On 10 November, I gave a speech in Brussels on freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. Here’s what I said.

Last year, a Baptist Church in Norfolk in England put up a poster suggesting that if you didn’t believe in God you would go to hell. The poster said, “If you think there is no God, you had better be right”, and underneath there was a picture of flames, hellfire, the suggestion being that if you don’t believe you will suffer. Suffer in eternal damnation, no less.

Now, to some people, certainly to those who don’t believe in God, that may seem like a shocking message. But to me, the most shocking thing was what happened next. Which is that passersby complained about the poster, not to each other, which is par for the course when you’re walking down the street and see something you don’t like: you moan to your friends about it. No, they complained to the police.

The police registered the poster as a “hate incident”. They launched an investigation. But in order to avoid embarrassment — because it would undoubtedly be very embarrassing for the police in modern Britain to investigate a church for expressing its religious views — the police went to the church, spoke to the pastor, suggested he take the poster down, and so he took the poster down.

I found this really disturbing. For what we had here, in Britain in the 21st century, was a situation where the armed wing of the state put pressure on a church, a private religious association, to take down a public expression of its deeply held beliefs.

There are three things about this case that I found alarming.

The first is that, having been brought up a Catholic - though I am now lapsed beyond all hope - I know that the idea of hell is central to many Christians’ beliefs. It is a key component of their moral outlook: that if you don’t believe the right thing there is a chance you will go to hell. The fact that it is now difficult to express that key Christian belief in public should be disturbing to everyone, whether you’re a Christian who believes in hell or an atheist, like me, who does not.

The second thing about this case that struck me is that it happened in Norfolk. Norfolk is the birthplace of my hero, Thomas Paine. Paine is my hero for many reasons. One of them is that he is, in essence, the intellectual founder of the United States, which does a far better job of liberty than we in Europe do. Paine argued for the separation of America from Britain. And when he was calling for the creation of a new, independent republic of America, he said there would have to be a Bill of Rights guaranteeing fundamental liberties - and “above all things, it must guarantee the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience”. That was his key idea of America, and that is what America became: a safe haven for people from Europe who could not exercise their religion freely according to the dictates of their conscience.

The fact that in Norfolk, we had the birth of this man in the 1700s and then in 2014 the restriction of a church’s right to express its religious convictions, to live by the “dictates of its conscience”, is a snapshot of how far the clock is being turned back.

And the third shocking thing about this case is that it was not a one-off. This was not weird, rash incident. There have been numerous incidents in Britain where people have been arrested, charged or punished in some way for expressing their religious beliefs.

I want to give you a few quick examples.

— Last year in Dundee in Scotland, a street preacher was arrested by the police, taken to a police station, put in a cell, and later questioned. Why? Because he said, as part of his street-preaching, that homosexuality is a sin. For expressing what many Christians believe to be true, he was taken in by the cops.

— In Northern Ireland, a Christian pastor was taken to court in August, charged with “improper use of a public electronic communications network” — i.e. the internet — and charged with making a “grossly offensive” message. He had said, during an internet sermon, that Islam is a “Satanic” faith. Many people will find that offensive; Muslims certainly will. But that is his deeply held conviction. He was arrested and hauled before the courts for saying what he believes to be true.

— Some people, including politicians, are campaigning to force Catholic schools in Britain to teach children about homosexual sex and that gay marriage is equal to traditional marriage. Well, newsflash: Catholics don’t believe that. They believe traditional marriage is superior to gay marriage. Some believe gay marriage is not real marriage. They are facing great pressure to teach their children something that they do not believe, which goes against “the dictates of their conscience”.

— Ofsted, Britain’s education regulator, now regularly denounces certain Christian schools. Last year it denounced a whole bunch of them as “inadequate” because they “fail to teach respect for other faiths, or develop their pupils’ awareness of other [belief systems]”. In other words, they teach their own faith. They elevate their own beliefs over others. They teach their children to live by and understand the world through a particular faith, and for doing that they are denounced by a wing of the state.

— Also, there are no explicitly Catholic adoption agencies left in Britain. They’ve either been closed down or have changed their names and values. Why? Because under equality legislation, if you refuse to adopt children to homosexual couples, as most Catholic adoption agencies do, then the state can judge you a practitioner of inequality and punish you. So these religious agencies were pressured out of existence for the crime of acting on “the dictates of their conscience”.

And on it goes. Across Europe we’re seeing attacks on people of faith, on their right to exercise their freedom of conscience. Swedish pastors arrested for denouncing homosexuality; bakers taken to court for refusing to serve gay weddings; a small Jewish sect threatened with state action because of its rules regarding women’s roles in its community life; Islamic schools obsessively investigated in search of radicalism. Religious groups, especially smaller, pretty hardcore one, face a level of state or official investigation that should alarm anyone who, like Paine, believes people must be free to live according to the dictates of their conscience.

