Posted on 12 February 2020
*Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett(Social activist )
** Robin Marsh (Secretary General for the Universal Peace Federation)
*** Dr Fuad Nahdi (Executive Director of the Radical Middle)
Creating a society that enjoys natural human serenity and suffers less moral decadence is what religious communities aspire to achieve. They aim to work for social cohesion based on mutual recognition, respect and morality. They aspire for a society with no oppression of the weak, organized crime, drug gangs, youth stabbing, sexual exploitation, or human trafficking. What can divine religions provide to salvage modern civilization and stop societies sliding into the abyss?
Tuesday, 23rd July 2019
Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett: When I initially looked into RSE I did not look at it in an isolated way. I tried to see the bigger context because it has never happened in a vacuum. There is always planning and a strategy behind most things.
When I started looking at RSE I realised that it is just the crest of a wave from a long torrent that has gone on before on it. The sexual revolution of the 1960s is responsible for most of the societal ills that we are seeing today such as pornography, free sex, free love all these things.
RSE has been justified in order to tackle issues such as pornography, sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies however the way they do it is very questionable. Rather than looking at the root of the problem such as the breakdown of traditional family values they are just sticking a plaster on it by telling children to use contraception and so on.
The root goes back to the sexual revolution and the predecessor to that, probably the French Revolution when the church and state were separated, the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned and started writing about sexual freedom and from then onwards a secularised approach to sex and relationships has gained momentum.
What I realised with RSE and the ideology behind it is that it is a very secular ideology that they are starting to introduce into schools. This has a lot of history in Marxist and communist thought as well as in radical feminism and post modernism and at the heart is the destruction of the traditional family.
I feel this is where religion has such an important part to play in remedying the situation. It is very much a secular notion of freedom that is being espoused regarding sex and relationships. This is what they are selling to people and people are buying into it in the name of freedom. You can do what you want, it is your body, it is your right, you have ultimate freedom. This is the hedonistic life style that has been mis-sold and we are seeing the fallout today.
But freedom is always at a cost and in the liberal sense of freedom there are no bounds. We are seeing this played out today in the trans movement. This complete sense of no boundary. In a short space of time we have gone from there unquestionably being two sexes and two genders, male and female to a situation where you can be arrested and penalised for calling a man a women and mis-gendering or mis-pronouning them.
This trans movement is an extreme form of individualism which is again coming out of the secular thinking surrounding sexuality. I was actually reading something today that highlighted that there is a very fine line between individualism and statism. The more you push individualism the more it is going to create chaos and when chaos is created the state will step in and take over.
We are starting to see this come in in schools with the erosion of parental rights in bringing up their children. We are not talking about facts such as maths and science lessons we are talking about relationships and sex, very value and culture laden areas that the state has actually decided to teach whether you like it or not.
With the RSE debate the media has very much spun it as Muslims versus LGBT. However there are far greater concerns then just that but the media has totally side-lined issues such as the dangers of totalitarianism with the state taking over the role of the parents as well as the dangers of sexualising children by exposing them to concepts and in some case resources that are completely inappropriate. This is my concern.
My training in psychology has helped me look at the processes of things and when you expose children to naked images and teach them at a very young age the sexual organs of their body a desensitisation process occurs. Further whether people actually agree or disagree to teach these terms should be up to the parents and not the state. That should be for the parents and the family to decide and not the state.
This exposure and sexualisation is happening also in the wider community and in society. The repeated exposure, the desensitization of young impressionable minds, whether it is sex, different family make-ups, sexual orientations, concepts that boys can be girls etc – this is going to confuse children at a very young age. By the time they reach puberty they are going to be very confused. We are already seeing this in the Muslim community. A very high number of our youth, based on what people have told me, are turning to same-sex relationships because they are equating friendship with being gay or it is gaining the popularity – this is based on accounts that I am hearing from parents and colleagues.
I said that I was looking back at the sexual revolution but even before that there have been psychologists who have been hell bent on eroding the male-female binary. This has actually been in the offing for a very long time. Again the reason being that if you can erode the role of the male and female you can destroy the family and create rootless and confused individuals who are consequently very easy to control.
All these societal and sexual changes we are witnessing – this is not actually about people’s human rights which is the way it is being spun, but about a far deeper issue which I have always argued has been partly to destroy the traditional family. This is where the role of religion and traditional family values has to come back.
