Adam Smith-Connor: Modern Britain's First Thought Criminal
Silent Prayer Criminalised in Twenty-First Century Britain
On Wednesday 16 October 2024, a dangerous precedent was set at Poole Magistrates’ Court. For the first time in modern British history, a man was convicted of what, since the 1949 publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, has come to be known as ‘thought crime’.
Adam Smith-Connor was found guilty of breaching a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) established in a 150 metre radius around a BPAS abortion facility in Bournemouth. His actual crime? Offering silent prayers for his son Jacob, who was killed at a similar facility in Leeds in 2000. He did so in the privacy of his own mind while standing in a public place in November 2022.
The other day I heard a story which reminded me of Adam, the story of St Ciarán’s bell. St Ciarán of Saigir (5th century), thought to be the Church’s first Irish-born saint, was to found a monastery. St Patrick instructed Ciarán to found his monastery at the site of a holy well, and to establish God’s chosen location, he gave Ciarán a small bell to carry on his wanderings. When he reached the well and the bell began to ring, he would know that he had discovered the spot ordained for the monastery. According to one telling, Ciarán visited many beautiful wells which would have been perfect locations for the foundation, but alas the bell did not ring. Only when he came to a well in a deserted place deep in a wood did the bell finally sound, notifying Ciarán that his community was to be formed in hardship and isolation.
Like Ciarán, we Christians are called to wander through the world until that bell – the sensus fidei fidelis, or else simple conscience – rings. We are to go where God leads us, no matter how barren and demon-infested, there to set about working out our salvation, trusting that the waters of God’s holy well will be enough for us.
‘I never imagined that the nation I love, that has been so good to me in the past, could turn on me for doing nothing more than offer up a prayer for my deceased son.’
Having come to know Adam in the course of my own pro-life work, I have found him a man uniquely open to this calling. He is not a clergyman, a great orator or lofty theologian, nor is he really an activist in the traditional sense; he is a missionary and pro-life minister. He is guilty only of doing what the saints of all ages have done, of going into the pagan woods, to the temples of sacrifice to false idols, to bear witness and to intercede with God. I was deeply saddened, then, to hear of Wednesday’s guilty verdict, which resulted in Adam being handed a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £9,000 (fine plus legal costs).
Speaking outside the court after the hearing, the army reservist of twenty years, and now physiotherapist, church volunteer and pro-life missionary, expressed a sense of abandonment by the society he has put so much of his life and work into, quoting the words of the psalmist: ‘When my father and my mother forsake me, Then the LORD will take me up’ (Ps. 27:10 KJV). ‘I never imagined,’ he said, ‘that the nation I love, that has been so good to me in the past, could turn on me for doing nothing more than offer up a prayer for my deceased son.’
Adam’s lawyer, Alliance Defending Freedom UK’s Jeremiah Iggunoble, also shared his thoughts: ‘When British lawyers drafted the European Convention on Human Rights in the aftermath of World War II, they could never have foreseen that their own country, the United Kingdom, which has a long and rich history of protecting civil liberties, would be guilty of interfering with the most sacrosanct of fundamental rights, namely the right to freedom of thought.’ He went on, ‘Without robust protection for freedom of thought and speech, we cannot consistently present ourselves as a free and civilised country that respects the rule of law.’
As I have written before, and as I will continue to say to anyone who will listen, now is the time for Christians to bear witness to the injustices presently wrought against the most vulnerable in our society (the unborn chief among them), the erosion of civil liberties, and the signs of worse to come. For, with this unprecedented conviction for an act of prayer in a citizen’s mind while in a public place, and with new legislation coming into effect in England and Wales on the 31st October banning all such activity within 150 metres of any abortion facility, the threat to freedoms of thought and religion in Britain (not to mention the threat to live-saving pro-life ministry) now seems grave indeed.
