Is JD Vance right that free speech for Christians is under attack?
John Duddington• March 1, 2025
The label (not to mention idea) of “free speech” is really a bit of a misnomer, despite free speech being in the limelight after JD Vance, speaking to the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, said: “Free speech, I fear, is in retreat…”
Speech, of course, is never entirely free as we can never say absolutely anything we like. Traditionally, the line was drawn where speech incited or provoked violence. The Public Order Act 1986, for instance, criminalises the use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” with the intent to cause others to believe that violence will be used against them.
What JD Vance meant was that the boundaries of what one can and cannot legally say have been pushed too far, hence Christians expressing views contrary to the prevailing secular ideology find their freedom of speech wrongly curtailed.
One instance, which he mentioned, is the law imposing so-called “safe spaces” (buffer zones) around abortion clinics, introduced by the Public Order Act 2023. This criminalises intentionally or recklessly influencing any person’s decision to access or facilitate abortion services at an abortion clinic. What does “influencing” mean though?
Government guidance says that it could even include private prayer and the practical effect appears to give a wide and surely unjustifiable discretion to individual police forces. Nor is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) of assistance here, as its case law has made it clear that member states have a wide margin of appreciation when implementing matters of social policy.
When Christians are speaking, the lodestar for guidance, I would suggest, should be the words of St. Paul that we must “do all with patience and with the intention of teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2).
Our aim is to persuade and ultimately to convince. Yet we are caught in the crosswinds of an intolerant and aggressive secularism, alongside an equally aggressive brand of Christianity that insists that “we are Christians, so we are right”. These winds are fanned by the use of social media with its often thoughtless, instantaneous re-posting of material. How to chart a way forward?
The recent case of Higgs v Farmor’s School gives us some very helpful points. It concerned the familiar situation where the expression of views by an employee on social media had led to them losing their job; one reason, in this case, being that the employer claimed that the individual’s comments had caused the employer’s business “reputational damage”. This sort of stance can be just as much a restraint on freedom of speech as the threat of criminal prosecution and, in many ways, more dangerous for being more insidious.
Kristie Higgs worked at Farmor’s School, a secondary school, as a pastoral administrator and work experience manager responsible for overseeing students who had been removed from class for disruptive behaviour. She is a Christian and was concerned about the making of teaching regarding “Relationships and Sex Education” mandatory in secondary schools, and she posted, or more generally re-posted, comments about this on her Facebook page.
These included the comment “that expressing and teaching fundamental Christian beliefs, relating to the creation of men and women and marriage will in practice become forbidden – because they conflict with the new morality and are seen as indoctrination into unacceptable religious bigotry”. She added that “this is a vicious form of totalitarianism aimed at suppressing Christianity and removing it from the public arena”. A re-post from the USA said: “The LBGT [sic] crowd with the assistance of the progressive school systems are destroying the minds of normal children by promoting mental illness…”
The Facebook account was in her maiden name, not her married name used at the school, and contained nothing suggesting any connection with the school. However, she was dismissed and subsequently she claimed that this was discrimination based on her beliefs that, in essence, gender is binary and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.
The Court of Appeal held that her dismissal was indeed unlawful discrimination given that “neither the language of the posts nor the risk of reputational damage were capable of justifying the Claimant’s dismissal in circumstances where she had not said anything of the kind at work or displayed any discriminatory attitudes in her treatment of pupils” (although the court held that some of her comments may have been “unwise”).
This in itself was a victory for Christian speech and the court emphasised that the right to manifest belief (religious or otherwise) and express views relating to it are essential in any democracy, “whether or not the belief in question is popular or mainstream and even if its expression may offend”.
The court then laid down guidelines for employers when addressing social media posts and other communications by employees which may be deemed offensive. This is where the principle of proportionality is relevant.
Although Article 9 of the ECHR protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion, its actual manifestation by worship, teaching, practice and observance is subject to the limitations that are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society. Therefore, as Lord Justice Underhill, in the Higgs case, stated: “this requires an assessment of the proportionality of the limitation in question.”
This assessment also applies to Article 10 of the ECHR, which guarantees freedom of expression. How do we assess this?
Although Farmor’s School was not a church school, because the case involved the expression of Christian views, the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England was allowed to make submissions to the court, which then accepted the points put forward by the Council to guide how speech should be exercised in these cases. These included the content of the communication, its tone and extent, the employee’s understanding of the likely audience; whether it might present a reputational risk to the employer’s business and any potential impact on vulnerable service users or clients. These points will be important in the future when other such cases might arise.
The other relevant recent case was that of Benedykt Dybowski, a Catholic school teacher, whose expressions of views within his school, in particular at a training event, regarding gender reassignment, same-sex marriage and sharia law were held to have justified his dismissal. Kristie Higgs, on the other hand, had expressed her views outside the school, a distinction noted by the court in her case and which distinguished between posts on private social media and objectionable manifestations which are “brought into the workplace”.
The difference judged in the case of Benedykt Dybowski was that he discussed his views with pupils and staff on a number of occasions, and one factor justifying his dismissal was the potential impact of such views on vulnerable children.
So, JD Vance is right: free speech is not so free as once it was, but Christians should note, and take heart from, two points.
Firstly we must be unflinching in defence of our rights to speak up in defence of Christian teaching, and be prepared to defend them as the teachers in both these cases did. Equally we must recall that what matters is not just what is expressed but how and where it is expressed.
And here we come back to St. Paul’s advice to speak “with patience and the intention of teaching”.
RELATED: Christian school worker wins landmark trial for expressing religious beliefs
John Duddington is editor of Law and Justice, also known as The Christian Law Review.
Photo: US Vice President JD Vance delivers his speech during the 61st Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Munich, Germany, 14 February 2025. (Photo by THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP /AFP via Getty Images.)