When the State Bans Street Preaching
Inappropriate Speech, Islamophobia, and Evangelical Privacy
Could the public preaching of Christian truth become illegal in Britain? If it did, how would our evangelical leaders react?
I was going to call this article “If the State Bans Street Preaching…” Then I heard about Birmingham, the second largest city in England, where—as I write—police have been engaged not only in removing English flags from lampposts, but in enforcing a new public order which does, in fact, ban street preaching.
Oh, they don’t call it the banning of “preaching” of course. They simply call it the banning all things that make too much “noise”, including musical instruments or anything that uses amplification, etc. As reported, Birmingham Council made a statement saying there were fears that such activities contributed to “an environment of harassment and lack of control” in the city centre.
The state doesn’t like losing control, of course, and clearly feels it has far too little power over how we think and speak as it is. If some feel “harassed” by what some people say, presumably the best solution would be for the state to stop people saying anything at all? Or if they absolutely must speak, perhaps they ought do so without the kind of conviction that might suggest they actually believe what they’re saying. After all, there’s a chance someone else might actually hear them.
The authorities make the public order sound as if it is nothing to do with the content of what is preached, merely the volume at which it is preached. Similarly with the removal of England flags in public spaces: the Council’s response was that it was not that the symbol itself was the problem, it was merely a matter of public safety. Apparently the hanging of the flags “could put lives at risk”.
Yes, think of all those worldwide deaths directly attributed to the hanging of flags on lamp posts. It’s a wonder that the benevolent council lets the inhabitants of Birmingham leave their homes at all, such is the myriad of safety risks that await them from all manner of deadly sights and sounds.
Why Street Preaching Matters
The right to a hearing is a very English thing. When the Great Awakener of 18th century England, John Wesley (an ordained Anglican minister) was barred from preaching inside the church building, he famously went outside to the church graveyard and stood to preach on his own father’s grave, as it was the only piece of land in the vicinity from which he could not legally be removed.
People flocked to hear him preach in town centres across England, in part because they sensed that—unlike the dull pulpits of “allowed” preaching—the streets might actually be a place where one might hear something risky enough to be true by someone who truly believed it.
I have often reflected on this “existential” significance of street preaching both theologically and missiologically, even publishing a couple journal articles on it a few years ago, one for the Harvard Theological Review and another for the International Journal of Public Theology. This wasn’t mere academic speculation but was in part borne from the experience of God quite unexpectedly calling me to do some of it a few years earlier, not long after I had begun my PhD studies. Street preaching is not a usual thing for PhD students of theology to be doing, as I soon found out. (Perhaps I’ll talk about such experiences in more detail another time.)
The Rite of Privacy
The reason street preaching remains especially relevant today is not necessarily that it is the most fruitful or effective form of public witness. Lots of street preaching really isn’t. It’s often wildly ineffective, even if we should never write off what God may be doing even in the hearts of those who walk by, apparently despising it.
Some street preachers who revel in the Christlike call to be “despised” by the world (because no one wants to hear them) might also reflect that there are better and worse ways of doing it when seeking to communicate to apathetic passers by who did not necessarily request a sermon on their way through town that afternoon.
Most westerners—English people in particular—first need to be “won over” to the very fact you are there at all, regardless of what you are actually saying. Unless there is some kind of spectacle afoot, for many English people street preaching instinctively feels like an invasion of that most sacred English rite: privacy.
And yet, this is also why street preaching is even more significant now than it has been for a long time. Why? Because this notion of the street preacher invading one’s “privacy” becomes an increasingly “political” matter in which the state is especially interested. There have been many examples in recent years of local authorities putting pressure on, and even threatening to ban the practice of street preaching altogether.
Muslims and Police
Rotherham—where I preached in a Salvation Army church earlier this year—became infamous in recent times as the place where Muslim rape gangs were covered up by local authorities. This is the kind of egregious evil that you’d think ought to inspire more street preachers, not less. Yet recently, several local police took action against one street preacher simply because he questioned the authority of the Quran, which made a Muslim feel “threatened”.
