Fired, prosecuted, banned: Is Joshua Sutcliffe the most persecuted 33-year-old in Britain?
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Joshua Sutcliffe, it seems, cannot stop getting into trouble. The Christian teacher has been fired twice from schools and also prosecuted for street preaching during the pandemic lockdown. And now, he has been banned from teaching anywhere for two years by the Teachers Regulation Agency for refusing to use the preferred pronouns of a trans student and sharing his opposition to gay marriage during a maths class.
Sutcliffe claims he is simply trying to live out and share the gospel, telling everyone from his pupils, to teachers, to passers-by in the street, all the way up to the audience of Piers Morgan’s TV show, the truth about their sin and need for Jesus. Is he a victim of a Britain which has turned its back on Christianity and is trying to silence the gospel? Should the church embrace controversial and outspoken figures like Sutcliffe and support his legal efforts to fight back? Or has the maths teacher lost sight of the Jesus he seeks to proclaim and fallen down a rabbit hole of culture war squabbling and gratuitous offensiveness?
- Read a recent interview with Sutcliffe in Premier Christianity https://www.premierchristianity.com/interviews/banned-christian-teacher-speaks-out-students-had-a-vendetta-against-me/15682.article
- He was also interviewed two years ago after he first lost his teaching job https://www.premierchristianity.com/interviews/is-this-the-most-persecuted-31-year-old-in-britain/5502.article
- I wrote a big feature in 2021 exploring whether Christians were truly being persecuted in the UK https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/investigation-are-christians-in-the-uk-persecuted-/4366.article
- You can find out more about Sutcliffe on his personal website https://www.joshuasutcliffe.com/
Released on 26 Jun 2023
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