The dangers of policing belief and the State trying to control our thoughts and values

Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act is part of a trend in the Western world for the State to police our thoughts and values.

Designed to eradicate prejudice against groups who have historically suffered discrimination, and motivated by the new focus on gender identity, Scotland’s new law, and those like it, are ostensibly secular. But inevitably the attempt to limit the expression of beliefs and values, especially those to do with gender and sex, affects the freedom of religious expression.

Scotland’s new law, which came into force on 1 April 2024, creates a new set of crimes that trespass on the freedoms of thought, belief and religion. Statements relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or gender deemed to “stir up hatred” can now get you a prison sentence of up to seven years, even if they’re made in the privacy of your own home. As a result, the long-defunct crime of blasphemy is getting another run at it in the UK under a different, seemingly more charitable guise.  

The cluster of kindred rights that are the foundational values of Western society took centuries to evolve. Their formulation goes back to the early 1700s, when the battleground was explicitly religious. By the twentieth century they had evolved into a broad conception of human rights understood as the right to freedom of thought, belief, conscience and religion enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other key documents.

But in 2024, Western society seems to be regressing. We are forgetting the lessons of the last century about the dire consequences of suppressing the human instinct to think our own thoughts and hold our own values. What on earth are we doing?

Five springs ago, I spent a month in Albania, a country notable for a dictatorship that isolated it from the rest of the world for nearly half a century. While religious life suffered under most communist regimes, Albania is the only country in the world to have banned religion. Dictator Enver Hoxha’s determination to develop a nationalist materialist ideology extended to defining the meaning and purpose of life for his people.

The persecution of Catholics began as soon as Hoxha took power in the 1940s, presumably because their international ties and loyalty to the Vatican posed a clear threat to his authority. Jesuit and Franciscan orders were ordered to terminate their missionary activities and Catholic institutions were forbidden from having anything to do with the education of the young.

In 1967, a State decree formally banned the practising of all religions in Albania. Places of worship were closed down and demolished or turned into bars, cultural centres or youth clubs. Nine years later, Article 37 of the Albanian Constitution declared: “The State recognises no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in the people.” 

Albania became the world’s first atheist country, with a penal code imposing prison sentences for “religious propaganda and the production, distribution, or storage of religious literature”.

During my visit I was told by Franz, now in his forties, about what it was like growing up under the Hoxha regime. When religion was banned, his Catholic parents found ways of keeping their faith alive. They told their children about Christianity but forbade them from repeating anything outside the house. They celebrated Christmas in secret, buying presents way in advance so as not to arouse suspicion among the locals. They named their son Franz in an oblique tribute to St Francis, the saint on whose day he’d been born.

When the communist regime fell in 1991, Franz’s father took him to church immediately. The boy was bemused to find himself in the middle of a congregation practising unfamiliar rituals. “Some people there were very happy because they had got back something they had lost,” he said. “For me, it was strange: “oh, you do the cross here” – he made the sign of the cross on his chest – “and stand up there“.

In today’s Albania, religion appears to be flourishing once more. Religious institutions have been rebuilt, quite literally, and the Easter service I attended at the Catholic cathedral of St Paul’s – an elegant new building inaugurated in 2002 – was full and decorated for a baptism to welcome a new soul into the Catholic faith.

But Albania’s history of persecution created a culture of distrust that exists to this day. By the end of the dictatorship, as many as one in three people in the capital worked as voluntary informers for the secret police, creating a comprehensive system of surveillance in which brother spied on sister, husband on wife, children on parents.

“People learned to keep things private and secret, especially thoughts: your thoughts are always secret,” Ana Stakaj, the women’s programme manager for the Mary Ward Loreto Foundation, explained. “My father was almost sent to prison just for having some books. Thank God there were also people who were good, even if they were in power, and they said ‘just get rid of the books’. The books ended up in the nearby river and he was saved.”

Distrust and suspicion are never recipes for a good society, and I wonder how far those responsible for Scotland’s new legislation have thought through the implications of outlawing things said in the home. Police Scotland has promised to investigate every allegation and have created an online form to make the reporting of incidents simple – and anonymous. It would be all too easy for a guest with a grievance or a teenager angry with a parent to report a remark made at the dinner table or an off-the-cuff comment from the sofa.

Last year, England came perilously close to violating the right to freedom of thought and belief when Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested outside an abortion clinic. “You’ve said you’ve been engaging in prayer, which is the offence,” the arresting officer told her. Subsequently, the home secretary wrote to every police force in the country, reminding them that silent prayer was not an offence. Vaughan-Spruce received an apology from West Midlands police.

Western democracies would do well to heed the lessons of the authoritarian countries whose systems they claim to have transcended. State control of hearts and minds never works, and untold damage is done in the trying. Let’s hope that the UK will resist the folly of trying, as Queen Elizabeth I put it, to “make windows onto men’s souls” and remember its long tradition of toleration.

And while the UK is unlikely to turn into an atheistic dictatorship anytime soon, it is looking increasingly probably that after the next General Election the country will have its first atheist prime minister in Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party that looks set for a solid victory according to polling.

Photo: Historian Gjergj Marku stands in front of the dormitory of the former prison of Spac, where many Catholic priests are believed to have suffered punishment under the communist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha. They were tortured to death, fatally strung up by their feet, shot and thrown into quicksand, Shkoder, Albania, 1 November 2016. Shortly afterwards, on November 5, 2016, Albanian Catholics celebrated the beatification of 38 Catholics who were killed under Hoxha’s regime. (Photo credit GENT SHKULLAKU/AFP via Getty Images.)

Alex Klaushofer is an author and journalist. She writes about the changing times on Substack at Ways of Seeing. Her short travelogue ‘Spyless in Tirana: An Albanian adventure’ is out now.

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