Adam Slate, the minister-elect for New Unity

A MINISTER has warned that the right to protest is under threat as their congregation showed solidarity with those arrested in a Quaker meeting house earlier this month.

Members of New Unity in Newington Green gathered last Thursday to eat hummus and breadsticks, drink tea, and talk about Gaza, climate change, and ways of protesting. Their meeting came one week after police raided a Quaker meeting house in Westminster and arrested six women who were talking about the same issues and planning disruptive but peaceful, protests.

Adam Slate, the minister-elect for New Unity, said: “The pendulum is definitely swinging in a more restrictive direction, and the hard part is we don’t know where the line is.”

He added: “A week and a half ago if someone had said if an activist group got together to have a welcome meeting to talk about different ways of protesting, would that get a church broken into, we probably would have said no, it’s probably safe.”

The minister said that it was becoming more important for religious communities to speak out about moral issues.

He added: “One of the things I worry about is that I don’t want people to be scared to speak up for their moral conscience because they don’t know where the line is.”

Having moved to Islington from Virginia in December, Mr Slate explained that the Unitarian community he leads in Newington Green has a long tradition of dissent.

The church even counts Mary Wollstonecraft among its past attendees.

Mr Slate told the Tribune: “Mary Wollstonecraft was speaking up for the rights of women when feminism didn’t exist. So I want us to have that role and at the same time, realistically, I have to be careful for myself.”

He added: “Two ministers ago, during the marriage equality movement, we had a minister who would have, if he thought he could get away with it, married same-sex couples when it was illegal. So what we ended up doing was we stopped marrying anyone until same-sex couples was legalised. To protect his status as an immigrant, so he wouldn’t get kicked out.”

Mr Slate, who ran for US Congress in 2017, said that weaving politics and religion came naturally.

He added: “The things I would talk about in a lot of my political talks were the same things that you would hear from a pulpit, about how do we uphold human dignity for everyone, how do we behave in moral ways.”