“Rev Dr Bernard Randall was suspended from Trent College, a Church of England school, in 2019 after he preached that it was acceptable for students to hold traditional views on marriage, sex and gender identity. The chaplain said he was asked by a student to talk about LGBT+ issues, following the adoption of teaching material from ‘Educate and Celebrate.’ The school subsequently took disciplinary action after Rev Randall shared the sermon with his students. It was while going through the documentation related to the disciplinary action that Rev Randall discovered that he had also been referred to Prevent, an anti-terrorism programme designed to stop radicalisation in the UK. The police later ruled that Rev Dr Randall was not a ‘counter-terrorism risk’ nor ‘risk of radicalisation’. He went on to say that although the process has been traumatic, it has actually pushed him to become more vocal about freedom of speech, especially as a Christian. ‘I think as a Christian in particular, speaking about truth is really important, as Jesus said, I am the way the truth and the life. He didn’t say, I am the opinion, the feeling and the lived experience, or whatever some of these things that people attach themselves to might be, and truth really, really matters. I’ve become all the more convinced of the importance of standing up to speak truth, and to challenge what appear to me to be untruths in our society,’ Rev Randall concluded.”
“My world fell apart,” Premier Christian News, June 4, 2021