Short story shorter: A street preacher was told to shut up and move on by a police officer. She is now being defended by the Free Speech Union (FSU).
I support the mission of the FSU and I think they do valuable and necessary work, but I think on this issue they are wrong.
I’d better get one small ‘elephant in the room’ ushered out into the fresh air first though: I think critics of the police who say they are willing to shut down Christian god-botheres – but would never do the same to Muslims – are probably right. But an uneven, ‘two-tier’ application of the law is no big surprise. I also think that the tutting disapproval of the officer is unprofessional and unlikely in another scenario. But, be that as it may, this is still not a free speech issue.
Let me explain. Christians – along with other religious groups – are not denied the right to express their views or talk about their faith in the UK. Practically everyone lives in walking distance of a church from which sermons can be heard twice every Sunday. These churches happily have study groups, prayer meetings and social get-togethers where people can express their religion to their hearts’ content without any interference from the State. In the foyer, they will likely have a variety of leaflets anyone is free to take. In the churchyard visible from the road, it is not uncommon to see advertising boards with religious messages.
The faithful are free to knock on doors and invite people to join them or ask if they’d like to hear their gospel. They are free to push their tracts through letterboxes or hand out magazines and pamphlets outside events or shopping centres, which many do.
There are dedicated newspapers, and television and radio programmes devoted to religion which invite participation. Today there is even democratised social media – you could run a YouTube channel, TikTok feed or Facebook group talking about your faith. You can comment on newspaper articles or tweet your heart out.
Absolutely no one is stopping a religious discourse from being had or being heard.
What you don’t have the right to do is screech at an unwilling audience through a megaphone or other amplified electronics in a public place. That is not speech, it is bullying. It is depriving others of the quiet enjoyment of public space. Even people sympathetic to the message might not want to hear it amidst amplified distortion and feedback above the city din.
Yes, you may have a right to self-expression, but others have a right to a quiet – or at least not unnecessarily loud – life.
For example, someone might decide the place to assail you with a loudhailer is on a train. It they are forced to STFU, their rights are not being violated, they are being balanced against other people’s rights to listen to a podcast (via headphones!!!) or to read the paper, or to daydream, or to catch up on some work on a long commute. It is their space as much as yours, but by amplified preaching you would be usurping that space and asserting your illegitimate ownership of it. It would not matter if your message were religious, political, or a rant about alien abductions. It would be unwelcome, and ‘free speech’ doesn’t mean you have the right to force others to listen to you.
There is a worrying social trend that leans away from free speech and towards compelled listening. In a society that has never had more avenues for free expression, there is a tendency to opt for means that inconvenience and annoy, or prevent others from going about their lawful business, not as a last resort, but as the default method of communication. Blocking roads and preventing other people from getting to work, or to medical appointments, or running their errands, now seems the way to get a point across in preference to all the other means of doing so at our disposal.
It doesn’t stop there. Blockading supermarket aisles, or invading restaurants where people have come for a quiet meal, are just more examples of this trend towards forcing people to listen to you and then screaming about your “right to free speech” being violated if you are asked to put a sock in it.
There is self-evidently a time and a place for speech. If a troupe of thespians has hired a theatre to tell the tale of The Tempest, the stage is theirs, not yours. To interrupt their performance because you want to rant about your grievance is rude and unnecessary, and it would not be a violation of your rights if the ushers threw you out. On the contrary, it is you violating the rights of those who have invested their time, energy and money rehearsing and presenting a play, and those who have bought tickets in anticipation of an enjoyable evening – which your antics have ruined. You are the monster, not those who silence you.
The police and authorities have got a lot wrong on speech issues – from so-called “non crime hate incident” policing to prosecutions and disproportionate sentences for social media posts, but it is perfectly legitimate to ask people shouting the odds in a public place to pipe down.
I just wish they’d do it more often, and more even-handedly.
As for the FSU and this Christian preacher. My advice would be to not jump on every case that makes the news. No one is trying to silence or stifle the expression of Christianity in the UK. This is ‘silencing’ in the interests of peace-and-quiet; it is not shutting down debate or free expression.