I will just read a couple of quotes from a book called The Compassionate Family by Ayatollah Khameini. He says :”Why does the West expend so much effort to promote hedonism in Eastern countries in general and Muslim countries in particular. One reason is to shatter the family unit and weaken their cultures in order to dominate them.”
This concept of destroying and deconstructing the family so you can control is well known and that links to my opinion on RSE with the erosion of parental rights because they are taking the right of the parent away to educate their children in relationships and sex education. It is very easy then to put a wedge to undermine parental authority on these issues and we are seeing this happening.
He goes on to say: “If there is a nation that promotes complete sexual freedom the family unit is weak because men and women in that country do not need the institution of the family to fulfil their desires. Where hedonism or libertarianism takes root ruptures appear and the rupture of the family follows suite”.
I thought we were living in a Christian country but after going into this and seeing what is happening every day I realise we are a very very secular country. This extreme liberalism which people misconstrue as freedom is very dangerous. It has no boundaries. It is like a juggernaut that is going on and on.
Like I said, when you are not answerable to God or family and you are only answerable to yourself the moral rot sets in an a very deep way. So what can religion offer? For me we have to return to traditional family values. I think the anecdote to a lot of this is to strengthen the bonds between husband and wife. We need to go back to very clearly defined male and female roles.
In Islam this is very clearly defined. We do have very different roles to play. With the trans movement this is what is under attack. They are trying to create this genderless being. I have a collection of LGBT story books which often are being read to children in schools. I got hold of a new one called What Makes a Baby – not who makes a baby. It thought it would be about two lesbians getting together and looking at a catalogue so they can chose male sperm for their baby, or two fathers looking for a surrogate mother.
Actually it was none of that. It was about genderless beings some had an egg, some had a sperm. There was no mention of man or woman, no mention of marriage or relationships. You need a sperm from that genderless being and an egg from that genderless being and they can come together and make a baby. It was just like some kind of factory machine of baby production. It was much more alarming and eerie than I imagined. They completely de-gendered, defeminised and de-masculinised these beings.
That is sadly the way it is going so we have to recapture the male/female tradition of family again. It is the family that is under attack and when the family is under attack, obviously the community is under attack. So it is going back, to these timeless ideals of where we can spend time with our children building those relationships and connections. Supporting couples, husbands and wives, preparing our youth for marriage so they go into that contract with the right attitude.
We have to protect the family because when it is destroyed you have these rootless individuals and that is how you control society. It is all highly political and sex has been used as a political weapon to take control.
I will stop here and hope you will raise some points during the discussion.
Robin Marsh: The Unification Church was renamed in 1994 as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification so you can imagine from which perspective we are coming. I am a long time member and at the latest stage I became involved in the Universal Peace Federation which also is very much promoting the family.
I am going to look at this from a religious perspective. So the founder of the Unification Church, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification are Mr and Mrs Moon. They come from South Korea. At one point in the 70s and 80s Father Moon started a speaking tour in America and he was talking about God’s three headaches. He was particularly looking at the development of communism which was a big threat but also the decline of religion. Communism was a God denying ideology which was proposing an alternative to a religious perspective and religion was seen as the opiate of the people.
So there is a decline in religion and a decline in the family. In America hedonism, consumerism and individualism was very strong. And also misuse of the natural world, in terms of consumerism, self centerdness, pollution etc. This has only exacerbated over the decades.
In the bible there is the tradition of three great blessings which were a gift from God to humanity, Adam and Eve. In Genesis it says: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
This was a bequeathing of God to humanity. It was a free gift of God’s love to humanity. If we look at what it means it means something like this: be fruitful but a tree does not give off fruit until it is mature, until it has lived for a number of years. As a sapling it does not give fruit. So to be fruitful means to grow up and to be mature. Everything needs to grow up over a period of time. We need to grow in maturity and in our understanding of God.
When we truly unite with God and feel God’s love in every cell in our body, when we truly feel this love we are a mature and fruitful person who can go on and marry and be responsible for a husband or wife and be responsible for raising children. To multiply is another sense of this pro creatorship that humanity has been given. By raising children in faith who can experience God’s love in the family and grow in the community we can develop a loving world.
And also to have dominion, to be a loving steward of this creative world. If you think about it this theoretical construct of individual maturity, perfection and love of multiplying the family of love which can expand throughout the world and to have a loving relationship with the natural world in a sense is a construct of what the world should be and what satan wants to stop.
