Last week the Evangelical Alliance published Confident Faith, Contested Culture, surveying 884 evangelical Christians across the UK. Nearly a quarter feel hesitant to talk about their faith at work. Eighty-eight per cent say practising their faith has become harder or stayed the same over the past five years. The researchers identified what they called ‘a widening gap between formal freedom and lived confidence’.
That phrase captures a problem now documented across multiple surveys, multiple professions, and multiple years. The gap is not imagined. It is measured.
In January 2025, the Commission for Countering Extremism asked Ipsos to survey 2,291 adults in England and Wales about freedom of expression. The results, published in June, confirmed what many suspected: a third of the population believes free speech is under-protected, and significant numbers self-censor on the issues that matter most. Among Christians, 48 per cent said they held back on transgender issues. Forty-one per cent believed Christianity itself is insufficiently protected. This was not a church survey or an advocacy poll. It was commissioned by a government body.
The fear extends into Parliament itself. In October 2018, an anonymous ComRes survey of 150 MPs found that 54 per cent felt they could not speak freely on gender and sexuality issues without fear of social media attacks or accusations of bigotry. Among female MPs the figure was worse: 63 per cent said they could not discuss these matters openly. When the people whose job it is to debate law and policy self-censor, the chilling effect has reached the institution designed to be immune to it.
The CCE findings sit within a growing body of evidence that something has gone badly wrong with the relationship between belief and employment in this country. In 2021, Savanta ComRes found that 38 per cent of the public believed people were afraid to speak their minds at work – the second highest ‘afraid’ score of any social setting tested, exceeded only by dealings with the police. Half of all respondents said freedom of speech in the UK was under threat. Nearly half said people were freer to speak their minds five years ago than now.
In the workplace, the fear has a specific vector: diversity, equity and inclusion training. In March 2024, the Free Speech Union surveyed 800 employees who had undergone such training. Sixty-two per cent said they had concealed what they really thought. Forty-five per cent said the training conflicted with their personal, religious or political views. Thirty-six per cent had witnessed colleagues penalised for challenging it. Twelve per cent had witnessed colleagues fired.
The most telling finding was that this was not just a problem for white, conservative men. Among black employees, 43 per cent said DEI training conflicted with their views. Among Asian employees, 46 per cent. Among LGBT employees, 46 per cent. That last figure was reinforced in July 2025 when the LGB Alliance Business Forum found that 86 per cent of lesbian, gay and bisexual employees avoid expressing their views on sex and gender at work for fear of professional consequences.
For Christians specifically, the picture has been tracked across multiple surveys. The Evangelical Alliance’s earlier Living for Jesus at Work report found that 54 per cent of respondents said workplace DEI training did not fairly represent their experience as Christians. Four in ten had felt the need to prioritise their job over their faith.
On paper, the law protects religious belief. In practice, the institutional machinery of the modern workplace – Stonewall Diversity Champions guidance, zero-tolerance EDI policies, HR departments advising silence – has created an environment where the formal right to believe is undercut by the practical risk of expressing that belief.
The institutional capture has been documented. In 2021, barrister Akua Reindorf found that the University of Essex’s trans-inclusion policies had been drafted under the influence of external lobby groups and produced a ‘culture of fear’ among staff with gender-critical views.
In 2025, the Office for Students fined the University of Sussex £585,000 – the largest penalty in the regulator’s history – for free-speech failures after Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded off campus for her gender-critical beliefs. The OfS specifically found that Sussex’s policies could have led staff to self-censor.
Meanwhile, the Bar Standards Board proposed replacing its anti-discrimination duty with a positive obligation to ‘advance equality, diversity and inclusion’ – a duty so vaguely defined that the Bar Council itself called it ‘substantially unlawful’ and warned it would chill speech. It was withdrawn in May 2025.
The pattern extends internationally. In the United States, Professor Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas published peer-reviewed research in 2012 on family structure and child outcomes. Because his findings did not support the approved narrative, he was subjected to a formal university ethics investigation, sustained professional attack, and attempts to discredit his methodology. He was cleared, but the message to every other family researcher was unmistakable: produce the wrong findings and your career is at risk. I interviewed Regnerus recently about what happened and what it tells us about the suppression of honest research on marriage and family.
Yet here is the turn in the story. The law is catching up. In 2021, the Employment Appeal Tribunal confirmed that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act, in the Maya Forstater case. In February 2025, the Court of Appeal ruled in Higgs v Farmor’s School that dismissing an employee for expressing traditional marriage beliefs was unlawful discrimination – and last June the Supreme Court refused the school permission to appeal.
Last month, the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled that mental health charity Touchstone Leeds had directly discriminated against Christian social worker Felix Ngole by withdrawing a job offer because of his beliefs about marriage.
In January, the EAT upgraded Dr Aaron Edwards’s appeal – he was sacked by a Methodist Bible college for a tweet defending orthodox Christian teaching on sexuality – to Category A, signalling that the legal questions involved are of wider public importance.
The Free Speech Union’s membership has surged from 9,000 in 2021 to more than 20,000, with a 43 per cent jump following Labour’s election victory. People are not resigned. They are organising.
The gap between formal freedom and lived confidence is real, documented, and wide. But the direction of the case law is clear. The question now is whether employers, regulators, and HR departments will read the judgments and change course, or whether it will take another decade of litigation to close that gap from the other side.