What we’re witnessing is a silent war on religion. In the 21st century, there is the creeping criminalisation of certain religious views and an undermining of religious groups’ right to organise themselves, and those who are voluntarily part of their community of faith, in what they consider to be the most fitting way. Religious people’s ability to express themselves publicly is being undermined, and their ability to organise themselves around their faith — such as by having schools and other agencies to propagate their views among their followers — is being undermined too.

How has this happened? I think there are two drivers of the silent war on religion: first, the spread of hate-speech legislation; and second, the rise of new and intrusive so-called equality laws.

On hate-speech laws: we currently have the redefinition of certain religious beliefs as bigotry, as hatefulness. There are numerous hate-speech laws across Europe, which restrict the expression of ideas that are hurtful or insulting to certain racial groups, sexual-identity groups, in some cases women, and so on. And these laws don’t only capture and punish the expression of explicitly racist or homophobic views, which would be bad enough: I think people must be free to be racist and homophobic. They also increasingly investigate and censure certain religious and moral convictions. The idea that homosexuality is sinful, for example. Or that gay marriage is perverse. Or that women do not have what it takes to be priests. Whatever we as individuals, or as a society, may think about those views, the fact is they are deeply held and believed by significant numbers of religious people. Now such convictions are rebranded “hatred”, and in some cases are punished.

What our society seems to have forgotten is that one man’s hate speech is another man’s deeply held belief. What the state considers to be hate speech might be considered by someone else to be the truth. It could form a core belief in their life and worldview. And yet because it doesn’t conform to what the state thinks is true and proper, or to the outlook of the new PC moral majority, it is demonised and you can be visited by the actual police for expressing it.

The second problem is the rise of new equality laws. These laws, whether it’s Britain’s Equality Act of 2010 or the Equal Treatment Directive currently being discussed in the EU, are very different to the older equality legislation of the 1960s and 70s. Where that legislation was largely about forbidding employees and public institutions from discriminating against people on the basis of their race or gender, the new equality laws are far more interventionist in both workplaces and also private associations. In Britain, for example, new equality laws closely police all public-sector institutions to ensure they have the correct share of staff in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability and so on, giving rise to a vast new layer of bureaucracy that myopically monitors the racial and gender make-up of institutions and which actually nurtures tension rather than promoting social cohesion.

And even in relation to private associations, whether churches or political parties, equality law is having a detrimental impact. Let me give you one shocking example. In 2009, Britain’s Equality Commission took legal action against the far-right British National Party on the basis that its constitution went again equality laws. Its constitution said that only Caucasians could join the party. The commission said this was wrong, started proceedings, and the BNP bowed to the pressure and rewrote its constitution.

Now, we can all agree that the BNP’s constitution was foul and obnoxious. But what is even more obnoxious is the idea that the state should have the right to force a political association to overhaul its constitution to make it conform to the state’s preferred morality and outlook. Because that, right there, is the end of freedom. That is the end of the freedom of association, the end of the right to political organisation, the end of any kind of independence of individuals from the state, the end of our ability to act on the dictates of our conscience. Now, understandably, churches in Europe are very worried that they might be pressured to employ women in roles that their faith forbids women from doing, and faith schools are under pressure to take in students who do not share their faith. All in the name of ‘equality’. Under the banner of a very phoney kind of equality, states are limiting the ability of ‘spontaneous societies’ — as John Locke described religious groups in his Letter Concerning Toleration — to be spontaneous, to enact their own rules for their own members.

What we have right now is the undermining of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. Over the past 300 years of Enlightenment, we saw the growth of the idea of freedom of conscience into the idea of freedom of expression. The Enlightenment started with Locke and others arguing that people should be free to believe whatever they wanted — let everyone “live by the light of his own reason”, said Locke. Post-Inquisition, there was a new, fresh agitation with the notion that people should ever be punished for their beliefs, for the content of their minds or souls: no one should be put to “the fire or the sword” for the contents of their conscience, said Locke. And then over the centuries this developed into a conviction that people should also be free to express what they believe. We get to John Stuart Mill in the 1800s, arguing for the right of everyone, no matter how eccentric or controversial their convictions, to express themselves publicly, to engage in the public sphere.

Now, all of this is being undone. The freedom of speech is under assault by hate-speech laws and through other means, to the extent that a Christian church can be made to take down a poster expressing its beliefs. And we’re now reversing freedom of conscience, too, through attacking the very ability of ‘spontaneous societies’ to write their own constitutions, create their own communities, live by their own moral rules.

We have ended up with a New Inquisition, the punishment of those who say or believe things that the state and the PC moral majority dislike. The very thing that the Enlightenment arose to tackle — the Inquisiatorial demonisation of those who hold non-mainstream religious or moral views — has made a comeback. This shows how fragile are the ideals of Enlightenment. We must refortify them, and challenge every restriction on freedom of expression, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what is being expressed.

This is the text of a speech I gave in Brussels on 10 November 2015.