Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to a recent report in the Independent, at least 100 preteen children in the United Kingdom have been forced into marriages in the last five years. That includes 62 under the age of 11 and 27 that were under the age of six. According to Dame Jasvinder Sengar, who ran away from home as a child to avoid a forced marriage and now runs a charity in the UK, the actual numbers are probably higher, given how UK authorities failed to act.
To stop the widespread grooming gangs and other abuses of children, as she was quoted in the article as saying, "I know that when schools open in September, there will be missing children. Is someone going to ask where they are, or are they simply just going to go off the school roll? Or children will come back engaged or even married." End quote. In fact, all the way back in 2005, the British government established the Forced Marriage Unit in order to coordinate a response to the crisis between. And family members and law enforcement, though a good sign, the government wants to take the issue seriously.
How on earth did British society devolve to the point that they need a task force on forced marriage? And according to the government department responsible for immigration enforcement in the U.K., no particular culture should be blamed for child marriages. Forced marriage, they said, is not a problem specific to one country, religion, or culture. There's no archetypal victim or perpetrator, and no two cases are the same. "End quote." Of course, in reality, forced child marriage is not really a general British problem at all.
It's a problem unique to various Muslim communities within the U.K. As Ayon Hursi Ali noted, while it's good that some media outlets called on the government to increase its efforts, they've all practiced self-censorship when it comes to describing who's actually doing this. As Ali put it, in its coverage of the dark underbelly of modern multicultural Britain, the words Islam or Muslim never appear. Why not? Who else is marrying off five-year-olds?
It's a similar tactic that was taken by several prominent media outlets reporting on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For example, the New York Times published a piece entitled "After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers." Some school curricula equivocated on whether Osama bin Laden was really behind the attacks. Or ask students to question why he hated the West so much to begin with. In a brilliant article in Tablet, Ayon Hursi Ali argued that what media coverage of Muslims so often neglects to mention is what Muslims actually believe. Instead, acts of terrorism are described as being motivated by poverty or oppression or American imperialism or Israeli aggression.
This is the case with 9/11 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta, for example. Despite the fact that he actually wrote down what motivated him, as Ali put it in her article, "There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. There's only a young Muslim man in a German apartment arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come." Ali then further noted how, in the wake of 9/11, well-meaning politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair insisted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. Perhaps hoping to tamp down the violence, they instead reinforced a misunderstanding—one held by many secular Westerners—that religion is this private, secondary matter, and that real causes are socio-economic.
But downplaying religious zealotry is not only to misunderstand what motivates. Islamic terror. It has led us to very foolish responses, as Ali concluded in her piece. And I quote: "It's frankly insane to demand that the West recognize the right of our enemies to destroy and replace the civilization that we built according to the values of the Reformation and the Enlightenment with the values of other cultures distinguished by centuries of stagnation and decay." To deny the radical and positive importance of Western culture to the human inheritance is more than a form of historical and individual blindness. It is a death wish that we can no longer afford to indulge.
For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Paget. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to Breakpoint.org.
Hey, John Stone Street here. I want to say thanks for listening to Breakpoint, and I want to invite you to the 2027 Colson Center National Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 4th to the 6th, 2027. This year, we're going to talk all about what it means to pursue wisdom. We live in an age of information overload, and it's easy to confuse information or the access to information with wisdom. But as the church, God calls us to pursue wisdom.
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