It was not because the man threatened anyone, it was because the very notion that the Quran could be questioned publicly was itself deemed a “threatening” act.
In many such cases (and there are many such cases) it often comes to nothing in the end. But it serves to drive fear or apathy into other would-be preachers of inconvenient truth, on or off the street. For many, it would be hard enough summoning the courage to get out there in the first place and speak out, let alone the frustration of potential arrest, whether or not the charges stuck.
Nor is it inconceivable that more and more of these charges will begin to stick, the more the present Labour government finesses its commitment to tackling what it deems “Islamophobic hate speech”: offending Muslim beliefs. This is yet one more example in which Britain’s foolish commitment to multiculturalism enables its capitulation to soft Jihad, a slow form of national suicide which feels particularly agonising to watch.
But it’s not just the secularists and the Muslims who oppose robust proclamation of Christian truth in Britain today. It’s also professing Christians! Especially Methodists, even if they are the very people spiritually “descended” from the aforementioned bold street preacher, John Wesley.
Methodists and Pietists
Earlier this year, the faithful Gospel street preacher, Jon Pilgrim, had his book table trashed whilst preaching—not by an atheist or an Islamist, but by an angry woman from the local Methodist church. Sad to see, but even more sadly, not all that surprising. Perhaps the Methodists objected to the gentleman’s “inappropriate tone”?
With professing Christians objecting, it will become easier for secular councils to interpret the street preacher as a crazy “extremist” who technically doesn’t “have to” preach on the street, who could just as easily profess his faith like those nice Methodists do in their little chapel down the road (even if no one ever turns up to hear it). In times like these, it is often precisely that which the world (and/or Methodists!) deem “inappropriate” that may well be the most appropriate thing to say.
Christian Concern recently won a case regarding one street preacher in Aldershot, where the local council attempted to bring an injunction which would have effectively criminalised the public proclamation of Christianity! This win by the Christian Legal Centre demonstrated that Christianity is not, in fact, “illegal” in a Christian country after all. Who knew! Perhaps even John Wesley himself would have been proud.
This is why it’s so important to keep fighting the good fight for the Christian foundations of this nation at all levels.
The faithful Church must remain watchful and courageous in times ahead. This is not a time to rest on our laurels and play the waiting game. What has been built will continue to be undermined if we do not continue to fight for it. For too long, a mutated evangelical pietism has played into the hands of secularism by extolling an emphasis on the holding of Christian faith as a “private” matter, steering clear of nasty things like “politics”. This is just what secularism ordered, of course, because it makes us passive towards its advances.
As discussed in my recent interview with Bob of Speaker’s Corner, what is needed as a counteraction to Seculardom in Britain today is a return to the more front-footed “muscular” Christianity that built Christendom—the kind that doesn’t scoff at the thought of changing the world for Christ but recognises that that’s quite literally why we’re here.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, I had originally drafted this a while ago with the idea of the government hypothetically illegalising street preaching. In light of police responses in the last year alone—and with the likelihood of yet more escalated tensions to come over Islamism, immigration, and multiculturalism—it feels as though it is no longer a mere hypothesis but a genuine possibility.
An Evangelical Thought Experiment
If the government eventually did create, say, preacherless “buffer zones” in city centres, how do you think mainstream evangelical leaders would react?
Remember that the average evangelical leader's main reason for not getting involved in political engagement is because they believe first and foremost in the preaching of the Gospel. That's how they will often say change occurs exclusively, not through things like “laws” and “policies” and “cultural norms”, etc., but through proclamation of the truth.
So, it ought to be obvious that if the preaching of the Gospel—the main point of everything—was indeed banned by the state, how would they respond? With bold proclamation? With vociferous critique of the government legislation?
Here's my 4-Step prediction of what would happen...
