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classical theism in turn reinforced and sanctioned the philosophical valorization of mind, reason, and male over and against body, passion, and female. Some feminists would trace the cultural roots of this way of thinking to the phenomenon of “male bodily alienation” that arose in late classical antiquity’s asceticism (see Ruether 1983).

In any case, insofar as Western monotheism has constructed the meaning of “God” in relation to “world” around binary oppositions of mind/body, reason/passion, and male/female, traditional theism remains complicitous with the very system of gender constructs and symbolic structures that underlie women’s oppression. In the binary opposition between “God” and “world,” the term “God” occupies the privileged space and acts as the central principle, the One who confers identity to creatures to whom “He” stands in hierarchical relation. Oppositional pairing of God/world has served in turn to organize other categories, such as heaven and earth, sacred and profane. The widespread distinction between sacred and profane, employed by many authors, thus comes already encoded with the hierarchical oppositions of male/female and masculine/feminine onto which it is mapped, along with the structurally related pairs, white/black and heterosexual/homosexual. The first term in each pair is sacralized, while the second is rendered profane. This set of themes can be traced in connection with the classic work of Durkheim and Weber in their theorizations of religion (Erickson 1993).

Contemporary feminist philosophy of religion is also aware that the relation between symbolic structures, on the one hand, and gender constructions, on the other hand, cannot be specified in terms of a single explanatory model. The power of symbolic orders to invoke and reinscribe implicit gender understandings works in varied and complex ways, as shown in studies by Bynum (1986), Fulkerson (1994), and Hollywood (1995, 2002). Because religious symbols are polysemic and multivalent, they hold different meanings for different people at different times. It is never a simple matter of sheer reflection of the given social order. The relation between society and symbol, or between psyche and symbol, is recognized as open-ended. Relations of reversal or inversion of actual social structures may obtain, making it risky for the interpreter to posit a single unidirectional cause-effect relation between symbol and social setting. As Bynum points out, meaning is not so much imparted as it is appropriated “in a dialectical process whereby it becomes subjective reality for the one who uses the symbol,” allowing for the possibility that “those with different gender experiences will appropriate symbols in different ways” (1986, 9).

It follows that no necessary correlation can be assumed between goddess-worshipping cultures and actual egalitarian social structures in the lives of females and males of that culture. Similarly, the male Father God may open up a range of different interpretative possibilities for both women and men. In culturally specific and historically unstable ways, religious symbols even of the male Father God have been useful in resisting and subverting the social order, not only reflecting and reinforcing it. In light of these considerations, most feminist philosophers of religions regard it as risky to generalize across cultures, religious traditions, or historical periods with respect to the different ways in which males and females appropriate or construct religious symbolism.