I got my first God-essay on a final exam over fifty years ago in a course on the history of the English language. I asked students to discuss the historical and social forces behind notions of correctness in standard English. Things like the impact on language practices of the industrial revolution and advances in writing technology; the rising middle class; the spread of literacy and mass education; and the increased importance of England, and later the United States, as world powers, correlating with the growing importance of English in the world; not to mention advances in philology, the study of language, and a whole lot more. Forces like these provided a backdrop for the 18th-century English grammarians and lexicographers and the usage manuals popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of mentioning any of these, this student, a prospective English teacher, equated correctness in language with intelligent design:
I think there should be an accepted way of speaking and deviation would not be tolerated. I believe in a set of absolute values. I believe there is one right and wrong for everyone. Perhaps what I think is right is not what you think is right but in the final analysis that isn't going to matter. What God thinks is right is what really matters and He doesn't have one right for you and one right for me.
I was a new teacher, but I knew this much: students have the right to believe whatever they want. That’s in the Constitution, plus it’s a basic premise of a free society. But I also knew that students don’t get an A just because their roommate or their state representative likes their paper.
My goal in that exam question was to get students to reflect on rules like “don’t use double negatives” or “avoid the passive voice.” Where do these rules came from? What gives rules their authority? Why should you follow them? What happens if you break a rule?
But the student’s answer, God speaks standard English so you should too, is what I call faith-based grammar: the belief that the rules of language are handed down to us from on high, much like the ten commandments, and we must abide by them or wind up in that special circle of Hell that Dante reserves for those who split infinitives.
It’s fifty years on, and faith-based grammar is still going strong. Only it has a new target. Forget about the difference between less and fewer, or whether data is singular. Today’s fundamentalist grammarians are going after pronouns. Specifically, the third person singular gender pronouns, he, she, it, and they (they, which is technically plural, begins to double as a singular pronoun as early as the 1370s). And the gender-inclusive pronouns like E (first coined in 1841), ne (1849), ze (1864), heer (1911), and hir (1920). But really, any pronoun is fair game.
The fact that gender pronouns have a long history may be important to a language historian like me, but it means nothing to the faith-based grammar crowd. The belief that God made only two genders led the state of Tennessee, which banned the teaching of evolution in 1925, to ban linguistic evolution in 2016, when Tennessee passed a law forbidding the use of taxpayer funds for gender-neutral pronouns. This, despite the fact that no one knows how much a pronoun actually costs.
Tennessee law bans gender-neutral pronouns
Red-led states like Florida, Indiana, Missouri, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah have joined with Tennessee to declare war on pronouns. Teachers in those states are being fired for messing with people’s God-given genders and their pronouns (I’m looking at you, too, Oklahoma).
It’s a tenet of faith-based grammar that gender pronouns, whether in class or in schoolbooks, lead to depravity. A bill before the Arizona legislature equates pronouns with pedophilia: A parent may ask for a book to be banned “because the parent finds the book to be lewd or sexual in nature, to promote gender fluidity or gender pronouns or to groom children into normalizing pedophilia.”
Not so long ago, conservatives complained that schools weren’t teaching enough grammar. Now they’re intent on eradicating an entire part of speech from the classroom, from the library, even from the English language. They claim that pronouns are suddenly interfering with their constitutionally-protected religious freedom. And yet eliminating pronouns interferes with everyone else’s constitutionally-protected free speech.
It’s an inconvenient truth for today’s faith-based language cops that traditional grammarians – some of whom were distinguished members of the clergy – taught that English has as many as seven genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, the common of two, the common of three, the doubtful, and the epicene. In 1792 the philosopher and grammarian James Anderson went even further, positing thirteen genders to account for the many variations and combinations that he found in human biology. Wonder what circle of Hell Anderson wound up in.
James Anderson proposed 13 English genders
OK, forget about the grammar books. You may hold the firm belief that there’s only he and she, that two plus two makes three, or that the Holocaust didn’t happen. You may even think that God demands standard English. But no matter what your faith-based grammar says, if you sign up for a course in the history of the English language, you should be prepared to deal with facts and reasoning, and I will tell you in advance that the nickname of the course is HEL.
