Barnabas Fund, 11 July 2018
There has been a troubling incident where, once again, at the order of St Paul’s officials in London, a man was apparently arrested outside the Cathedral for simply reading aloud the King James Bible. This is almost the very translation of the Bible that Tyndale was martyred for almost 500 years ago.
The man asked the policeman why he was being told to move on while other people were standing there talking, before adding he was a preacher and had been reading the King James Bible there for weeks. The police officer told him, “I haven’t got a problem with what you are doing, but staff here have asked you to move off of the property.” When the preacher continues to politely protest, the officer says, “Then I will arrest you for a breach of the peace.”
In February 2017, a CPS lawyer told Bristol magistrates court, in relation to the arrest of a street preacher in Bristol, that publicly quoting from the King James Bible “in the context of modern British Society, must be considered to be abusive and is a criminal matter”.
This disturbing trend against public preaching and Bible reading is evidence of the gradual erosion of Religious Freedom taking place in the UK.