Will any Church of England bishop in the House of Lords raise the case of the Christian evangelist taken to court for violating an LGBT “safe space” in Soho? With the Bishops’ Bench dominated by Left-wingers, the chances of a Lord Spiritual raising the case with a government minister are surely about as minimal as the Dean of St Paul’s repenting of his decision to host raves in the Cathedral’s nave.

The Soho case is serious because it shows how far the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have been captured by anti-free-speech ideologues with a very negative view of traditional Christian teaching.

Richard Johnson, 72, has this month been cleared by City of London Magistrates’ Court after the CPS prosecuted him under the Public Order Act for distributing illustrated leaflets featuring the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Genesis narrates God’s decision to rain down burning sulphur on these cities, believed to have been located in the plain south of the Dead Sea, because of their moral depravity. Genesis 19 describes an attempted homosexual gang rape in Sodom. 

The tract Johnson handed out in Soho was provocatively titled “Doom Town” and was possibly reminiscent of the name of a town Clint Eastwood might have ridden into in one of his spaghetti westerns.  

Christian Concern, whose legal arm represented Johnson, has reported on the case:

“Two complainants said they were distressed by the tract’s treatment of homosexuality and LGBT issues. One complainant told the court that Soho should be regarded as a ‘safe space’ for LGBT people, arguing in effect that the area ought to be protected from messages viewed as hostile to that community, creating what Mr Johnson’s legal team described as a de facto ‘gay buffer zone’.”

Christian Concern said the CPS relied on this context in advancing its case: “It is believed to be the first time the CPS has pursued a prosecution of this kind on the basis of such a geographical ‘safe space’ argument.”

Following Johnson’s acquittal on September 4th, Christian Legal Centre Chief Executive, Andrea Williams, said:

“The prosecution’s reliance on Soho being an LGBT ‘safe space’ was deeply troubling. No part of London can become a censorship zone in which lawful Christian beliefs are subjected to a different standard because some people find them offensive. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression belong to everyone, everywhere.”

She said the court was “right to recognise the high threshold that must be crossed before the message of the Bible is criminalised”.

“Richard did not threaten or intimidate anyone. He was sharing a biblical message about sin, repentance and salvation which Christians have proclaimed for centuries,” she said.

She concluded: “A free society must protect the right to express beliefs that challenge, provoke or offend. The police and Crown Prosecution Service must learn urgent lessons from this case and stop dragging peaceful Christian evangelists through the criminal courts.”

Unfortunately, this is a vain hope because dragging Christian street preachers through the criminal courts is precisely what the CPS seems determined to do. The fact that in the Johnson case prosecutors tried to play the “safe space” card shows the extent to which the CPS has been infiltrated by anti-free-speech Left-wing activists. The Labour government had been in office for less than a year when Johnson got into trouble for distributing the leaflets in April 2025, so the neo-Marxist capture of the CPS, reflected in this case, happened on the Conservatives’ watch.

I covered the case of Pastor John Sherwood who was arrested in April 2021 by Met police officers in Uxbridge, the parliamentary constituency of the then Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

Sherwood had been preaching near the tube station on Genesis 1:27 and said that the family unit as ordained by God consisted of a father and a mother, not two fathers or two mothers. Some passers-by had complained to the police that he was using homophobic hate speech and in September 2021 he was charged under the Public Order Act.

In June 2021 a CPS press officer told me that the file on Pastor Sherwood had been sent back to the Met because the case against him did not meet the threshold for a prosecution. But the CPS later overturned that decision and decided to push ahead with the prosecution. Pastor Sherwood was cleared by Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court in April 2022.

Ironically, the Bible, particularly the history books of the Old Testament, shows that when a nation gets captured by a destructive ideology, the ruling elite has a tendency to double down and to refuse to change direction, despite truthful prophetic warnings. Unless there is a profound change of heart in Britain’s political establishment, including among the Bishops in the House of Lords, the anti-Christian free-speech doom loop looks set to continue.

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.