How Religious Freedom Dies

Monday, July 20, 2026

Back in May I made mention of the arrest and conviction of a pastor for preaching near what is known in Northern Ireland as an “abortion safe access zone.”  Things took a turn for the worse this past week as law enforcement in the UK released guidelines for the enforcement of the law that establishes these zones.  It was covered on Fox and Townhall.  It is not a pretty picture.

Fox reports:

The PSNI clarified that the law does not affect “the vast majority” of hospital chaplains or pastors in their day-to-day work, unless their activities bring them into a protected safe access zone.

However, the law makes “no exemptions” for clergy or religious identity. Carrying Bibles, reading Scripture, consensual pastoral ministry, and praying with a patient during end-of-life care could be considered unlawful if the activity takes place inside a protected zone and is recognized as potentially influencing or distressing a protected person nearby, the PSNI said. Visible or “passive” religious practice may also constitute an offense, “even where no direct approach or communication takes place,” the PSNI added.

The PSNI emphasized that a religious person’s intention behind the activity does not protect them from liability under the law.

Imagine two people in the waiting area at a hospital, one waiting to have an abortion and one dying.  Apparently the dying individual’s right to the last rites is outweighed by the right of the person seeking the abortion not to be disturbed by the religious rituals happening across the room.

The immediate response to such news is chaotic.  For one, it is deeply saddening.  A dying soul is denied spiritual comfort to protect a soul that seeks to do harm to yet another soul.  The hypothetical is ugly piled on ugly, compounded by deep and abiding sorrow.

The law is deeply unfair.  We live in a time when houses of worship are increasingly under violent attack – violent.  The numbers are undeniable.  And yet a nation expends this much energy to protect the irreligious while the religious are killed in droves.

Increasingly the idea of protected or special classes is becoming as toxic and divisive as racism ever was.  This law is the very opposite of tolerance.  It denies free speech and it denies freedom of religious expression.  It also denies the fact that unlike violence against churches, the person expressing their faith to an abortion seeker, let alone unrelatedly expressing it across the room, is not motivated by evil, but by love.

But soon anger starts to step in. Admittedly, so anti-abortion zealots, even those motivated by faith, can carry things too far.  They can become ugly and the compassion that motivates them disappears in the ugliness.  But outlawing them is not the answer – it is returning evil for evil.  It is vengeful, not compassionate.  The temptation to strike out is quite strong.

But the temptation must be resisted.  Christ’s church has been persecuted throughout history.  It has survived despite those persecutions and it will here too.