this tiny book packs a punch. It traces how female healers—many of them rooted in goddess traditions—were demonized and driven out by both church and state. Think: the witch hunts weren’t just superstition—they were policy.
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin
Best for: Poets, feelers, and those who sense the sacred in the earth and the body.
This isn’t a textbook—it’s a poetic howl. Griffin breaks down the false binary between woman and reason, nature and culture, body and mind. Her lyrical style reveals how deeply patriarchy has tried to disconnect us from ourselves and the planet.