Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is being urged to defend Christian freedoms amid concerns that existing and proposed laws are restricting the public expression of religious beliefs.
Ciarán Kelly, director of The Christian Institute, said the treatment of Christians under abortion buffer zone legislation and the threat posed by a proposed conversion therapy ban would be a defining test of the new government.
Writing for Spiked, Kelly said, “Christians are increasingly finding themselves on the wrong side of existing or proposed laws that threaten the public expression of their beliefs.”
He cited in particular the controversial abortion buffer zone laws, as well as additional guidance on those laws issued by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
Northern Ireland has already seen one high-profile case in which a retired pastor was convicted of breaching buffer zone laws by delivering an open-air sermon. The sermon made no mention of abortion.
Guidance from the PSNI appears to be even more draconian, suggesting that hospital chaplains who openly carry their Bibles on their way to appointments may also be guilty of breaching buffer zone laws.
As Kerry notes, the PSNI guidance suggests that if a woman who has lost a child asks for prayer or a pastoral visit from a chaplain, that chaplain would have to consider his actions very carefully, as another woman accessing abortion services nearby may be “influenced or distressed” by the chaplain’s actions.
“A hospital chaplain comforting grieving parents with scriptural verses after the loss of a child could find himself subject to police scrutiny. That is an astonishing position for any liberal democracy to find itself in," Kelly writes.
Christian free speech is not only inhibited by buffer zone laws, but by a proposed ban on conversion therapy.
A range of Christian bodies, as well as the Free Speech Union, have warned that any potential ban on “abusive” conversion practices could well lead to the criminalisation of parents advising their children against gender transition surgery or pastors praying for people coming to them for help.
Kelly writes, “The concern with this growing legal edifice is not what parliament intends today, but how these laws are interpreted tomorrow.
"It certainly seems that with each new measure, justified by reference to genuinely harmful (and often already illegal) conduct, the space in which Christianity can be expressed publicly gets that bit smaller.”
While Burnham, who was raised Catholic, has “inherited” this state of affairs rather than created it, Kelly argued that one of the “defining tests” of his government would be on whether it would “allow this attack on religious freedom to continue”.
