When The State Arrests The Peaceful To Appease The Evil

In May 2025, The Telegraph published a curious report about a group of Christians in south-west London. It didn’t make much of a splash online, but it marked a shift in the way our authorities are dealing with religious advocacy.

The Labour-run Rushmoor Borough Council had attempted to secure an injunction to ban Christians not just from preaching in two local town centres, but from praying and handing out leaflets altogether.

Their justification? The preachers were “offensive” and had caused “alarm and distress” to passers-by.

Under the terms of the drafted injunction, Christians would have been banned from praying for anyone “without their prior permission,” handing out leaflets or Bibles, and even placing hands on someone during prayer with consent.

The proposed restrictions went further still.

They included bans on approaching people to discuss Christianity and preaching sermons deemed “hostile” towards anyone with a protected characteristic, such as age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

It marked yet another moment where authorities prioritised emotion over a basic "human right," placing supposed “distress” above freedom of expression and association—an arguably childish impulse, born under the rubric of modern progressivism.

An injunction is a civil court order that can compel someone to stop doing something. Unlike Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs), which councils can issue directly to curb “nuisance”, injunctions must be granted by a judge.

Rushmoor Council, under Labour leader Gareth Williams, opted for the latter, attempting to weaponise legislation to silence preachers in a way we haven’t quite seen before.

If a judge had granted the injunction, Christians in breach of the order could have been jailed for up to 2 years.

Such paradoxically nannying yet bullying conduct hasn’t been exclusive to Labour Party politicians either.

Last month, the Kingsborough Centre, a Pentecostal church, successfully overturned Conservative-led Hillingdon Borough Council’s PSPO that had criminalised much of its outreach activity.

In 2023, Hillingdon and its leader Ian Edwards imposed a PSPO in Uxbridge town centre. The order banned religious groups from preaching with amplification, handing out leaflets, and even displaying Bible verses in public.

Breaching a PSPO is a criminal offence. It can result in arrest, a £100 on-the-spot fine, and even prison time if someone refuses to pay (at which point the fine can rise to £1,000).

Perhaps the kicker is that these orders can last for up to three years and be extended indefinitely.

When ministers introduced PSPOs in 2014 under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, many justified them citing problems with street drinking, dog fouling, and aggressive begging.

What they didn’t say was that local authorities would later use it to suppress religious expression and censor speech in public spaces.

To name a few, Birmingham City Council, Leicester City Council, Leeds City Council, and Blackpool City Council all currently have active PSPOs which prohibit street preaching in some way or another.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of what some have called blatant “two-tier justice”.

Take 60-year-old miner John Steele, arrested last month after he asked a Muslim woman a question about the Quran and domestic violence. When he refused to give his details, officers escorted him to Rotherham police station, where he was reportedly detained, fingerprinted, and DNA-swabbed.

It is presumed he was charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalises using threatening or abusive language likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress.”

The CPS later dropped the case, stating it was “not needed in the public interest.”

Then there’s Christian pastor Dia Moodley.

In March last year, Avon and Somerset Police arrested Dia for “religiously aggravated harassment without violence” after he spoke of the moral differences between Christianity and Islam in response to a question from a Muslim man.

Dia also expressed his belief God created human beings male and female and sex is therefore binary.

Shortly after, a member of the public assaulted him. Yet, it was Dia who was arrested, with police detaining him for 13 hours. Officers also destroyed four of his signs, including one bearing a Bible verse.

Police eventually dropped the investigation in October 2024.

Then there’s the infamous case of David McConnell.

In June 2021, police arrested him under Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986 for “insulting” a member of the public in Leeds city centre. He had “misgendered” a biological male who identified as a so-called "trans woman."

Before the arrest, Dave had been assaulted, verbally abused, and had his belongings stolen while preaching. Still, he was the one prosecuted.

He was convicted at magistrates’ court, ordered to pay £620 in costs, and sentenced to 80 hours of community service.

Before his sentencing, the Probation Service (which has a Muslim staff member on its front page) referred him to the Joint Counter-Terrorism Team. It is believed David was the first preacher to be convicted for such an offence and referred as a potential “terrorist.”

It wasn’t until March 2023 his conviction was finally overturned.

