God Is Not a Man in the Sky: Deconstructing the Patriarchal Divine

If God transcends humanity, why does divine authority keep sounding suspiciously human?

Recently, the internet did what the internet does best: it took religion, spirituality, trauma, theology, twenty opinionated people, one woman sitting in the middle of them and approximately zero chill, and turned the whole thing into discourse.

In August 2026, The Bridge released its viral “1 New Ager vs. 20 Christians” episode, with Jasmine Gardens debating twenty Christian women on crystals, sage, whether the universe is God, manifestation and tarot.

Whether you loved Jasmine, hated Jasmine, thought the Christians cooked her, thought she cooked them, thought everybody needed to go home and drink some water, or spent two hours screaming at the screen, the conversation exposed something much bigger than New Age spirituality versus Christianity.

It exposed how differently human beings understand God - and more importantly, who gets to decide which understanding of God is legitimate.

Because underneath all the arguments about tarot cards, prayer, manifestation, crystals, Jesus, demons and the universe sat a much older question humanity has been fighting over for thousands of years:

What exactly do we mean when we say “God”?

And perhaps an even more uncomfortable question:

How much of what we call God is actually God, and how much of it is us?

I used to believe in the man in the sky too

My relationship with God has changed dramatically throughout my life.

At one point, particularly when I was Mormon, God made sense to me as something much closer to the traditional image many of us grow up with: a divine man, a Father, a supreme authority somewhere above me who had created humanity, established the rules, sent Christ to die for our sins and expected obedience in return.

Follow the commandments, choose God, live correctly, and underneath all of that sat an enormous consequence: get it wrong badly enough and your eternal future is at stake.

For a long time, I didn’t interrogate that framework particularly deeply, because when you’re taught that questioning something sacred could itself represent spiritual danger, questioning becomes emotionally expensive.

Over the last ten to fifteen years however, my understanding of divinity has changed.

Today, when I use the word God, I’m usually speaking about something much harder to fit into a body. Source, consciousness, cosmic intelligence, the intelligence moving through creation rather than necessarily sitting outside creation watching it happen.

I see my existence as one expression of that Source. Not because I believe I am God in some grandiose sense. I’m not about to start walking around announcing that everybody should worship me, please relax. I mean that I am alive, conscious and experiencing.

My body exists because two human beings biologically co-created it, while spiritually I understand myself as a soul experiencing consciousness through this particular incarnation.

That is my belief.

I don’t present reincarnation, Source consciousness or ancestral spirituality as laboratory facts. They are part of the framework through which I understand existence and that distinction matters enormously to this conversation, because one of the biggest problems in religion — and spirituality — begins when we stop saying, “This is how I understand the mystery,” and start saying, “This is what the mystery objectively is, and anybody describing it differently is wrong.”

Christianity doesn’t actually require God to be a biological man

This is probably where somebody gets annoyed with the title.

God is our Father.

Yes. Christian scripture overwhelmingly uses masculine language for God: Father, He, Him, King, Lord.

But masculine language and biological maleness are not necessarily the same claim.

In fact, the Catholic Catechism explicitly states that God transcends the distinction between the sexes and is neither man nor woman. The same section acknowledges maternal imagery for God alongside paternal imagery.

Which means God Is Not a Man in the Sky is not necessarily some radical anti-Christian declaration. Depending on your theology, it’s remarkably orthodox.

That’s where this gets fascinating, because - if your theology says God transcends biological sex, why has our cultural imagination worked so hard to make divinity male?

Look at the language, the paintings, the sermons, the films, the children’s books, the structure of religious authority. God becomes He, Jesus becomes the Son, religious leadership has historically been overwhelmingly male, kings rule beneath God, fathers rule beneath kings, and eventually something metaphorical begins to feel literal.

The problem isn’t “Father.” The problem is only Father

I’m not interested in telling Christians they cannot call God Father.

If that language helps you experience tenderness, protection, guidance, accountability or relationship with the Divine, beautiful. Keep it. The question is why Father became so dominant that other ways of imagining divinity can begin sounding threatening.

Even biblical tradition contains feminine imagery for God. Isaiah, for example, uses images associated with pregnancy, labour, maternal comfort and nurture alongside masculine imagery.

Which makes sense to me.

If God is supposedly the source of everything we associate with masculinity and femininity, why would the source of both be confined to either one?

