[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

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?”

He continued,

I served for 20 years in the army reserves, including a tour in Afghanistan, to protect the fundamental freedoms that this country is built upon. I continue that spirit of service as a healthcare professional and church volunteer. It troubles me greatly to see our freedoms eroded to the extent that thought-crimes are now being prosecuted in the U.K.

After the ruling, Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for ADF UK, correctly called the result a “legal turning point of immense proportions”:

A man has been convicted today because of the content of his thoughts – his prayers to God – on the public streets of England. We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of free speech and thought.

Igunnubole concluded, “This is a watershed moment for British freedoms, and one the public must not take lightly.”

Indeed not. Under the radical new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the recently elected Labour Government has vowed to implement such buffer zones near abortion clinics all across the country (currently five UK councils that enforce such zones). Smith-Connor’s experience is only the beginning.

The UK police, who won’t address skyrocketing knife crime but will go door-to-door questioning citizens about their social media posts, have demonstrated over and over again that they will punish Christians for “causing offense” online or in a neighborhood with an abortion clinic but will do nothing to Muslims marching in the streets shouting the genocidal chant “From the river to the sea” and the supremacist “Allahu Akbar.” Multiculturalism trumps all, and refuses to coexist with Western cultural norms.

Yes, this example is from the UK and not the U.S., and fortunately we have First Amendment protection against religious discrimination. But do not think for a moment that America will be safe under a far-Left regime led by Kamala Harris if she is successful in retaining the White House for the Democrats. The Left is obsessed with eroding the inconvenient safeguards of our Constitution, which they see as a “living document” that needs updating for our time. They relentlessly push for censorship of what they deem to be “misinformation” or “disinformation.” They despise free speech advocate Elon Musk for enabling the social media platform X to become a more trustworthy news outlet than the propagandistic mainstream media they control. They label speech they disagree with “fascist violence,” which justifies violent “resistance” against their political enemies.

If the Democrats continue to hold political and cultural power, they will continue to work tirelessly for the erosion of our constitutional protections, and for the increasing marginalization of Christians and Jews whose moral code is anathema to the progressive religion of expressive individualism. The soft totalitarianism will harden into the criminalization of Christian religious expression as it has in the UK, and will snowball from there to encompass all perceived threats to their one-party hegemony.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior