Long-time readers of this space know I've occasionally lashed out at blockheaded approaches to inclusive language in church, cases in which he, him, and his are treated as 4-letter words, even in cases when (a) clearly a male (e.g. Jesus) is being referenced or (b) the substitution destroys the poetic or musical integrity in its context.
Today's example is a reverse of the usual War on Pronouns; in this case a pronoun was actually substituted for a noun. The original text, from the English Te Deum:
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man,
Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers
became:
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver us,
Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers
Although the number of syllables didn't change, the substitution struck a discordant note. This is a setting of an almost 500-year-old text from the Book of Common Prayer, which we're keeping intact without modernizing its thees and thous and modernizing just this one word. I call it modernizing because everyone in the sixteenth century (or even 50 years ago) knew that "man" in this context meant all humans, and indeed the following line says "all believers," not "all male believers." Maybe your average schmoe in the pew isn't familiar enough with this text to notice the substitution, but we do have a pretty well-educated congregation.
Furthermore, the word stress on pronouns is just different. Read the original passage out loud. Although you don't have to, it's likely you put a least a mild stress on the word "man," and that's how most composers set this text. But when you read "...deliver us," that mild stress just doesn't make sense. Subtle, perhaps, but not nonexistent. And for what? So we can continue to dumb down the language for people who can't understand that a word might have different meanings in different contexts?
I go to a Lutheran church, but we often sing Anglican music, especially as the ELCA continues to follow the Catholics into Marty Haugen candy-music land.
Forums 
