From Central America to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, religion has long been at the root of many of the world’s most devastating conflicts. But when it was time to heal those communities and countries, religion often became taboo. Katherine Marshall, 63, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, spent more than three decades with the World Bank, working in part to create space for faith in discussions about development. She sat down with The Washington Examiner to share her beliefs, and why due respect for religion can make all the difference.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I was raised an Episcopalian, and spent part of my childhood in England, where there was an intensely Anglican focus to my school. As students, we attended chapel, and regularly studied the Bible as a subject, and performed church music and dramas. Through that I came to appreciate the cultural heritage, and also to a degree the intellectual grounding of the faith. I still consider myself an Episcopalian, and I admire and support the global focus of the Episcopal Church, and its integral concern for issues of social justice and combating poverty.
Did anyone or any experience especially influence your faith, or your path in life?
Growing up, I had wanted to be a doctor – I especially liked the idea of helping people. But when I was perhaps 16 years old, I was in Nigeria on a school vacation (my father lived there at the time) and there was a cholera epidemic in Ibadan. It was a terrible disaster, and every able-bodied person was asked to help. We came to a mission hospital where patients were all over the courtyard, lying on plywood planks. People like me were changing IVs, cleaning up when patients became sick, comforting them – everything. And we were frightened. I remember a doctor pulling several of us aside and telling us, first of all, that if we contracted cholera, we’d easily be cured with a couple of antibiotics. And secondly, he told us to take note, and see that this was a disease about poverty, and about condition – and to look at who was there. Where were the women? Where were the children? They were dying at home.
That experience gave me the sense that not only must we deal with the raging injustice of the health conditions, but also with the systems that created the poverty, and the individuals that must be reached in order to bring change.
Much of your work has involved empowering women. Hasn’t that idea seen its day?
The biggest revolution of our time is the changing relationship between men and women. I believe it’s even more complex than race, because it involves every single person, every day of our lives, from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. And when a society begins to change the balance between men and women, it changes fundamentally the way people live and think.
It’s not a trivial thing, and it’s something the development community has really come to understand: If you do not change the imbalance between men and women in terms of power, and decision making, and responsibility, you cannot have a successful modern society.
Save for missionaries, religion for many years has been kept away from discussions about how best to encourage development globally. Why introduce it?
I think there’s as much danger in characterizing religion as unthinking and incompatible with reason as there is in seeing it as completely divine. Clearly, one can find elements of both.
But despite that, bringing religion to the table can bring its age-old wisdom and its ability to move people at all levels – to inspire and to motivate people to want to help others, and to fulfill potential. With it, the development will be better – it will be richer and more flexible, and the religious communities will benefit from engaging with each other. There have been blind spots, and yet the development community and the religious communities share a very strong common purpose: To build social justice, and develop human potential.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that never in human history have we had so great an opportunity — and therefore so great a responsibility – to develop human potential. We’ve never in human history had the opportunity of actually offering every child an education, or ensuring all children are born in decent health. But because we have the opportunity, we also have the obligation to make that happen, and to make the necessary sacrifices.
