Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion

Abstract

Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens' social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion's reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern political struggle to bring about the demise of patriarchy: a system of non-relation held to be global and structurally continuous over 5000 years. Goddess feminism is premised on the necessity of a collective moral confrontation with patriarchy and the planetary injustice and suffering it causes. And yet thealogians' reflexive criticism of the authoritative nature of traditions makes them unable to ground their religion in a fully collective, normative, ontological and moral account of the Goddess. Goddess feminists' struggle for sexual, economic and environmental justice may also be impeded by their configuration of the Goddess as a female trinity whose hypostases sacralise moral ambiguity and by their resistance to divine and human authoritative judgements. My task in this paper is not that of arguing for the truth or falsity of thealogical claims, but that of showing how Goddess religion's late modern reflexivity is both liberative and may ultimately stunt its own development.