The list of examples go on and on. Some other names to consider: Hatun Tash, Ian Sleeper, Angus Cameron, John Dunn, Shaun O’Sullivan, David Lynn, Mike Overd, Don Karns, Mike Stockwell, AJ Clarke, and Hazel Lewis—all occurring in the last few years.

The ordeal Northamptonshire Police subjected Conservative councillor Anthony Stevens to, however, really puts the level of partisanship into context.

In August 2023, police arrested Anthony at his home, in front of his family, not for something he said, but for something he retweeted.

The post concerned a video criticising how police treated Christian street preacher Oluwole Ilisanmi, who was arrested by (little tyrant) Sadiq Khan’s Metropolitan Police in Southgate, London, in 2019.

During that arrest, an officer snatched Mr Ilisanmi’s Bible after he was accused of “Islamophobia”. Ilisanmi was later awarded £2,500 for wrongful arrest.

Anthony had simply shared the video as, in his words, “disturbing evidence of religious discrimination in law enforcement.”

Police reportedly told Anthony the original tweet had been posted by a member of registered political party Britain First. Anthony said he had no idea who they were but it didn’t make a difference.

Officers held him in custody for nine hours on suspicion of “stirring up racial hatred” under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, a charge carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in prison—all for a retweet.

The force eventually dropped the case in December, two whole months later.

Indeed, the palpable imbalance, of course, extends to central government.

As freelance journalist and deputy director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, Hardeep Singh, noted in The Critic in March 2024, discrimination against Christians is treated far less seriously than discrimination against Muslims or Jews.

For starters, Home Office figures for 2022/23 recorded 609 “perceived” hate crimes against Christians—nearly 10% of the total. Yet, when have you ever heard a mainstream politician loudly and consistently condemn “Christianophobia”?

Nick Tolson, a former government faith adviser, told Singh:

Crime against churches is often assumed to be normal crime unless proven otherwise whereas crime against other faith communities is considered hate crime unless proven otherwise.

In other words, if there’s an act of vandalism committed against a Christian church it is not assumed to be driven by hate. Compare that to an act of vandalism against a Mosque, and it is.

It is a worldview is often underscored by mainstream coverage—just look at how the BBC reported vandalism on a churchyard and mosque. These stories were published two months apart.

Tolson also highlighted the disparity in government funding for religious protection schemes, noting:

it is often the [faith group] that shouts loudest that gets the Government funding.

During the Hindu-Muslim unrest in 2022, many British Hindus voiced frustration after mandirs in Leicester and Birmingham were targeted by reported religiously motivated violence.

Despite threats and attacks on multiple Hindu temples across the Midlands, not a single mosque was attacked in retaliation. Yet, in the months which followed, the Government allocated over £100 million specifically to protect mosques.

As far as the author can tell, there is not a single example of UK police available in the mainstream press concerning the arrest of a Muslim street preacher for hatred or causing alarm or distress. The only two vaguely related cases were the arrests of Anjem Choudary in 2006 and Abu Haleema in 2021—both for terrorism-related offences, not public preaching.

It’s a crude point to make, but had this kind of tyranny been inflicted on Muslim communities rather than Christian, one gets the sense that they wouldn’t take it lying down. Christians are an easier target.

They certainly didn’t when hoax rumours circulated of the “far right thugs” wanting to hunt them down during the protests and riots last summer.

R Epilogue

Socialists are infamous for the enforcement of secularism. Beginning with Hegel, who saw the state as the highest earthly manifestation of what he called "Absolute Spirit" (absoluter Geist), the culmination of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), or the divine reason working itself out through history.

Lenin viewed religion as fundamentally incompatible with socialist "progress," famously calling it "the opium of the people" (adapting Marx's phrase). He argued religion was an "outdated" social institution which served to pacify the working class. In his view, scientific materialism and socialist education would naturally replace religious belief as society evolved beyond the need for such "primitive" explanations of the world.

While still viewing religion as ultimately serving capitalist interests, Antonio Gramsci focused on how it functioned as part of cultural "hegemony" - the way ruling classes maintain power not just through force, but by making their worldview seem natural and inevitable. His concept of "counter-hegemony," which later influenced liberation theology movements, suggested socialists needed to develop their own cultural and intellectual leadership to compete with religious worldviews.

This view of religion being "outdated" became statistically significant during the 1990s within British teaching colleges and polytechnics – the kind British police officers attended to get fake sociology degrees ending in "studies" – through the adoption of critical pedagogy.