Without a culture shift, Christian street preachers will proceed to be arrested

Dr Martin Davie’s article ‘Understanding the explanations for the conviction of Päivi Räsänen’ sheds invaluable light on why Christian street preachers will proceed to be arrested within the UK.

In his widely-read article on Christian Today, the Anglican theologian described how “victim centred authoritarianism is precisely what we see on display within the conviction of Räsänen”.

“Dissent is being criminalised by a liberal state to guard the alleged victims of conservative Christian teaching,” he writes.

Christian street preachers are almost invariably arrested for causing “harassment, alarm or distress” through “threatening words or behaviour” under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986.

The intention behind this laws, passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, was to combat football hooliganism. But law enforcement officials at the moment are using it against Christian street preachers when a bystander complains that something said about homosexuality or Islam or transgender ideology has offended them.

It is sweet news that Avon and Somerset Police have dropped their five-month investigation into Pastor Dia Moodley, albeit fairly reluctantly. Pastor Moodley was arrested last November under the Public Order Act after giving a street sermon in Bristol criticising Islam and transgender ideology.

A police spokesman said there was insufficient evidence to pursue a criminal investigation but added: “Should more information or footage be received, then we are able to review that material and consider whether any further inquiries are needed.”

It would seem from his arrest and that of other Christian street preachers, reminiscent of Shaun O’Sullivan in Swindon in 2020 and John Sherwood in Uxbridge in 2021, that the law enforcement officials involved were ideologically committed to suppressing conservative Christian opinions. Otherwise they might have simply done what a Metropolitan Police Constable did in Whitechapel, east London, last February.

PC Moule defended a Christian street preacher’s freedom of speech in front of an offended crowd of Muslim men. When a bystander told her, “This is a Muslim area,” she said: “In this country, we’ve got freedom of speech … I understand that you simply guys don’t need to hear it, so I might just recommend that you simply walk away and don’t take heed to him. He’s not in your house.”

Writing in The Telegraph after a video of the exchange went viral on social media, Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, said she “deserves a medal”.

“What she demonstrated, under considerable pressure, was a superb grasp of the law: that an individual preaching peacefully in a public place is exercising a right protected by Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, and that the sentiments of offended bystanders, nonetheless loudly expressed, are irrelevant. Unfortunately, she is the exception fairly than the rule,” he wrote. 

Indeed. In defending Christian freedom of expression she is the exception fairly than the rule in UK policing precisely for the explanations Davie gave in his article on the egregious conviction of Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen by her country’s Supreme Court for ‘hate speech’.

After the capture of the UK’s educational institutions by neo-Marxist ideology prior to now couple of many years, police forces at the moment are stuffed with people who find themselves personally committed to that ideology with its strictly-defined hierarchy of victimhood. At the highest of the neo-Marxist pyramid are those with ‘protected characteristics’ reminiscent of Muslims or LGBT people. If a conservative Christian offends someone at the highest of the ideological pecking order, the police will act quickly to ‘safeguard the victim’ from psychological harm by arresting the speaker.

Davie quoted fellow theologian Carl Trueman to make clear the “latest liberal authoritarianism which uses an appeal to the supposed must protect victims of oppression as a pretext for stifling dissent”.

Trueman wrote in his 2022 book, Strange New World: 

“The claim that certain narratives are psychologically oppressive is plausible to many because our modern intuitions are to see ourselves as psychological beings and anything that obstructs our psychological happiness, our sense of self, is inevitably bad, oppressive, and something to be opposed.

“Victimhood has an intrinsic virtue to it; and anything that may lay claim to the vocabulary of the victim has unlocked a serious, even irresistible, source of cultural power. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are simply licences to oppress and marginalise the weak. True freedom is present in closing down such traditional virtues and replacing them with a victim centred authoritarianism.”

This victim-centred authoritarianism explains why with out a radical cultural change in UK policing Christian street preachers are going to proceed to face state-sponsored harassment. Martin Davie’s piece really is a must-read for conservative Christians wanting to grasp why the current culture is so virulently against the expression of their biblical convictions.

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.