When We Forget Who We Are
The Friday Compass | Wanderings | May 8
One benefit of walking a lonely path is the space it creates for uninterrupted reflection and prayer. As I've been walking, I've been contemplating a video circulating online that I cannot stop thinking about.
It was filmed in Watford, England, a town about fifteen miles northwest of central London. On a Saturday morning in April, a 66-year-old grandfather named Steve Maile was standing in the town square doing what he has done for forty-five years: preaching the Gospel in public. Not shouting. Not threatening. Preaching. The kind of thing that has happened on English street corners since before America existed.
Three police officers arrived. They double-handcuffed him in front of his wife and children and led him away while he kept saying, with remarkable composure, “You cannot arrest me. I am a preacher of the Gospel. No offense is being committed here.”
He was held for twelve hours. No charges were filed. The assault allegation that had been offered as justification was dropped. Steve Maile was released after midnight and went home. More than a million and a half people watched the footage.
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That incident is not isolated. It is not even surprising to anyone who has been watching England for a while.
Pastor Dia Moodley has been arrested twice, once in March 2024 and again in November 2025 for open-air preaching in Bristol. His offense, as recorded by Avon and Somerset Police, was discussing the differences between Christianity and Islam in a public square. He was held for eight hours on the second arrest, then barred by bail conditions from entering Bristol city centre for the entire Christmas season. Let that land: a Christian pastor, banned from the streets of an English city during Advent because someone found his theology unwelcome.
When Moodley was assaulted by men who objected to his preaching, one of whom threatened to stab him, the police threatened to arrest Moodley for breaching the peace. Not his assailants. Him.
Hatun Tash, a former Muslim woman who became a Christian evangelist, spent years preaching and debating at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Speakers’ Corner has stood for over a century as the most famous free-speech location in the English-speaking world, the place where anyone could say anything, and the tradition of open debate was the whole point. But something has changed. Hatun Tash was recently arrested and strip-searched. Charged with criminal damage for holding her own Quran. Accused of stirring up hatred for wearing a t-shirt. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face. She had been the target of a terrorist plot. She eventually won £10,000 in damages from the Metropolitan Police for wrongful arrest and breach of her human rights. She has kept preaching, but those who have represented her in the legal attempt to defend her right to speak have said something we all need to hear:
Our freedom is hanging by a thread. If Hatun is silenced by violence at Speakers’ Corner, then we are all silenced.
In Glasgow, street preacher Angus Cameron was handcuffed and arrested after an unverified complaint that he had used homophobic language, a claim he denied, and which witnesses present were willing to refute. The arresting officer declined to speak with those witnesses. When charges were dropped, Cameron discovered that a “non-crime hate incident” had been logged against his name in police records anyway, linked permanently to hate crime intelligence files. He had been acquitted of nothing and accused of everything, and the shadow followed him home.
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I want you to understand what you are actually looking at.
These are not rogue officers making bad calls. They are not glitches in an otherwise functioning system. They are the system functioning exactly as a post-Christian culture produces it: a society that no longer has a theological framework for the public square, improvising new rules as it goes, and discovering that without a grounding in transcendent truth, the loudest complaint wins.
William Wilberforce saw the early stages of the disease and spent his life trying to treat it.
Most people know Wilberforce as the man who abolished the British slave trade. That victory is real and it is great. But Wilberforce himself said it was only the first half of his mission. In his diary in 1787, he wrote that God had set before him two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners.
By manners, he did not mean civility. He was not talking about table settings and thank-you notes. He meant something far more serious: the moral and spiritual framework of a civilization. England in the late eighteenth century had grown prosperous and thoroughly secular. Wherever religious life flourished, it was the shallow type, not the vital kind that comes from a deeper life with Real God. The superficial Christianity of the ruling class was, as Wilberforce wrote bluntly in his book A Practical View, a Christianity that had been gutted of its content. It had retained a shallow life of faith as social decoration while its substance was quietly abandoned. The nation no longer thought in biblical categories. It no longer ordered its common life around the way of Jesus. It had kept the vocabulary and discarded its source.
