Under the Fig Tree

In my doctoral program at Grand Canyon University, I was told not to use scholarship from outside the United States. The justification was that research from other countries might not apply to American demographic contexts. In one sense, this made methodological sense. Social, cultural, and policy differences matter, and context-specific findings do not always generalize. Yet what troubled me was the blanket dismissal of non-U.S. voices as irrelevant to academic discourse. This directive revealed more than a concern for rigor; it reflected an elitist assumption that only American scholarship counted as authoritative.

Such restrictions expose how structures of power operate in academic life. By privileging one context over all others, institutions silence knowledge from the Global South and reinforce the dominance of Euro-American perspectives. The result is that voices outside the so-called center are treated as marginal or parochial, even though U.S. research is just as context-bound as the work it dismisses. This not only narrows the scope of scholarship but also reproduces a hierarchy of voices. The exclusion of global perspectives is not neutral. It is a gatekeeping practice that enshrines some knowledge as valid while rendering other knowledge invisible.

The danger of this exclusion became clearer when I began studying Anglican missions. Reading Kevin Ward’s histories of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America, I saw how missionaries often ignored or suppressed the voices of native Anglicans. These local Christians were treated as recipients of mission rather than agents of mission, their witness dismissed as secondary to the official reports written in London. Yet Ward shows that they shaped the church in ways missionaries could not foresee.¹ Their agency planted seeds of justice and resilience within contexts scarred by empire. The subaltern spoke, even when the structures of mission sought to silence them.

Harvey Kwiyani’s Decolonizing Mission pushes this lesson further. He insists that the future of Christian mission will not be led from the West but from the very communities once colonized.² For Kwiyani, mission must undergo a conversion of its own, moving away from its imperial past and being reframed around justice, liberation, and mutuality. His call resonates with my own frustration at being told to exclude global voices. Just as mission cannot be reduced to expansion, scholarship cannot be reduced to a narrow set of authorities. To decolonize either field, we must listen where we have been taught to ignore.

This journey leaves me asking a simple but urgent question: who gets to count as a scholar? If academia only validates U.S. and European perspectives, then we are left with a partial and distorted picture of truth. But if we treat voices from the margins as producers of knowledge rather than as footnotes, then our scholarship becomes not only richer but more just. My doctoral experience now serves as a reminder that elitism is never neutral. It always silences someone. Today, I choose to stand on the side of those whose voices demand to be heard. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us in her landmark essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, the challenge is not only to critique structures of power but to make space for marginalized voices to be heard on their own terms.³ What voices have you been told not to listen to, and how might your world change if you treated them as authoritative?