Satan wants to put up an alternative. Communism is one alternative which has run down. It ran for a period of time, it just didn’t work. It was obvious that it was falling apart. Now we have a further alternative which attacks individual and family morality and how we use the natural world. Do we use it as a loving steward or as an exploitative self centered way. Because we do not have this sense of love in every cell of our body which is so fundamentally rooted in us we are sadly unclear of the way to fill the emptiness people feel inside. They go to so many strange ways of trying to fill that gap and finding that it doesn’t work.
So in the ideal world there are a number of quotes: “There is a time coming when I will put my laws into their minds. They will know me from the least to the greatest.” And the famous one: “They shall beat their swords into plough shears. Nations shall not lift up sword against nations. ”
God’s ideal has always been there since the first human family we have been on this war and battle. There is also a biblical saying that God is going to make it work and God is not going to give up until it works.
There is also the sense of a change over of sovereignty which we often call the last days and there are lots of biblical references to this when evil sovereignty changes and good sovereignty takes over. And this point is a time or turmoil because evil does not want to let go. It wants to grab hold of the sovereignty that it has been enjoying for so long.
But we can also see a growth of individuality which is much more ideal. There are many studies, many people around the world are experiencing a greater sense of that ideal, spiritual development, communication between people of different faiths and heightened understanding of asceticism, freedom to go from one to another and understand development of human nature.
In a sense God also wants all people to be restored. God does not want to leave anyone out. So we can say that the last days are also the first days and there are a number of things which are coming out which have never been in human history before. It is up to us to push through this change from the last days to the first days and to make it work by fulfilling our tenants, by fulfilling our own faith and by being good examples to the wider world to persuade them of the celebration of this way of life.
So to create this sense of one humanity under a loving God, whether God, Allah, so many different names – Jehovah- creating this one loving family of humanity under this being – we have a much greater sense of that in this age. The growth of NGO’s, of civil society of the role of the United Nations even though it is not fulfilling a strong enough role.
So there are many things that were never in existence ever before. So many international institutions that are in existence now. Also the unification of cultures. Historians talked about this coming together of cultures and we can see this coming together which has taken a long period of time. But communication is increasing and there is a sense of understanding of each other’s culture much more than ever before.
So when we look at the glass being half full we see many positive signs. It also means that we have to fight to make this happen. Fight with ourselves to make ourselves the best examples of our religion that we can be. And to fight also to be the most loving family that we can create. To be an example that others would follow. To show that the emptiness that people feel can be filled by living this way and also to use the natural world in the right way.
God talks about the heart being deceitful above all things. The heart is more deceitful in the natural world. That is why throughout history we have made offerings, we have given tide or zakat. We have given things of the natural world as a token of our sincerity. So we need to show a better example of how the natural world can be used.
The Unification Peace Federation wants to bring forums of religious leaders and political leaders together to create these forums where religious and political leaders can be involved in a decision making process. Religious leaders have a sense of accountability to their faith and also to their religion. Political leaders have a sense of accountability to their electorate. So they have political skills. Sometimes they can be corrupt, sometimes they can be very moral and there are a number of politicians who are very moral.
Religious leaders sometimes have very good political skills but most of the time their faith is very good and their understanding of how to bring blessings to a country is very good. So bring them both together in forums for the decision making process. If they both understand each other’s way of thinking it has many advantages but it has to be done in a very peaceful and understanding way.
But religious leaders also have to have the sense of coming together as a collective. Not just one religion but all religions coming together in those kinds of forums. The religions have to come beyond themselves to embrace other religions and to embrace other perspectives. Like the mind and the body coming together they can form a better structure of decision making.
Religions should be concerned with God’s love and salvation of the individual and the welfare of their own denomination. Now is the time for all religious bodies together to search for the true will of God. As far as I know God is not concerned with the minor details of doctrine. In God’s heart there is great love. There is no discrimination based on colour or nationality, there are no barriers between countries and cultural traditions, between east and west or south and north. So to enter into religious dialogue in harmony we should realise an ideal world in peace.
Religions coming together gives us a much stronger position to take care of these issues where we can come together as religious bodies and collaborate. That will make our position a lot stronger and it will help political leaders to respect us a lot more.
Dr Fuad Nadi: Those who are familiar with the Muslim folkloric tradition must have heard of the mythical figure called Nasser Uddin. Sometimes he is called Hojar. As a young man he won a Quran recitation competition. His recitation was so beautiful that the angels were moved and they requested God to give him a special present.
So one of the angels came down and told him make a wish and it will be granted. So Mullah Nasser Uddin sat down with his own village and did a shoura (consultation) and he asked what is the thing that the people would want. After much consultation the villagers felt that nothing would be wonderful than if they could see the future.
So they came to the angel and said they would like to see the future. So the angel said alright in an hour’s time you will see it. So in an hour’s time Mullah Nasser Uddin was teleported from 1000AD right into 1990s England to a room in Bradford where members of the Islamic community were watching a television series. They enjoyed the pakoras and he watched the TV. Technically he had only one hour. After one hour he was shifted back and the villagers asked him what did you find out? The mullah started rubbing his beard and looked very wise and said my God you won’t believe. The villagers thought he was going to disclose the future so all of them gathered in the mosque and kept asking the question.
The Mullah said it will be difficult for your to understand. And they said just tell us. He said they showed naked girls on tv but it was the cars they were selling. For us who are desensitised when we look at the sex industry we forget that only a couple of years this was not allowed.
The topic today (I am glad I did not bring my disc because the pictures may have shocked you but they would have kept you awake) is very interesting. When we talk about the moral rot I thought when I was given the topic people from the Judeo Christian background always think about sex as an issue. But the rot is a lot more than that. The sexual manifestation of it is at the end. As with the rotten fish. The rest of it has to be rotten before the head is rotten.
Today one of the biggest industries in the world is the so called advertising industry. And in advertising whether you are going to sell, tea, coffee or cars is based on the weaponisation and sexualisation. Pornography is one fastest growing industries making millions for people and we might say corrupting millions.
It did not start yesterday but it has been legitimised every day. Some few years ago when they were talking about the gambling industry being legalised they were talking about the age limits I was talking about this to one of my good friends Dr Zaki Badawi. At that time they were talking about the National Lottery that the money from the lottery is going to help communities. A lot of Muslim felt uncomfortable in applying for that kind of money in running their social works and infrastructure.
What he told me has stuck with me today. He said things that are forbidden in the faith of Islam are based on two things one is the theological or jurisprudence understanding of it. But the higher situation not being allowed is moral outrage. And a good society always tries to strike a balance between moral outrage and jurisprudence.
For us this is true about our politics in the Muslim world and it is true about how we behave in certain situations. We should get angry because something is wrong. We should get inspired and irate because we want to change something for the better. It is not just a Muslim thing. The interesting thing is that when I sit with Jews and Christians – people from the Ibrahimic faiths – we can create a nice cosy zone. We share a lot, the notion of marriage.
This is not true of large amounts of humanity. They have a totally different understanding. Even now when America is spending billions trying to legalise homosexuality, lesbianism and that sort of thing the countries that are most violently against it are not even Muslim countries.
I come from Africa. It is Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Rwanda, South Africa. There is also a debate about what is legal and illegal. They have used this argument about rights and said it is the right of the individual which supersedes the right of the community.
For Muslims the whole issue of sexual norms and sexual matters has got very nicely entwined with the Sharia. The Sharia is there to protect the ummah and one of the basic things to protect is the family. So having sex outside marriage is a threat to the family. That is why it is illegal.
There has always been homosexuality in the Muslim community. We have always recognised that they are among us. For them to have their sexual act within the four walls is between them and God. But it is a crime when they come out and promulgate it because it is then that they threaten the fabric of society. These are things for young people to talk about.
But now the issue of trans genderism and making our mosques accessible – they call them inclusive mosque. We do not need to overreact but we do need to sit down and make the argument. The argument has to be holistic. It has to look at the whole of society. Every time we have to define the moral parameters. We have to know what we are about and what it is that we are trying to preserve and we want to promote. Not everything that you want to promote and preserve is right for the time.
The institution of marriage is essential and it is what we need. But marriage is being redefined with so many other labels. We have to understand this. We are now marrying across tribal lines, ethnic lies, national lines and even inter faith lines. We have to sit down as Christians and Muslims and talk about what it is about the heritage and what we want family to be.
