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A Christian preacher brought a legal battle against the police in the United Kingdom after he was told by authorities that he could no longer comment on other religions while he gave street sermons.
Police conceded that they acted "disproportionately" when they forbade Dia Moodley from commenting on other religions, like atheism or Islam, while he preached in the streets of Bristol, England, according to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International. The Christian leader received a settlement from the Avon & Somerset Police after lawyers from ADF UK and the Free Speech Union argued the authorities wrongfully tried to ban him from criticizing alternative worldviews by discriminating against him on religious grounds and for breaching his European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, assembly and association.
Moodley, a Bristol-based pastor and father of four, is known for preaching in the streets using a Q&A style where he allows passersby to ask him questions and challenge his beliefs, which often leads to references to other religions or beliefs and asking those who engage with him questions in return.
"There would be a signboard that said 'Stop and ask any question' and so whatever I'd be speaking on, I'd literally stop and take questions from people," Moodley told Fox News Digital. "But part of my agreement in taking questions from people was that I could ask the question back. That question and answer discourse … gathered a crowd very quickly ... It could grow from two people to 100 people in a matter of minutes."
Dia Moodley engaging in a question and answer session while preaching on the streets of Bristol. (Dia Moodley)
Moodley said his congregation laid ground rules when they decided to preach in the public square with the aim of not preaching to breach the peace or cause problems. If they felt the crowd was getting out of control, Moodley would step down from the ladder and stop preaching so that the crowds could disperse.
While Moodley said some people would come to listen and learn, others were "merely troublemakers" who came to be offended or upset at what was being said. Then, they would often call the police and complain that certain topics were being discussed. In one example, he said Muslims would get upset if he referenced the Quran, complaining to the police that he was being Islamophobic by reading the Muslim religious text in the public square.
Moodley has been fighting back in an effort to protect his right to have a conversation without the authorities weighing in, simply because they disagree with what he was saying. Freedom of speech – and its limits in the UK – have been in the spotlight recently.
"Over the last number of years, increasingly restrictive laws have been passed, introducing a new public order act that seeks to restrict even more the right to speak freely on controversial matters in the public square," Lorcan Price, legal counsel for ADF International told Fox News Digital. "I'm afraid we're going to see more of it in the future, because the underlying problem of this instinct towards censorship, particularly of Christians, is still there in police forces, it's still there in government ministries."
Before Moodley began street preaching, he decided to meet with local police and give them a clear explanation of his church, what he planned to do and discuss and the potential problems he and police might encounter, so they could "help each other" and be prepared. While he said they were "very reluctant" to engage in such a relationship, Moodley said one officer eventually got on board.
After he sought help, police began to regularly attend Moodley’s public preaching.
"I went into the constabulary every month, and I met with them to say, ‘Okay, what complaints are you receiving? How do we deal with this? These are how the officers have responded. How can we help them get better trained at how to respond?’ And we'd have these meetings continuously. There came a time, a few years later, where there was a change in management and a new officer came in and immediately [we] began to encounter some problems, and we found that the police were sending people almost undercover to investigate what was being said and there were times when, the crowd would actually come and tell us the police had asked them to complain against us."
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But at the meeting, he was served with a warning notice that forbid him from criticizing any religions other than Christianity, banning him from "delivering a sermon or religious address at a time or place that has not had prior consent and approval of Avon & Somerset Constabulary" and from using "any words or language that could be considered to negatively affect public health and morals, or have the effect of inciting crime and disorder."
"I was greatly disturbed and saddened, obviously," he said. "I did not sign the document, [but] they said if I continued preaching ... they would build a case against me, it would lead to criminal proceedings against me."
"What is the argument from an atheistic approach? What is the argument from an evolutionist that we should not tackle? When did evolutionism and atheism become such a protected group of people that we can't contend with them or have a debate with them, about what they believe?" he asked.
As an immigrant to the United Kingdom from South Africa who has been in the country for 26 years, Moodley said he is trying to champion freedom of speech as an immigrant to the country because "what's also being questioned is not just the fact that we're not able to speak these things, but it came down to officers now questioning whether we have the proper interpretation of the Bible … We felt we couldn't let it go, we had to take it to court to make sure this doesn't happen to us or to anyone else."
Dia Moodley is an immigrant to the UK from South Africa. (Dia Moodley)
"Our freedom of speech is under threat, our freedom of religion is under threat, and we're thankful for this case going in our favor," Moodley said. Now, he plans to keep preaching as he always has.
"I'm going to be out this Saturday preaching," Moodley said. "I'm not going with any intention to be beaten up or have things thrown at me. But during summertime, it's slushies and milkshakes. During wintertime, it's hot chocolate and coffees … We've been told a number of times by people, we're going to find something more dangerous to throw at you."
Unfortunately, Price said Moodley's case is part of a pattern in the UK where increasingly Christians in the public square are being arrested, harassed or subject to legal restrictions by the authorities simply for saying things that other people find challenging, upsetting or controversial.
"That's a real problem for freedom of expression in this country, which is the country in the world that really introduced the concept of civil rights with the Magna Carta all the way through to the unwritten constitution that we've lived by for so many centuries," he said.
"The legal framework here is public order law … if you're engaged in conduct that could cause alarm or be grossly offensive in public, the police have the power to give a caution or a warning notice, which is what happened in Dia's case, to move you on from a public place," Price said. "If you refuse to comply, then they can arrest you. This law though generally, for most of its existence, was associated with people who were engaged in kind of harassment or any kind of threatening behavior."
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"We've only seen in recent years, sadly, that it has started to be applied to the totally legitimate activities of Christians in the public square and Dia's case is a very good example of this, where simply because of what he's saying, some people find it challenging or upsetting, that they're very quick to call the police."
Price explained that the UK doesn't have the strong protections laid out in First Amendment for freedom of speech, expression and religion, which gives UK citizens a much weaker protection in law that is heavily balanced against things like public order and discrimination.
"This case is just one example of the systematic problem we're seeing in this country when it comes to an instinct towards censorship on the part of the authorities, particularly where Christians are concerned. And it's a very troubling pattern, that we're seeing," Price said.
ADF legal counsel said Dia Moodley's case is just one example of a systematic problem in the country. (Courtesy of ADF UK)
In addition, at the official policymaking level, even though the UK left the European Union, it's still a member of the Council of Europe so it still subscribes to the European Convention on Human Rights. Because of this, many people don't realize the UK is still under the authority of the European Court of Human Rights and "those institutions have what I call a systematic hostility to free speech, where the speech is seen to be interfering with I suppose the best way to put it is social stability," Price said.
"In the view of the European Court of Human Rights, countries are entitled to place restrictions on speech where it interferes with social order and public order and stability in society," he said. "As our societies became less Christian and more religiously diverse, countries responded, and the authorities responded, by passing more and more restrictions on what you could say because they feared things like race riots or religious riots or inter-community conflict.
The Bible has some very strong things to say about how people should live their lives and because some people find that upsetting, offensive or troubling, there is an instinct by authorities and policymakers to censor those views because they don't want to provoke inter-community conflict, Price said. Society's ability "to ventilate the truth in an open way without fear of legal consequences" and human rights like the entitlement to freedom of expression suffer as a result, he said.
"This was the impetus, really, behind the censorship that we see in the European sphere and that includes, in this case, sadly, the United Kingdom," he added. "I don't see any immediate solutions to it, unfortunately and Christians are at the receiving end of this because what Christians have to say is a radically challenging message."
Kendall Tietz is a Production Assistant with Fox News Digital.