And if humanity is made in the image of God — male and female — perhaps humanity reflects something of God rather than masculinity having exclusive ownership over divinity.

Maybe Father is a metaphor. Maybe Mother can be one too. Maybe Creator, Source, Spirit, Wisdom, Love, Consciousness, Light or Mystery are also attempts at describing something too large for human vocabulary.

Human language does what human language always does when it encounters something enormous: it reaches for metaphor.

And metaphors are useful until we forget that they are metaphors.

Infinity probably doesn’t have a beard and preferred pronouns

This is where I think humans get ourselves into trouble. We anthropomorphise.

We understand reality through what we already know, so when ancient societies tried to communicate divine authority, they reached for recognisable forms of authority: father, king, lord, ruler, master. Those words carried meaning because those societies understood paternal and monarchical power.

But language isn’t neutral.

Feminist theologians have spent decades examining how overwhelmingly male God-language developed in androcentric societies and how repeating it can reinforce the idea that authority, leadership and sacred power are naturally masculine.

I don’t think the historical relationship between patriarchy and religion is as simple as saying, men invented a male God because they wanted to control women. That’s neat, but history is rarely that neat.

I think it can operate more like a feedback loop.

Patriarchal societies describe divine authority using the structures they already understand. God becomes Father, King and Lord. Those metaphors become sacred, and then those sacred metaphors return to society carrying divine authority.

Suddenly male authority doesn’t merely look cultural. It looks cosmic.

Human hierarchy describes heaven, then heaven gets quoted back to justify human hierarchy.

That’s where it gets dangerous.

And then we get to Eve

Few biblical ideas have had as much cultural baggage dumped onto them as the creation of woman.

Adam first, Eve second. Adam from the earth, Eve from Adam, and somewhere along the way that has often been culturally translated into man being primary, woman being secondary, man being leader and woman being helper.

Except the Hebrew is more interesting than that.

Genesis describes the woman using the phrase ezer kenegdo.

Ezer is generally translated as “helper,” but the word itself does not inherently imply inferiority. In fact, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly uses ezer to describe God as help or helper. Scholars likewise note that kenegdo carries the sense of correspondence, being opposite or matching.

That is a long way from: Here’s Adam’s little assistant.

I grew up hearing interpretations about women being created as helpmeets for men, but what happens if we stop hearing “helper” through the modern hierarchy of boss and assistant?

What if we’re looking at partnership, correspondence and mutuality — someone standing opposite you who possesses something you do not, someone capable of confronting you, supporting you, seeing what you cannot see and being seen by you in return?

I personally think there is something beautiful in the symbolism of woman being created from the side rather than being presented as something beneath man.

But I also want to be intellectually disciplined here: Genesis itself does not explicitly say that God chose the rib because women should neither dominate men nor be dominated by them.

That is interpretation and knowing the difference between text and interpretation is precisely what this article is asking us to do.

Because the Bible didn’t fall out of the sky bound in leather

This tends to make people uncomfortable, but uncomfortable and disrespectful are not synonyms.

The Bible is a collection of ancient writings produced in different historical periods, genres and communities.

Biblical scholars study composition, editing, transmission, manuscript variation, canon formation and translation precisely because these texts have histories.

The writings making up the Hebrew Bible were composed, copied and revised across several hundred years, reflecting different genres, circumstances and points of view. The formation of biblical canons itself was also a historical process.

None of that automatically proves the Bible is spiritually meaningless. It doesn’t prove God wasn’t involved. It doesn’t prove Christianity is false.

It simply means that when someone says, “The Bible says…”, I think a perfectly legitimate next question is: which book, written when, in what genre, from which manuscript tradition, translated how, understood by whom, and are we discussing the text itself or centuries of interpretation layered over it?

Faith should survive a question.

If your faith collapses the second somebody asks about history, translation or context, the question isn’t necessarily the problem.

Then Jasmine said something that bothered people

One idea from the debate that stuck with me was essentially this:

Why would a loving God create humans with free will, already know some of them would not choose him, and then punish them for exercising that freedom?

Now, I don’t think the answer is simply: God is a narcissist.

That comparison is emotionally understandable when divine authority is presented as: love me, obey me, centre me, do not leave me, do not question me, reject me and suffer forever.

Read as a human relationship, that sounds horrifying but theology is more complicated than that.

