Larry Siedentop’s definition of secularism gets to the heart of current tensions surrounding issues of conscience and personal liberty. Secularism can be criticised as ‘mere consumerism, materialism and amorality’, but Siedentop (anticipating similar arguments made by Holland, Trueman, Wilson, et al) argues that secularism properly defined owes its origins to Christian expectations of personal liberty – that our understanding of the ‘individual’ is inseparable from the Christian message:

Paul’s conception of the Christ introduces the individual, by giving conscience a universal dimension. Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history?

But what of when individual liberty and conscience collide with that of another? Whose conscience should be given priority?

In my home town our council has established a public spaces protection order (PSPO) around the abortion clinic. This order expressly forbids prayer within the exclusion zone; and from the end of this month a new law will enforce a similar 150 metre buffer zone around all abortion clinics in England and Wales.

This week Adam Smith-Connor was handed a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay more than £9,000 costs for praying outside our local abortion clinic. According to the Bournemouth Echo Smith-Connor, “emailed the council before each visit, informing he would be silently praying for his son who was aborted 22 years ago and for the end of abortion in the UK and across the world.”

Arguably, Smith-Connor was looking to be made a martyr. Before his arrest he was clearly given time and opportunity to walk away. Or he could have simply denied he was praying. But that someone should be arrested, receive a criminal record and have to pay a significant fine (the council had initially asked for costs of £93,441 to be awarded) for silently praying is troubling. As professor of law Andrew Tettenborn observes,

This episode should worry all of us, pro-life or pro-choice, if we believe in the idea of liberty. The by-law Smith-Connor was convicted under (not strictly a by-law, but it has a similar effect) effectively bans the expression of moral opinions that are entirely lawful and quite widely-held from within a sizeable chunk of suburban Bournemouth.

Smith-Connor was following the secular principle, he was acting as “a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions.” He was placing “a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules.” Within British cultural and legal tradition this would be considered entirely unexceptional and Smith-Connor’s arrest and conviction feels more akin to the actions of a totalitarian state than a democratic one.

The paradox of secularism though is the way in which it, “joins rights with duties to others.” Did Smith-Connor, in the exercise of his rights, fail in his duties to others? The PSPO was introduced to protect the rights of women attending the clinic – including the right to not feel threatened or harassed as they enter it. Whose rights should triumph here?

This is where the PSPO, and the forthcoming buffer zones, feel a blunt instrument. Had Smith-Connor been acting in a way that was clearly intimidatory he could have been moved on but it is hard to see how to stand silently praying constitutes a threat to anyone.

Last year our church undertook to prayer walk every street in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. This meant that at some point one of our church members infringed the PSPO, even as they were praying for the blessing and wellbeing of our town. Personal, private prayer: in a culture of death this is now an illegal act.

Not being allowed to pray in a small area around abortion clinics might not feel a vast infringement of individual rights: Smith-Connor could have stood further away and prayed without interruption. Yet his arrest is part of a general slide from policing actions to policing words to policing thought itself. This is a retreat from the secular ideal. As Andrew Tettenborn says, it should worry us all.