This month’s issue of National Geographic is a special issue on women that appears to be the start of a yearlong project. All the contributing writers, photographers and artists were female.
So here is a rather obvious fact to note right up front. Being that women lead the way in religious observance around the planet, I thought there would be at least some representation of women in religion.
So I read through the entire issue. Answer: There is and there isn’t.
Since the text of the issue isn’t online yet, I can’t cut and paste much. So what did they include?
There’s a picturesque double-page spread of five nuns from Kerala, India in their brown habits. The text says:
Their superiors keep pressuring them to keep quiet and stop making trouble, but they refuse. When a nun in Kerala told church leaders multiple times that a bishop had raped her repeatedly, nothing happened, so she turned to the police.
Months later, in September 2018, these fellow nuns joined a two-week protest outside the Kerala High Court. The bishop, who maintains his innocence, eventually was arrested…Instead of supporting the nuns, the church cut off the protesting nuns’ monthly allowance.
That was the only mention I could find of any Christian women in the entire issue.
Much better represented were Muslim women, such as France’s first black Muslim woman mayor Marième Tamata-Varin (p. 58); the anti-hijab movement in Iran (p. 59) and Meherzia Labidi, the Tunisian politician who likes being veiled (p. 72).
The hijab movement was teamed with some paragraphs about Saudi women’s efforts to get laws changed on male guardianship, driving and a host of other rights. The magazine implied all these inequalities were the fault of culture. Islam, which informs ALL culture in Saudi Arabia, wasn’t mentioned as a cause of repression.
There weren’t any Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish women profiled that I could find. There was a whole section on Rwanda, which is a place whose renaissance had a lot to do with Christianity, the power of forgiveness and so on. But faith was not mentioned anywhere in the 12-page section.
I would have liked something on Yazidi women and the enormous persecution they’ve endured and how some of them have risen above the fray. You can’t cover the Islamic State years in the Middle East without mention that, right? And other forms of violent repression of women — think sexual slavery — in religious minorities?
But all the mentions of various religions, what little there was, had a common theme. Religion has oppressed women, but liberated women are now beating back the darkness caused by patriarchy, which was introduced to the world through religious texts.
There was absolutely nothing about religion being a positive force in women’s lives. That’s amazing, in an issue that was supposed to let women talk about their lives and what matters the most to them.
I know you can’t do everything in one issue and hopefully National Geographic will be publishing more material about women and faith this coming year. But the God angle was pretty thin in their inaugural effort.