Wilberforce called that loss a reformation problem. Not a political problem, not primarily a legal problem, but a formation problem. An entire people group had forgotten who had made them and what they were made for.
He spent the next forty years trying to remind them.
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He did not entirely fail. The abolition of slavery was a great concrete achievement. Wilberforce saw it not as an isolated immorality but as something inseparable from the theological convictions that drove it. The Clapham Saints, the circle of evangelical reformers gathered around Wilberforce, could not have sustained the campaign through decades of defeat and delay without the belief that human beings bear the image of God and that no earthly power has the right to reduce them to property. That conviction came from somewhere. It came from the Bible. It came from the Jesus.
When you remove the source, you do not immediately lose the values. You coast on them for a generation or two. The borrowed capital of a Christian civilization can fund a secular one for a surprisingly long time with few people noticing.
But not forever.
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What the Watford footage shows is a civilization at the end of its borrowed capital.
England was not always this. The open-air preaching tradition is one of the most English things that exists. Wesley, Whitefield, the Salvation Army, the street corners of every market town in the kingdom ringing on a Saturday with someone who believed the Gospel was worth saying out loud. Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park was built on the conviction that free expression of ideas, including religious ideas, was the oxygen of a healthy public life.
That England is not entirely gone. But it is being quietly legislated away, one public order notice at a time, one bail condition at a time, one non-crime hate incident logged in a police file at a time, one cowardly and accommodating political act after another. And the striking thing is that the enforcement is not even-handed. Peaceful preachers are handcuffed. The men who threaten to stab them are released without charge. The culture has not become neutral. It has chosen a different allegiance. It simply has not said so plainly.
That is what the loss of a Christian worldview actually looks like. Not a dramatic announcement. A slow administrative drift in which the assumptions change and the institutions follow and one day a grandfather in handcuffs is asking, on a square where Englishmen have preached the Gospel for centuries, What have I done that is wrong? What? Preaching the word of God?
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I have been watching this long enough to wonder about the ground beneath our own feet. Not the legislation — that comes later. The formation. What has been forming the people sitting in our pews, our small groups, our church plants, our cathedral congregations? What do they actually believe about who they are and whose world they are standing in? Could they say, with Steve Maile’s quiet composure, what they are doing and why no offense is being committed? Not as a legal argument. As a lived conviction.
Wilberforce’s diagnosis was that England had forgotten who it was. The borrowed capital ran out not because of bad legislation but because the formation had stopped. The people no longer knew, from the inside, what they believed or why it mattered. When that happens, the institutions eventually reflect it. The law follows the imagination. The imagination follows the formation.
Which makes me wonder about the questions nobody is quite asking yet. Not what programs to add or what positions to take, but something quieter and harder. What does it mean to form a person who knows, at the level of bone and marrow, whose image they bear? What practices, sustained over years, produce that kind of knowing? What would it look like for a congregation — not just its pastor, not just its most committed members — to recover a theological imagination deep enough to hold when the pressure comes?
I don’t have all the answers to those questions. I’m not sure anyone does fully. But I think Wilberforce was right that they are formation questions before they are anything else. And I think the time to ask them is before the footage appears, not after.
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I do not know what the reformation of manners looks like in 2026. I suspect it does not arrive the way we expect — not through political victory or cultural dominance. It probably looks more like Steve Maile in handcuffs, still preaching, still insisting that no offense has been committed because he knows whose square he is standing in, and no police caution can revoke that.
He knows who he is. That is the whole thing, really.
The question I keep returning to:
What is forming us? And will it be enough to hold us when the day comes that someone tells us to be quiet?
Gene Maynard is the founder of The Compass Institute of Christian Spirituality and the author of Trekking: A Guidebook for Spiritual Transformation. He and his wife Lorri live on six acres in northwest Montana, between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, where they operate Stillpoint, an Oasis Rest retreat space for depleted pastors and missionaries.
Powerful testimony of a post-Christian nation, yes, I mean America! Where wrong is right, and right is wrong.
Sobering and thought provoking which should drop us to our knees in prayer.
Lord, give us wisdom and give us courage.