This is an excerpt from Unshaken Allegiance, Patrick Parkinson's new book on the shifting landscape of religious freedom in Australia and beyond, and how to respond well to this as a faithful Christian. The excerpt below is from pages 19–21, part of a chapter exploring whether God requires his people to obey oppressive laws.

The decline in freedom of speech

Even laws which are, on their face, neutral can be used to harass people who dissent from a particular viewpoint or ideology. Because Christian views and values are now offensive to many, laws that prohibit offensive speech may be used to target people of faith who express opinions that are not institutionally favoured.

Laws making it punishable to cause offence to others are proliferating in several countries. In the United States, with robust protections for freedom of speech and religion in the First Amendment to the Constitution, the courts are likely to be a bulwark against interference with basic liberties. However, protection for freedom of speech elsewhere is not as robust, which allows for the proliferation of such laws. There is enormous scope for provisions about causing offence to be used as a pretext for action against those who express points of view that some find offensive.

Consider, for example, section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 in the UK. This makes it an offence to send “by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”. In December 2022, James Goddard received a letter from a police officer attached to London’s Public Order Crime Team.* Goddard had posted a ten-second video of Wembley Way, a road leading to England’s national football stadium, which was lined with a corridor of colourful ‘Progress Pride Flags’ to mark the Pride movement’s 50th anniversary. Most of the video simply showed him walking up the road, drawing attention to the corridor of flags, but he commented adversely about it at the end, using a pejorative term about those who identify with LGBTQ+ groups or causes. Most social media posts are ephemeral, and unless the person posting a video has a very large following, it will be viewed by only a handful of others. This video, most likely, made only the smallest amount of noise inside Goddard’s social-media echo chamber, and only for a moment.

The video, nonetheless, came to the attention of a police officer, perhaps because of a complaint from an activist. The police officer’s letter confidently asserted that Goddard’s comments “would be considered grossly offensive” in contravention of section 127 of the Communications Act. The reason the officer gave is that the comments targeted “the LGBTQ community”. Consequently, Goddard was required—not asked, but required—to arrange a ‘voluntary interview’. If he declined to do so, the matter would be referred “for consideration of prosecution”. So the ‘invitation’ was accompanied by a threat.

In fact, the chance that charges would be laid in matters of this kind is not high. Prosecutors’ guidelines on prosecuting such matters are written against a background of acknowledging the right of freedom of speech.† Those guidelines also require the consent of a senior prosecutor before certain laws, including section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, can be used to bring charges—or, if charges are laid, before a prosecution can proceed.

In the 2021 decision of DPP v Bussetti, the High Court in England held that, to satisfy the requirements of section 127, the message must have been “not simply offensive but grossly offensive. The fact that the message was in bad taste, even shockingly bad taste, was not enough.”‡ In other cases, the courts have made it clear that there is no right not to be offended. As one judge put it in a 1999 decision concerning the arrest of three preachers:

Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.§

However, any police involvement in such matters has a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The vast majority of offensive commentary on social media does not attract the use of scarce police resources, and so it is reasonable to ask why some offensive speech receives police attention. Fewer than six percent of offences reported to police led to a suspect being charged or summonsed in 2022-23 in England and Wales.‖ Shoplifting prosecutions have declined to a small fraction of the number of cases prosecuted a decade ago, while reports to the police have increased by a third in the same period.¶ Perhaps the police might have better uses for their time than policing language.

* ‘UK police want to interview man over his Twitter commentary on video of pride flags’, Free Republic, 7 January 2023.

† ‘Communications Offences’, Crown Prosecution Service

‡ DPP v Bussetti [2021] EWHC 2140 (Admin); see ‘Communications Offences’, CPS.

§ Lord Justice Sedley in Redmond-Bate v DPP [1999] EWHC Admin 733.

‖ Home Office, ‘Official Statistics: Crime outcomes in England and Wales 2022 to 2023’, Gov.UK, 20 July 2023.

¶ M Dathan, ‘Labour: “Shameful neglect” of shoplifting must end’, The Times, 26 August 2024.