 Philosophers of religion have sometimes marked a distinction between the anthropomorphic language of myth and popular piety, on the one hand, and the conceptual and abstract categories of philosophy, on the other hand, as though when we repair to the metalevel of analysis we leave gender-inflected language behind. Feminist philosophy of religion points to all the ways the signifier “God” remains stubbornly gendered male in Western thought and subliminally envisioned as a male personage. Whether taken as real or unreal, inferred validly or invalidly, said to be experienced directly or only projected illusorily, the divine identity in classical theism and atheism is unmistakably male. This supreme, ruling, judging, and loving male God is envisioned as a single, absolute subject, is named Father, and is conceived as standing in a relation of hierarchical dominion over the world. In ways both implicit and explicit, this construct tends in turn to justify various social and political structures of patriarchy which exalt solitary human patriarchs at the head of pyramids of power. Drawn almost exclusively from the world of ruling class men, traditional theistic concepts and images legitimate social and intellectual structures that grant a theomorphic character to men who rule and relegate women, children, and other men to marginalized and subordinated areas. The discursive practices that have constructed the divine as male are intimately connected to the production of ideologies which devalue all that is not male; they have formed a constitutive element in the oppression of women and other “Others”.