You’ll Believe God is a Woman

Guest post by ObstacleChick

There is a popular song sung by Ariana Grande called God Is A Woman that has some Evangelical Christians up in arms. When it was released, my 18-year-old daughter and her friends were excited that this might be a song about female empowerment. They were hoping that Ariana Grande would sing about women pursuing their dreams, breaking through glass ceilings, being recognized as equals in the workplace and in politics, doing all the things that their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were prevented from doing as 18-year-olds. My daughter’s friend group were a bit disappointed that this was a song about sex with one’s lover. The song is empowering in that the woman is communicating to her lover what gives her pleasure, and she tells her lover what she will do to give her lover pleasure. Yet my daughter and her friends, all high-achieving young women who grew up in the shadow of New York City, wanted more:

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You’ll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can’t fight
My one, it lingers when we’re done
You’ll believe God is a woman

I don’t wanna waste no time, yeah
You ain’t got a one-track mind, yeah
Have it any way you like, yeah
And I can tell that you know I know how I want it
Ain’t nobody else can relate
Boy, I like that you ain’t afraid
Baby, lay me down and let’s pray
I’m tellin’ you the way I like it, how I want it

(Yeah)
And I can be all the things you told me not to be
(Yeah)
When you try to come for me, I keep on flourishing
(Yeah)
And he see the universe when I’m in company
It’s all in me

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You’ll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can’t fight
My one, it lingers when we’re done
You’ll believe God is a woman

I tell you all the things you should know
So, baby, take my hand, save your soul
We can make it last, take it slow, hmm
And I can tell that you know I know how I want it, yeah
That you different from the rest
And boy, if you confess, you might get blessed
See if you deserve what comes next
I’m tellin’ you the way I like it, how I want it

(Yeah)
And I can be all the things you told me not to be
(Yeah)
When you try to come for me, I keep on flourishing
(Yeah)
And he see the universe when I’m in company
It’s all in me

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You’ll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can’t fight
My one, it lingers when we’re done
You’ll believe God is a woman, yeah, yeah

(God is a woman)
Yeah, yeah
(God is a woman, yeah)
My one
(One)
When all is said and done
You’ll believe God is a woman
You’ll believe God
(God is a woman)
Oh, yeah
(God is a woman, yeah)
(One)
It lingers when we’re done
You’ll believe God is a woman

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As we drove from northeastern New Jersey through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky to my daughter’s university in middle Tennessee, we marveled at the bumper stickers and highway signs we saw along the way. Living in a diverse area where people of many faiths and no faith reside, we see religion represented by religious houses of worship and through religious dress. We are not accustomed to seeing signs with religious messages. Here is a small sample of the messages we saw during our road trip – I wish we had been able to photograph or write down each one, but this selection is representative of the messages we saw.

“Lust Will Drag You Down to Hell” (And there were flames in the bottom right-hand corner, because that’s where hell is, the bottom right-hand corner)

“Prepare To Meet Thy God” (Is that a threat or a promise? I can’t tell….)

“Todd’s Auto Body – Serving You AND The Lord” (Because if Todd is serving the Lord he TOTALLY won’t rip you off)

“God Loves You! Jesus Is Coming Soon!” (OK cool….does he want to text me to meet for coffee?)

“This Cross Is a Memorial to All the Aborted Babies” (Um….OK)

“HE > i” (and no, the lower-case “i” is not a typo)

“Jesus Forgives Our Sins” (Isn’t that special?)

Two separate billboards advertising the Planetarium and Creation Museum in Kentucky

A farm named “By Faith Farm”

A bumper sticker shaped like the Jesus fish, with American flag background, and prayer hands in the middle of the fish’s body with the text “For Freedom” superimposed over the flag (I suppose the meaning should be translated to “please pray for Christian religious freedom in America”)

T-shirt proclaiming that “Sundays are for Jesus, Family, and Football” (How about we skip the Jesus part and just go straight to Family and Football, OK?)

T-shirt proclaiming “Nope Satan, Not Today” (I found this particularly funny)

As we passed more and more of these types of signs, heard a political ad in West Virginia against a candidate who supported funding Planned Parenthood and appealing to the pro-life crowd, and saw Christian memorabilia for sale in the convenience stores, my daughter suddenly understood. She said that driving in a part of the country which was so overtly Christian made her aware that Ariana Grande’s song could only receive air time if her empowerment message was disguised as a love song rather than as an outright feminist anthem. While fundamentalist evangelical Christians are outraged over the notion that their God might be a woman (because, God forbid, complementarianism, y’all), they are focusing more on “God is a woman” than on a woman communicating her desires to her partner and promising to fulfill the partner’s desires in return. They are focusing on the outrage that their deity may be portrayed as a woman, someone who is commanded in the Pauline epistles to submit to the husband’s authority and to remain silent in church. They aren’t focusing on Ariana Grande’s encouragement of women to communicate with their partners as equals.

From my perspective, if some Evangelical teenagers listen to this song, I hope that the message of equality gets through to them. And yes, from my experience growing up as a Fundamentalist teenager, many teens do sneak and listen to “worldly” radio (or these days, streaming music) without their parents knowing. No matter how much youth pastors rant and rave against the influences of “the world,” the ranting and raving only make the appeal of “worldly” media that much more enticing. Who knows, maybe some of these Evangelical teens might embrace the concept that god could, indeed, be a woman!