Police officers across the country are arresting street preachers for publicly declaring their religious beliefs.
LAUREN SMITH
Forget terror plots, knife crime, or rampant theft, Britain’s police have bigger things to worry about—Christian street preachers. Shaun O’Sullivan, a 36-year-old preacher at the evangelical Awaken church in Swindon, was acquitted unanimously by a jury last week at Crown Court. He faced charges of racial and religious harassment against Muslims for saying the words: “Pray for the Jews and pray for the Palestinians.” This culminated in a six-day trial, costing an estimated £20,000.
This is by no means O’Sullivan’s first brush with the law. The preacher has been arrested 16 times now, but so far, none of the charges have stuck. Before his September arrest, he was put in handcuffs for saying “God bless you” to pro-Palestine protesters at a demonstration. In one clip he posted to TikTok after the incident, a female police officer can be heard confirming over the phone that this phrase is criminal, “if it causes distress.” The officer explains that, “if that person was a Muslim,” they could be distressed. The case was, thankfully, dropped.
As a result of his many run-ins with the authorities, O’Sullivan believes that Wiltshire Police have a “vendetta” against him. He told the Daily Mail: “I’m not racist and I have no problem with people disagreeing with my religious views, but I do have a right to state them because we have freedom of speech in this country—even if it does offend people.” He says he is now attempting to sue the force for harassment.
Nor is O’Sullivan the only Christian street preacher who has found himself being treated like a criminal. In fact, British police seem to be weirdly obsessed with arresting Christians for expressing their (perfectly legal) beliefs in public. A recent legal case might offer some hope for O’Sullivan in his pursuit of compensation from Wiltshire Police. In 2022, 52-year-old Angus Cameron was preaching in central Glasgow when he was handcuffed and bundled into the back of a police van. Apparently, a passerby had accused Cameron of using homophobic language. He was released after an hour in custody, but warned that he would face prosecution for breaching the peace—a shockingly broad crime that, in Scotland, can land you in prison for up to a year. Fortunately for Cameron, the case against him was dropped and he was awarded £5,500 in damages by Scotland Police for wrongful arrest.
The sheer number of these cases point to something worse than mere incompetence—a growing willingness to treat public Christianity as quasi-criminal. In 2019, Oluwole Ilesanmi was preaching in north London when he was arrested for making ‘Islamophobic’ remarks. Ilesanmi had his Bible confiscated, was taken into a police car and driven around for four miles, before he was “de-arrested” and left in an unfamiliar suburb. He was only able to get home because a generous stranger gave him enough money to get the bus home. Ilesanmi was, at least, awarded £2,500 from the Metropolitan Police for his ordeal.
Many other street preachers have been arrested, only to have their charges dropped or their convictions overturned—including Hazel Lewis, who was arrested in 2020 for saying the words “You are an advocate of Satan and I rebuke you in Jesus’s name” to a gay person, but was later acquitted. Or David McConnell, who was found guilty of “harassing” a transwoman by calling him a man. His conviction was, thankfully, overturned.
In one particularly shocking incident, Dia Moodley, a pastor at a church in Bristol, was assaulted last year while preaching and hosting a public question-and-answer session outside the University of Bristol. Moodley, in response to a question from a Muslim man, mentioned that there was a difference in moral standards between Islam and Christianity. He also mentioned that he believed God had created sex to be binary. For this, Moodley was physically attacked by those who disagreed, pushing him off the stepladder he was standing on and tearing a placard from his hands. The police were called, but, instead of arresting the people who had assaulted Moodley, officers led the pastor away in handcuffs. They suspected him of “racially or religiously aggravated harassment without violence.” The investigation was promptly dropped, and Avon and Somerset Police were subsequently forced to pay Moodley’s legal costs. Unfortunately, a near repeat of that incident occurred earlier this year, when Muslim men pinned him to the ground and threatened to stab Moodley, and police responded by warning they might have to arrest Moodley—again.
It’s astonishing that police forces across the UK have failed to learn anything from these episodes. The legal grounds for arresting street preachers are flimsy to say the least. Even in a ‘best’ case scenario from the police perspective, the preacher is arrested, tried, and convicted—only to later be acquitted and awarded monetary compensation. Why, then, do officers insist on arresting Christians for these bogus ‘crimes’? One very pragmatic reason is to prevent or put a stop to violence. It is far easier to arrest one person—in these cases, the preacher—who is being threatened or attacked than it is to detain multiple people or even an entire crowd. Tensions are high between different ethnic and religious groups in the UK right now, and stopping those from boiling over is, generally, a high priority for any police force. Paradoxically, coppers often feel the need to arrest preachers to keep them safe—even if this is expressed in a tremendously clumsy way.
A less charitable explanation for arrest-happy police is, of course, that many in the police have internalised identity politics’ victim hierarchy—in which Christians are as close to the bottom as a group can be. The feelings and comfort of LGBT people and the Muslim community are considered to be far more important than the rights of Christians (or, indeed, anyone) to speak freely. Some individual officers no doubt believe they have a duty to shield minorities from offence, even where the law may not necessarily agree with them.
Regardless of the justification, this muddled and inconsistent approach to free speech is chilling. People should not have to go through the humiliating experience of being arrested, interrogated, and potentially appearing before a court for saying words—even if they are found not guilty at the end of it. Feeling offended or hurt does not warrant criminal action, no matter how controversial a belief might be. If the police cannot grasp this, then it is they, not high-street Bible-bashers, who are the real threat to public order and to liberty.
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