On the same day in London, Spen Valley Labour MP Kim Leadbeater introduced her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to the House of Commons. The first such attempt to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales for nine years, on 29 November the bill will be put to a free vote, meaning party whips will have no power to influence which way MPs will vote. Though the 2015 bill was rejected by 330 votes to 118, the nature of the free vote combined with the sheer number of new MPs to enter parliament since then (many secular-liberal in outlook) make the future of this bill somewhat uncertain.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has this week come out against the bill. Speaking with the BBC, he warned against ‘[opening] the door to more pain and suffering’ by a change of law which ‘may introduce structural incentives to our health system – incentives that could have disastrous consequences.’ The Archbishop envisaged a future situation in which the elderly, disabled and people with mental health issues, as well as people in coercive and controlling relationships, could be pressured into suicide. For some, ‘even where there is no abuse, the pressure to end one’s life could be intense and inescapable if the law were changed.’
Critics of the Archbishop’s stance may scoff at the apparent fallacy of the ‘slippery slope’ argument, at the idea that granting the legal right to choose to ‘die with dignity’ will lead to the sort of pressures and abuses he listed. But that would be to miss the fact – harder to ignore as time goes on – that we westerners are not in fact at the top of the slope and in danger of slipping, but already some way down and continuing on our downward trajectory with alarming momentum.
Yes, as the pro-lifers of yesteryear predicted, the push for legal assisted suicide has everything to do with the normalisation of abortion in the past decades. What is also becoming clear to a growing number is that the notion of ‘dying with dignity’ has everything to do with the notion of ‘my body, my choice’, and that both of these memes are the rotten fruits of the loss of the sense of the human person as imago Dei, of human life as sacred. In other words, this decline began with the loss of the sense of persons as having an inherent dignity by virtue of their being formed in the image of God, a dignity in no way dependent on any capacity or capability, and of individuals belonging not finally to themselves, but to God.
As Adam put it on Wednesday, ‘We have forgotten our first love, and the principles upon which our once great nation was built. We are a Christian nation. Our constitution is based upon the Bible. The King’s authority comes from Yahweh, the God of the Bible. If we are to restore our once great nation, we need to remember its foundations as set down in the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, we need to return to the Lord Jesus Christ.’
‘We have forgotten our first love, and the principles upon which our once great nation was built. We are a Christian nation.’
Whether the nation will return to its founding principles and Christian ethos remains to be seen, but what we can say for certain is that we have now well and truly entered a new and dark era in our history, one which may prove most inhospitable to lovers of freedom and of Christ.
A couple of weeks ago, Scots whose houses now fall within buffer zones – which came into force with the Abortion Services (Safe Access) (Scotland) Act 2024 on the 24 September – received letters from their government informing them that they could be fined up to £10,000 if they ‘intentionally or recklessly’ did anything that would ‘influence someone’s decision to access, provide or facilitate the provision of abortion services, prevent or impede another person from accessing, providing or facilitating the provision of abortion services, or cause harassment, alarm or distress to another person relating to their decision to access, provide or facilitate the provision of abortion services, where in each case the person is in the Safe Access Zone.’ In other words, residents of buffer zones are no longer free to speak or worship as they see fit in their own homes lest their private actions within the confines of their private property should be found to have influenced or alarmed someone on their way to the local abortion centre. And on 31 October this will become the situation across the rest of Britain.
But there is still comfort to be had. The day before the verdict I was out at the local 40 Days for Life campaign keeping vigil with Adam. We prayed the Rosary together and discussed his trial and the possible implications if he were to be found guilty. Whatever came of it, we concluded, God’s will be done. Though it’s not always clear to us how trials and sufferings factor into God’s plans for this passing world of ours, we Christians may at least trust that no matter how dark the world may seem to those of us presently in its chaotic midst, the decisive victory has already been won, according to our Lord’s consoling words: ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33 KJV). Returning again and again to the remembrance of this truth in prayer is key, now as ever before.
As he often does, Adam concluded his remarks outside the magistrates’ court by thanking his family, his wife and four children, two of whom have fallen asleep in Christ, for the support and inspiration with which they have provided him. I for one hope that in the coming months and years, all Christians in this country and throughout the western world will follow in Adam’s footsteps and increasingly find courage to live the faith in spite of this new legislation, building each other up in parishes and prayer groups, in church and on the street, bearing witness to the ongoing slaughter of the unborn, the looming threat of state sponsored suicide, and the erosion of rights and freedoms hard-won by those who went before us in the faith, the saints on whose constant intercession we rely for unfailing help.