Christian traditions themselves disagree about hell. Some understand it as eternal conscious punishment, others describe it primarily as separation from God, some Christians hold annihilationist beliefs where the unsaved ultimately cease to exist, and others have argued for forms of universal reconciliation.

So I’m not interested in pretending Christianity has never thought about this. It has. A lot.

But the question remains valid: If love requires freedom, does freedom remain meaningfully free when one option carries an infinite consequence?

Sit with that… Because I still do.

If God wants relationship with us, why is God so difficult to verify?

There’s another philosophical problem called divine hiddenness.

Very loosely, it asks this:

If a perfectly loving God genuinely desires relationship with human beings, what do we do with sincere people who are open to God but remain unconvinced that God exists, or who search honestly and arrive at entirely different religious conclusions?

Philosophers continue debating whether divine hiddenness is compatible with a perfectly loving God and whether greater divine obviousness would interfere with meaningful human freedom.

And I find that fascinating.

Because if God appeared tomorrow in a way that removed all reasonable doubt, would knowing God exists force you to love God? I know plenty of humans exist. I don’t love all of them.

Knowledge is not devotion, so why would clarity automatically destroy free will?

I don’t have a neat answer and frankly, I don’t think every spiritual question requires one.

Sometimes intellectual maturity means being able to say: I don’t know yet.

That’s what bothered me about parts of the Jasmine debate

Not disagreement. Disagreement is fine. I actually think disagreement is healthy. What bothered me was how quickly spiritual certainty can become classification.

This is sacred, that is demonic. This is prayer, that is manifestation. This is anointing, that is witchcraft. This is divine healing, that is occultism. This spirit is God, that spirit is deception.

Before somebody comes for me, no, I am not saying all of those practices are secretly identical.

Christian prayer and modern manifestation can have different theological assumptions. Christian laying-on of hands is not simply Reiki with a Bible verse slapped onto it. The Magi following a celestial sign does not automatically mean the Bible endorses every modern astrological practice. Jesus healing through touch does not prove he was secretly practising Reiki. Different traditions can contain superficially similar behaviours while understanding those behaviours very differently.

That distinction matters but there is still a legitimate question underneath it:

Who gets the authority to decide which supernatural vocabulary is holy?

Because Christians believe in things that are, by definition, supernatural: miracles, angels, demons, prophecy, visions, divine intervention, spiritual gifts, healing, resurrection and prayer affecting reality… None of those are materialist claims, so when another spiritual system describes invisible forces, spiritual beings, energetic influence, divination or communication beyond ordinary physical perception, the disagreement is not necessarily supernatural versus rational. It is often a disagreement over which supernatural framework is true.

That is a very different conversation.

“But ours comes from God.”

I know! And somebody belonging to another tradition may sincerely believe theirs does too - That is precisely the problem.

If the evidence you use to establish your spiritual authority is only accepted after someone already accepts your spiritual authority, you have a circular argument.

The Bible is true because it is God’s word. How do we know it is God’s word? Because the Bible tells us. That may function meaningfully inside faith, but it is not necessarily persuasive outside it and spiritualists can do the exact same bloody thing. My guides told me. Okay. How do you know they’re guides?Because they told me.

Girl.

Critical thinking cannot be something we demand exclusively from religions we disagree with.

New Age spirituality doesn’t get a free pass either

This is important.

Deconstructing Christianity does not automatically make somebody spiritually enlightened. You can leave one rigid belief system and immediately construct another.

Different vocabulary, same dogma.

Instead of God told me, it becomes the universe told me. Instead of it’s God’s will, it becomes it’s divine timing. Instead of refusing responsibility because “God has a plan,” we can refuse responsibility because we’re “surrendering to Source.”

Ask me how I know.

I recently caught myself behaving as though the cosmos will provide regardless while simultaneously not showing up properly for my own self-employed work. Ma’am. The cosmos can provide an opportunity but you still need to clock the fuck in.

Spiritual bypassing is spiritual bypassing whether you’re holding a Bible or a tarot deck.

Manifestation without behaviour can become fantasy, intuition without discernment can become projection, “ancestor said so” can become another way of avoiding accountability, tarot can become dependency, astrology can become fatalism, and energy language can become an excuse not to have an adult conversation.

Spiritual communities can absolutely contain hierarchy, exploitation, manipulation and charismatic leaders who should not be trusted with a houseplant, never mind another person’s spiritual agency. Nobody gets immunity from scrutiny.

That is the point.

So why do some alternative practices feel automatically “demonic”?

History matters here.

Christianity did not develop in a vacuum, and neither did its global expansion.

Christian missionary activity became entangled with European colonial expansion in numerous historical contexts, while missionaries frequently interpreted unfamiliar Indigenous religions through their own Christian categories.

Nuance matters.

Not every missionary was some moustache-twirling coloniser.

Some missionaries opposed particular colonial abuses, some participated in antislavery movements, and Indigenous communities were never merely passive recipients either. Many incorporated Christianity into existing cultural realities or used Christian institutions in ways European missionaries never anticipated.

History is irritatingly complicated like that but the broader power question remains important.

Who historically possessed enough institutional power to classify another people’s gods as idols, their rituals as superstition, their ancestors as demons, their healers as witches and their cosmology as primitive, while calling their own supernatural worldview religion?

Sometimes the difference between religion and mythology has had suspiciously little to do with metaphysics and quite a lot to do with who controlled the classroom.

Christianity is relatively young compared with many spiritual traditions

Human beings were asking spiritual questions long before Christianity existed.

Ancient Egyptian religion, Mesopotamian religions, African traditional religions, Indigenous cosmologies across the Americas, South Asian traditions and ancestral systems whose histories were oral rather than written all existed in various forms long before Christianity emerged.

People have been staring at death, birth, dreams, stars, illness, nature and consciousness asking, “What the hell is all this?” for far longer than two thousand years.

That does not make older religions automatically true, age is not evidence but - it does challenge the assumption that Christianity arrived into a spiritually empty planet carrying the first human encounter with divinity.

Maybe humanity has always been trying to describe something. Maybe we’re describing different things, maybe we’re describing the same thing differently! Maybe some traditions are completely wrong, maybe all traditions contain pieces of human projection. Maybe some spiritual experiences are genuine and some are neurological. Maybe both can be true in different circumstances.

The intellectually responsible answer is that we don’t know everything - and somehow that sentence frightens people more than hell.

I also distinguish Jesus from Christianity

This matters enormously to me.

Critiquing Christianity as an institution is not automatically the same thing as rejecting everything attributed to Jesus.

In the Gospel accounts, Jesus repeatedly interacts with women, people considered socially undesirable and those living outside respectable religious boundaries. He also repeatedly clashes with religious authorities over hypocrisy, purity, legalism and what happens when rules become more important than people.

Which leaves me with a question I think Christians should be able to tolerate:

Would Jesus recognise everything currently being done in his name?

Not, would Jesus agree with me politically?

Everybody thinks Jesus secretly agrees with them. Convenient.

I mean something deeper.

Would the consciousness represented by compassion, humility, service, radical forgiveness and concern for the marginalised recognise itself inside every institution claiming ownership over Christ?

Because Christ consciousness and Christian institutional power are not automatically synonymous to me. History gives us plenty of reasons to know institutions can betray their own stated values. Religious ones are not exempt.

I don’t think questioning God is disrespectful

This may be the biggest difference between my spirituality now and the religion I once knew. I don’t believe Source becomes threatened because I asked a difficult question.

If God is infinite intelligence, my little human question cannot possibly destabilise him, her, it, them — see how ridiculous language becomes when you’re trying to give infinity a pronoun?

Maybe the point of consciousness isn’t blind obedience., maybe curiosity is part of the equipment. Maybe discernment matters. Maybe moral responsibility means we are supposed to question interpretations that produce suffering rather than hide behind, well, God said.

Especially because throughout history, human beings have claimed God endorsed a remarkable number of things that somehow benefited the humans currently holding power: slavery, war, conquest, segregation, subjugation, persecution, control over women, silencing women, anti-queer violence, colonisation and sacred violence.

At some point, “God told us to” cannot be the end of the moral investigation.

If your interpretation of God requires you to switch off your conscience, perhaps your conscience isn’t the thing that needs interrogating.

Faith and critical thinking are not enemies

This is what I genuinely wish more religious conversations understood. Critical thinking does not mean, I refuse to believe anything.

It means asking why you believe what you believe, where the belief came from, who taught it to you, what evidence supports it, what assumptions are being made, what historical context might be missing, how translation affects understanding, whether you would find the same argument persuasive if another religion used it, what might change your mind, and whether the belief produces compassion, responsibility and integrity or fear, superiority and control.

