by Brian Griffith
In my small Texas city of Corpus Christi, my Dad was the only person I knew with a short-wave radio. He made it himself, because the stores didn’t have short-wave radios. He’d listen to the news from other countries, like radio Moscow, Beijing, or Havana. It seemed like everybody else heard only local American AM or FM stations, or American TV. Back then, short-wave radio was the only sort of internet, and my family seemed to be the only one that had it. Near as I could tell, the other families I knew had never heard about the world from anyone except a fellow American.
I got an urge to learn what was outside the bubble of my own society, which seemed to be a kind of a sort of football society. There was lots of cheerleading for the home team—our school, our lifestyle, our politics, our religion. A lot of the cheerleading concerned the legend of how the West was won. We were pretty saturated with a mix of heroic movies about either the Wild West or WWII. I heard we were a nation that had never been defeated. We were the best and most advanced people the world had ever seen. Maybe we didn’t even need to go to church, because we were already so close to God.
Supposedly, we gained our position in the world by dint of cultural superiority. But the heroic movies we saw were mostly about victory in battle. Later I learned it was an ancient Roman belief—victory goes to those favored by the gods. It was an ego-boosting belief, depending on who you identified with. Our city was quite segregated. My high school was almost entirely White, though most of the city was Hispanic.
When I took history in school, I wasn’t much interested in the West. I already heard how it was won. I wanted to know about Chinese, African, Russian, or Latin American history. And of course it was plain to see in the histories of all these places—those who managed to dominate others were not the best people. It was interesting to watch Americans respond to the wave of anti-colonial revolutions that swept the world from India, to Vietnam, to South Africa. Because we seemed torn over whether to identify with independence movements, or to see them as subversive attacks on our world order.
I did a few things to see the world. I joined a village development organization and worked for seven years in India and Kenya.
In India, our village was running out of water. The villagers climbed down their wells to dig them deeper. But across the Deccan Plateau, the water table was falling at maybe a foot per year. Near the end of the dry season, the And this danger that the earth around us nearlymight run out of water. And this , brought me the deepest, most basic fear I had ever known. I had assumed that these villagers of huge Asian nations were struggling with problems of the past. But I saw they were dealing with the problems of the future.
In Kenya the villages were mainly female. The young men were mostly gone to the cities, leaving the women to work the farms and raise the kids. And these people were marvelous. Among other things, tThey were covering the hills in trees. Looking out from their hillsides, I realized that these women were the main force holding back the great African desert.
Naturally, I got more interested in women’s values and dreams. After I had a child and went back to North America, I wanted to tell stories about that. That’s why I wrote The Gardens of Their Dreams, about the culture wars behind environmental decline or renewal.
It slowly dawned on me that women commonly have their own alternative versions of culture and religion, even in officially patriarchal religions like Islam and Christianity. This struck me strongly when a Muslim friend had trouble at her mosque. She said that some men had watched her from the doorway as she prayed in the women’s section. This wasn’t surprising, because she’s a beautiful woman. But then some of these men complained. They said that she was inspiring sinful thoughts in their house of prayer. I asked her why she stayed in such a community. She said those men knew nothing of the real Islam. The first Muslim women were business managers, religious leaders, or generals in the army. Those men at the mosque were not the real Muslims—she was.
I realized that I had believed the claims of dominators. When bigoted Christians or Muslims claimed that their prejudices were fundamental to their religion, I had believed them. I had said, “If you’re the real Christians (or Muslims), then I want none part of it.” What if I responded like my Muslim friend?
After that I spent several years writing about alternative versions of Christianity. And to a large extent, the alternatives were women’s versions of the religion. Instead of trying to enforce holy laws and chains of command, they were mostly trying to explore how good our relations can get. I wrote two books about the long-running culture wars between these visions. The first one was Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History, and the second was Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story.
After that, I wanted to do something similar about China. I’d always loved Chinese culture, religion, and history. And here again were the same issues: an “official” tradition of dominators, warlords, and patriarchs—, with a huge counterculture of women’s values. China even has numerous religious sects, made by women, for women, with a host of popular goddesses. I realized that the rise of women’s values and religions in the world’s biggest society may be something that transforms the world. I wanted to write about that, and tell stories about people I can really admire.