But the issue at the moment which is more important is the education system. One secretary of state who preference is of a particular way wanted to make this a law for all – this mischief is going on. We need to campaign in this country to see that this does not happen.
About 15 years ago this was still a problem with the Muslim community. Research was done to show that within an area in Birmingham the level of teenage pregnancies among young Asian Muslim women had increased by 45 percent in a very short time. So we went to investigate what it was. A Sri Lankan doctor told us what was happening. He was not a Muslim.
There was a time, if you are old or young enough to remember, when you could withdraw from sex education. So a lot of Muslims said this education is not good enough so we will withdraw them from that education which is not the prefect one but there was no alternative so the kids became doubly vulnerable.
From what I understand the budget to subsidise Muslim schools is between pounds 12 -15 million a year. This is a figure which I have got. Yet the Muslims have not produced a halal pack for the sex education of their children. So this is the issue. They need to work on this. There is even a vegetarian one. A guide for sex education for vegetarians. There is a Jewish one. People need to sit down and do this.
The other issue is also that Muslims living in London alone are from about 100 countries. I come from East Africa that in our education when it came to sex it was much more open and freer. There were no inhibitions. We used to have discussions with the scholars. You could bring up the issue and talk about it.
But here with the majority of people, especially those from the sub continent it is something you don’t discuss. Everybody just whispers about it. It is not something you can have an open discussion about. And everybody thinks you can get a wahi a revelation about how you start producing babies.
When I started watching Indian movies the romancing is very good until they get married and then what they do is they run around the tree and then they don’t show you anything apart from the children running round. And there is no guide as to how the children came into being.
And this whole notion about bringing up young people. We tell them how important marriage is but marriage cannot take place on its own. There have to be institutions that help facilitate it. It was a refined process back home with aunties and uncles. I am not saying it was perfect but there was a system. It helped the right partners to get married.
Nowadays our children want to get married and they don’t know where to start looking for a bridge and groom and there is a such a misfit. This society is so diverse. I am calling for more round tables, conversations and discussions so we can open up this debate as to what is going on but not as reactionaries.
The society has its problems. I think we have the solutions. We have to sit down and rationalise them and get engaged and talk. We have psychologists, we have theologians, we have all kinds of experts. Education is essential – this is what we need. We need to get educated on this topic. There is a lot that Christians, Muslims and Jews share about family and that needs to be discussed.
I was going to show you a video but the bench line is 9pm. I can whats app it to you. On a more serious note what we are doing is good. Civil disobedience, working outside the schools but we must have an alternative. When we withdraw we must have an alternative as to what we want to give.
At the moment I speak from the Muslim community. We have nothing. Sex is very attractive. It is very enthusiastic. It is very mysterious. We have no alternative to offer our young people to think about other than what is going on in the mainstream.
There is a lot more to say but we can do that in the discussion.
*Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett is an activist in the social sphere. She holds a Doctorate in Psychology. Kate has been working in mental health for around fifteen years. In 2018 she set up StopRSE and has been working in the Muslim community creating awareness about compulsory relationship and sexuality education in schools.
**Robin Marsh met the Unification Church in 1980. Since then he has worked in the USA, South Korea and UK. He studied a post graduate two year course in Religious Education at the interfaith oriented Unification Theological Seminary from 1985 -1987. He was involved in inter-racial, ecumenical and interfaith activity in the United States. He began similar work in the UK from 1996 with the Inter-religious International Federation for World Peace and then as the Secretary General for the Universal Peace Federation (UPF) UK. He was involved in various human rights campaigns and helped to coordinate 18 European delegations on Middle East Peace Initiative tours visiting Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Gaza etc. He and the UPF team have been expanding a wide network of peace minded contacts through their activities.
***Dr Fuad Nahdi is the Executive Director of the Radical Middle Way and Founding Editor of the pioneering Q-News – the Muslim Magazine which he founded in 1992. His contributions in fields of media, community activism and interfaith work spanning over three decades have been widely recognised in the UK and across the Muslim world. Fuad is a graduate of the Centre for Journalism at City University, London. He has worked and contributed to media organisations from around the world including Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Arab News, The Nation, ABC News, Crescent International, Africa Events and BBC World Service. His journalism and commentary has been sought after by The Economist, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Statesman, Arab News, Mail & Guardian (South Africa), BBC, Arabia Magazine, Asahi Shimbun, Channel 4, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and others.