Those questions can strengthen, dismantle or transform faith. You do not get to decide the answer beforehand… That is what makes the inquiry genuine.

And perhaps that’s what deconstruction really is

People hear deconstruction and imagine somebody angrily ripping pages out of a Bible while chanting under a full moon.

Sometimes deconstruction simply means separating things that became fused together: God from institution, faith from fear, Jesus from empire, scripture from interpretation, metaphor from anatomy, spirituality from obedience and tradition from truth.

Then you ask:

Which parts actually belong together?

Some people deconstruct Christianity and eventually return to Christianity with a different theology.

Some leave permanently, some become agnostic, others atheists, some discover another religion. Some - like me - find themselves exploring Source, consciousness, ancestors, divination, astrology and spirituality outside conventional Christian boundaries.

The outcome isn’t what makes deconstruction sincere. The willingness to examine is.

Maybe God isn’t the problem

Maybe our need to own God is. This is ultimately where the Jasmine debate left me.

Not with: Jasmine was right and Christians were wrong… That would be painfully boring.

Jasmine said things I agreed with and she raised questions I think Christians should genuinely wrestle with. I also think some comparisons between Christianity and alternative spirituality need more theological nuance than simply saying: See? You do magic too. And I think some of the Christian participants were so committed to defending their conclusion that curiosity disappeared from the room.

Once you are listening only to find the opening through which you can convert somebody, you are no longer listening to understand them. You are waiting for your turn and if your kindness is ultimately a strategy for getting somebody to become like you, people can feel that.

I don’t need Christians to agree with me

That isn’t why I wrote this. I don’t need you to stop calling God Father. I don’t need you to buy tarot cards (please don’t buy tarot cards because a blog bullied you into it.)

I don’t need you to believe in reincarnation, ancestors, astrology, Source consciousness or any of it. I would actually rather you disagree thoughtfully than agree lazily. What I want is much simpler.

Ask why.

Why do I imagine God this way? Why does God need to be male in my imagination? If God transcends sex, why does feminine God-language make me uncomfortable? Why do I believe my spiritual experiences come from God while somebody else’s must come from deception? Why does questioning scripture frighten me? Do I believe God wants unquestioning obedience, or was I taught that institutions require it? Would I accept this moral argument if Islam, Hinduism, an African traditional religion or a New Age teacher made it? If not, why is it persuasive when Christianity does?

And if reading those questions produces anger, good.

Don’t immediately suppress it, call me demonic, or immediately go searching for a Bible verse that makes the discomfort disappear. Interrogate the anger. What exactly feels threatened?

Your faith? Your identity? Your family? Your certainty? Your understanding of morality? Or the possibility that something you were told was God might actually have been somebody’s interpretation of God? Those are not the same thing.

God may be bigger than the language we inherited

This is where I’ve landed, for now.

And I say for now deliberately, because if I am still alive ten years from now, I hope I have learned things that alter some of what I currently believe otherwise, what exactly have I been doing?

I don’t believe God is an old man sitting somewhere above the clouds monitoring whether I’ve been naughty. I experience God as consciousness, Source, intelligence, life moving through life, something I participate in without claiming to fully understand.

And I’m comfortable saying: I could be wrong about parts of it. That sentence doesn’t make spirituality meaningless to me. It makes it honest.

Because if God — or Source, consciousness, divine intelligence, whatever language you prefer — is genuinely infinite, then perhaps the most arrogant spiritual claim isn’t I don’t know. Maybe it’s: “I have successfully fitted infinity inside my theology, and everybody else is wrong.”

Father may be one doorway, Mother may be another. Christ may be another. Nature, silence, prayer, mysticism and consciousness may offer different languages through which people approach whatever they understand as sacred. Maybe some doors lead nowhere. Maybe some should remain closed.

Discernment still matters but I refuse to believe the Infinite becomes smaller because humanity discovered another metaphor. So no, I don’t believe God is a man in the sky and I don’t think removing the beard removes the Divine. I think it forces us to ask a far more interesting question:

If we stripped God of every human projection — gender, hierarchy, politics, fear, ego, institution and inherited imagery — what, if anything, would still be there?

I don’t have the complete answer. Neither did Jasmine or the 20 Christians, your favourite spiritual teacher, neither does your pastor - and perhaps the moment we become humble enough to admit that is the moment the conversation about God actually begins.