Dr Martin Davie’s article ‘Understanding the reasons for the conviction of Päivi Räsänen’ sheds invaluable light on why Christian street preachers will continue to be arrested in 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 in the conviction of Räsänen".
"Dissent is being criminalised by a liberal state to protect 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 legislation, passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, was to combat football hooliganism. But police officers are now 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 good news that Avon and Somerset Police have dropped their five-month investigation into Pastor Dia Moodley, albeit rather 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 can review that material and consider whether any further inquiries are necessary.”
It would appear from his arrest and that of other Christian street preachers, such as Shaun O'Sullivan in Swindon in 2020 and John Sherwood in Uxbridge in 2021, that the police officers involved were ideologically committed to suppressing conservative Christian opinions. Otherwise they could 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 angry crowd of Muslim men. When a bystander told her, “This is a Muslim area,” she said: “In this country, we have freedom of speech … I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him. He’s not in your home.”
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 good grasp of the law: that a person preaching peacefully in a public place is exercising a right protected by Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, and that the feelings of offended bystanders, however loudly expressed, are irrelevant. Unfortunately, she is the exception rather than the rule," he wrote.
Indeed. In defending Christian freedom of expression she is the exception rather than the rule in UK policing precisely for the reasons 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 in the past couple of decades, police forces are now full of people who are personally committed to that ideology with its strictly-defined hierarchy of victimhood. At the top of the neo-Marxist pyramid are those with ‘protected characteristics’ such as Muslims or LGBT people. If a conservative Christian offends someone at the top 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 shed light on the “new liberal authoritarianism which uses an appeal to the supposed need to 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 can lay claim to the vocabulary of the victim has unlocked a major, even irresistible, source of cultural power. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are simply licences to oppress and marginalise the weak. True freedom is found in closing down such traditional virtues and replacing them with a victim centred authoritarianism.”
This victim-centred authoritarianism explains why without a radical cultural change in UK policing Christian street preachers are going to continue to face state-sponsored harassment. Martin Davie’s piece really is a must-read for conservative Christians wanting to understand why the present 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.
