Androtheism

The word joins andro, man, and theism, worship of a god, and names a structure in which the divine is cast as male and men are raised toward the divine. Marsh uses it to name a pattern rather than to attack any one religion. When the ultimate authority is imagined as a man and men are placed nearest to that authority, worship and social hierarchy align, and the male becomes both the sacred image and the earthly figure closest to it. It connects to her account of how any endogroup installs a centre, an endo-ideal, invested with all virtue and authority, with androtheism the case where that idealised centre is male.

Androtheism is not a common academic term, though it appears in feminist theology and religious studies for god-concepts modelled on the male. Feminist critiques of religion, from Mary Daly onward, have argued that when God is imagined as male, the male is imagined as God. Marsh's usage runs parallel to that line and folds it into her account of the idealised centre.