RIGHT SPEAK: Is Thought Crime Coming to America? “What is the nature of your prayer?”; How the “Thought Police” Are Emerging Across the West

Is Thought Crime Coming to America?

“What is the nature of your prayer?”

Recently I wrote for FrontPage Mag about the editor of Mother Jones magazine complaining that a flight attendant had shared a “Christian nationalist dog-whistle” by merely wishing the passengers a “blessed” night. The editor even tried to pressure Alaska Airlines publicly to take action to ensure that no passenger would be oppressed again by the “dominant culture enforcing its norms.”

She rightfully received a flood of pushback on social media shaming her for her ingratitude and anti-Christian fear-mongering, but hers is the sort of “soft totalitarianism” routinely directed at Christians by our cultural elites, who in fact do dominate our culture institutions and who have no qualms about enforcing their norms, such as kink-promoting “Pride” parades, transgender flags adorning classrooms, demands to accommodate personal pronouns, sexualizing pre-K children, and pornography in school libraries.

All of these progressive shibboleths – indeed, progressivism itself, which is simply rebranded communism – directly conflict with Christian values. Karl Marx himself saw the eradication of Christianity as a necessary pre-condition for realizing his collectivist utopian vision, and today’s neo-Marxists are no less intolerant of Christians and their “invisible sky god” whose moral demands are an obstacle to progressive libertinism.

In a telling recent example, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who like her deposed boss Joe Biden claims to be a believing Christian, paused during a University of Wisconsin rally to address a pair of Christian students in the crowd who protested her pro-abortion promises by shouting, “Jesus is Lord!” She told them, to the crowd’s uproarious approval, “You guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street,” referring to a recent Trump rally (whose attendance actually dwarfed Kamala’s). The students later told Fox News they were heckled, cursed, and shoved by other attendees. This anti-Christian hostility and bigotry is a core Democrat characteristic.

Elsewhere in the West, in countries that lack our First Amendment rights, this soft totalitarianism is hardening into the criminalization of expressions of Christian faith such as saying “God bless you” to someone, and silent prayer. Case in point: last week Adam Smith-Connor, a British army veteran who served in Afghanistan, was found guilty of praying silently near an abortion clinic in Dorset, England. His offense was the breaching a buffer zone established by a Public Spaces Protection Order designed to stop pro-life beliefs being expressed near the facility, including offering help or prayers to women in crisis pregnancies.

According to Christian Daily, Smith-Connor (pictured above) was merely thinking about his son, whose abortion he regretted having paid for many years before:

Smith-Connor had slightly bowed his head and clasped his hands in prayer on a public green in a buffer zone near the abortion facility in Orphir Road, Bournemouth in November 2022. During a confrontation with police officers that he recorded, they asked him, “What is the nature of your prayer?”

What is the nature of your prayer? Could there be a more chilling, invasive police inquiry than a demand to know the details of one’s private communion with God? Whose business is “the nature of your prayer” but yours and God’s? Would the UK police approach, say, Muslims who lay their prayer mats in public spaces, and demand, “What is the nature of your prayer?”, much less arrest them?

Smith-Connor had merely stood behind a tree, spoken to no one, and even had his back to the facility, and yet the court found guilty of an act of “disapproval of abortion” and gave him a conditional discharge, meaning he will be sentenced only if convicted of future offenses within the next two years. The court also ordered the father of two to pay prosecution costs of 9,000 British pounds ($11,700 USD).

“Today, the court has decided that certain thoughts – silent thoughts – can be illegal in the United Kingdom,” Smith-Connor said after the ruling. “That cannot be right. All I did was pray to God, in the privacy of my own mind and yet I stand convicted as a criminal?”