 In any case, insofar as Western monotheism has constructed the meaning of “God” in relation to “world” around binary oppositions of mind/body, reason/passion, and male/female, traditional theism remains complicitous with the very system of gender constructs and symbolic structures that underlie women’s oppression. In the binary opposition between “God” and “world”, the term “God” occupies the privileged space and acts as the central principle, the One who confers identity to creatures to whom “He” stands in hierarchical relation. Oppositional pairing of God/world has served in turn to organize other categories, such as heaven and earth, sacred and profane. The widespread distinction between sacred and profane, employed by many authors, thus comes already encoded with the hierarchical oppositions of male/female and masculine/feminine onto which it is mapped, along with the structurally related pairs, white/black and heterosexual/homosexual. The first term in each pair is sacralized, while the second is rendered profane. This set of themes can be traced in connection with the classic work of Durkheim and Weber in their theorizations of religion (Erickson 1993).