When I look at religion in the world today I ask myself if it's part of the problem or part of the solution. The headlines can be disheartening. I have to remind myself there were saints in the past who changed the world for the good and brought peace. John Woolman, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.
And recently the women of Liberia.
It's no secret that in world's war zones women often get the brunt of the suffering, scrambling to protect and feed their children. As Hilary Clinton says most poignantly in the upcoming PBS series Women, War and Peace, premiering on October 11, "In today's wars the primary victims are women and children."
But women can also be the catalysts for change. In Liberia 250,000 people died in 14 years of civil war. Rebels recruited young boys into their armies, got them high, gave them guns, taught them to kill. Whole villages disappeared. Families were destroyed, the capital of Monrovia was decimated, people crowded into refugee camps. The war might have gone on forever if the women had not organized themselves.
They dressed in white, with white T-shirts and white hair ties, bare of make up and jewelry, "in sackcloth and ashes" as they said like Queen Esther when she spoke up for her people. In sweltering 100-degree heat and pouring rain, they sat in a field next to the fish market in Monrovia in the spring of 2003, asking, begging and praying for peace. Thousands of them held their ground in a fierce display of nonviolent resistance.
Liberia has a large population of both Christians and Muslims. At first, as organizer and 2011 Nobel Prize Laureate, Leymah Gbowee writes in her new book "Mighty Be Our Powers," there was distrust among the two groups. "Some of the Christian women felt that praying with Muslims would 'dilute' their faith." She brought them together in a workshop where they shared honestly, openly, the horrors of the war. The men killed, the daughters raped, the lost lives. They came up with the slogan, "Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim? Does the bullet pick and choose?"
In their peaceful protest they prayed together, chanting psalms like "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" or Muslim prayers like "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds..." They alternated singing Muslim songs with Christian hymns. The bishops of Monrovia and the imams supported them from the sidelines, but the women took the biggest risks.
How did they find such courage? How did they even find the energy? They drew on their faith, and Leymah is an especially captivating in talking about faith because she doesn't hesitate to describe her failings. She doesn't whitewash her sexual past, her children out of wedlock, her drinking. What she finds is that her very powerlessness, when harnessed with her faith, becomes a source of extraordinary power.
This is something all the women in Women, War and Peace have in common. Their status in society becomes an asset. They learn how to use it to their advantage. They go places men don't go. They see things. They move behind the lines. "I saw daily how right it had been to begin the work by mobilizing at the bottom," Leymah writes. "You can tell people for the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire."
The women in Liberia turned that war around. When the peace talks with the warlords were going no where, they risked humiliating themselves, threatening to remove their clothes as they blocked the doors of the conference, forcing the men to talk. It is one of the most moving moments of any film you'll see.
The prayers of people in times of war must break God's heart. But I saw something stunning happen here when Christians and Muslims prayed together. It gave me hope.
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Women, War, and Peace is a five-part series airing on PBS starting Oct 11, 2011.