 Gender bias as it operated in the history of the philosophy of religion shaped the ways in which the traditional problems and orientations of the field were constructed. Like the cultural phenomenon of religion itself, philosophy of religion not only originated in a male tradition of production and transmission, with a history of excluding and devaluing women, but it was also defined by many concepts and symbols marked as “masculine”, which stood in oppositional relation to those marked as “feminine”. Moreover, unlike the phenomenon of religion which was embedded in multiple cultural contexts, philosophy of religion was largely Eurocentric and Anglo-American in its orientation, such that in addition to gender bias, ethnocentrism constituted the second major weakness of the history of this field. For a long time, philosophy of religion was written from a standpoint not unlike that of Reverend Thwackum, the character in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, who announced: 