Free speech and religious liberty are under attack in Europe. Police are knocking at doors because of social media posts. People face court challenges for their religious views. The United States fears that Europe is reverting into an oppressive continent and could lose “our common Western civilizational heritage.”

To prevent this, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor launched a multimillion-dollar funding scheme in July to save Western values in Europe.

The $1 million to $3 million grant program, titled “Developing Civilizational Bonds, Democratic Resilience, and Rule of Law in Europe,” seeks “to strengthen and develop democratic resilience, rule of law, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the defense of human rights in Europe.”

The program is concerned about “national sovereignty, migration, censorship and lawfare challenges in line with shared political philosophy, law and our common Western civilizational heritage.” According to the program’s Goals and Objectives:

The purpose of democratic government is to protect natural rights and fundamental freedoms, including free speech and religious liberty, while ensuring citizens can freely choose their elected officials and hold their government accountable. For centuries, the trans-Atlantic partnership has been rooted in a common understanding of natural law, virtue and national sovereignty. However, European governments are increasingly drifting from these foundations through supranational bureaucratic overreach and partisan weaponization that concentrates power in technocratic institutions less accountable to democratic choices.

The department is particularly concerned about supranational institutions and governments that use state power to 1) enforce vague hate-speech laws to censor unwanted content and 2) manipulate legal systems to suppress freedom of speech.

“These tactics create chilling effects that discourage individuals and organizations from speaking out, even when cases lack merit, as the legal process itself becomes burdensome and intimidating,” the department writes.

A draft of the Religious Liberty Commission Report published in June highlights two cases in Europe:

• In the United Kingdom, police recently arrested Army veteran and physiotherapist Adam Smith-Connor for the crime of silently praying.
• In Finland, Finnish M.P. Päivi Räsänen was recently convicted for expressing her religious perspective on human sexuality and faces years of criminal prosecution for publicly sharing a Bible verse.

These are extreme cases, but the problem is widespread. The Religious Liberty Commission Report states:

Approximately 86 percent of the world’s population live in countries that restrict religious liberty. Today, as it has been throughout history, religious liberty is the exception rather than the rule. … The American people must choose whether to vociferously defend religious liberty or to allow the United States to join the other 86 percent of the world in repressing individuals’ first freedoms.

If the U.S. doesn’t fight for these liberties, it too will lose them. The threat to religious liberty is coming amid a wider attack on free speech by Europe’s political elite. The Trump administration has specifically criticized the EU’s Digital Services Act as an example of European censorship.

In “Coming Soon: A German Explosion,” theTrumpet.com managing editor Richard Palmer highlighted that Germans are now banned from insulting their political leaders on social media by Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, passed in 2021. In 2025, almost 4,800 criminal cases were launched under this law. A few examples:

• Police raided a man’s house after he called former Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck a “moron.”
• One man was fined over $2,300 for calling Chancellor Friedrich Merz a liar.
• Another had to pay $115 for calling a politician a “pompous fool.”
• Another was prosecuted for posting a meme showing Merz as Pinocchio; his case was dropped after a public outcry.

Dr. Sven R. Larson warned in the European Conservative in June that “increasingly hard-line political persecution will continue to lead Germany into the dark realm of tyranny.”

Many are concerned that “the dark realm of tyranny” could spread and engulf the entire world.

Election Interference?

According to Chancellor Merz, the U.S. government is interfering in European elections with this initiative. “We do not interfere in American elections; we’ve always stuck to that,” he told a reporter in July regarding the initiative. “Conversely, I don’t want the American government or government-affiliated institutions to interfere in German elections.”

In a way, he is right: The U.S. wants to stop Europe from suppressing its political opposition—which could be seen as election interference. But without the U.S. “election interference,” European governments would have free rein to suppress the common man and the common man’s political party.

But the claim that Germany would never interfere in American elections is wrong by the same standard. In fact, it shows Germany’s desire to censor free speech worldwide.

In 2006, the United Kingdom, France and Germany founded the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (isd). In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in 2025, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, who helped expose censorship on X, singled out isd as “one of the groups that has most aggressively demanded censorship of social media.” On the isd’s U.S. board sits former German politician Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.

The Capital Research Center’s website states: “The isd has been accused of suppressing conservative views online by erroneously labeling mainstream views as misinformation.” Its rigorous recommendations, heeded by some, suppressed the truth and thus helped portray Donald Trump as the villain.

Despite isd’s efforts, Donald Trump was reelected and his administration is now trying to curtail the European censorship apparatus. But the battle is not over. Shellenberger warned:

The isd, like many other groups that have been advocating censorship, was founded decades ago. Those groups likely look at the recent election of Trump, his executive order, and the new policies at X and Facebook as temporary setbacks in their mission to control the information environment. They are thus likely to regroup and keep their organizations operating until a new opportunity, perhaps a crisis of one kind or another emerges that would allow them to make the case for censorship anew.

In “Germany Is Taking Control of the Internet,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warned: “The EU is waging a campaign of technological imperialism, and most people don’t even know it! … The German-led EU is behaving the way the Holy Roman Empire has always behaved. Germany is once again seeking to impose its will on the world.”

Will the U.S. be able to curtail it to allow liberty to flourish for another century? Or will the dark forces of the past reemerge?

The Future of Censorship

In “Reviving the Dark Ages,” Mr. Flurry warned that while the U.S. “provided far greater religious freedom” than Europe in the past, “prophecy shows these days are nearly over.”

In the next few years, free speech and religious liberty will stop flowing out of America as tyranny spreads out of Europe. Mr. Flurry explained:

We are about to enter the darkest age in world history. I can prove this to you from world events and Bible prophecy.

The term Dark Ages means different things to different people. I view it as a time of severe religious suppression during the time of the Holy Roman Empire. It was a time when the Catholic Church, together with the civil government, attacked other religions. It was a time when Jews and “heretical” Christians were tortured alive and/or burned at the stake!

It was this kind of religious persecution that caused many to flee to America. But the Bible reveals that these Dark Ages will make a comeback—and the U.S. cannot stop it because its people are divided and engulfed in sins. In fact, many of them have taken on the religion of Roman Catholicism, the religion of their old persecutors.

“Many Catholics are unaware of this history,” Mr. Flurry wrote, “and I am not attacking them. But we cannot afford to be ignorant—because the Bible warns that our physical and spiritual lives are at stake.”

The European censorship apparatus is about to be used once again to suppress “heretical” thought.

A prophecy in Revelation 12 says: “And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. … And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days” (verses 3, 6). Mr. Flurry explained:

This passage is about God’s true Church running for its life from a beast led by a great false church—speaking of the Holy Roman Empire! Applying the day-for-a-year principle (Numbers 14:34), this is referring to a period of 1,260 years of intense persecution.

God’s Church endured 1,260 years of trial from a.d. 554 to 1814, hiding out to survive the wrath of this great false church! Those certainly were dark ages for the people of God! And untold thousands got slaughtered. Yet their record in history has been virtually erased!

This horrific story is not yet complete. Ninety percent of God’s prophecy is being fulfilled in this end time. The darkest part of the Dark Ages is just now beginning to develop! Another 1,260-day period talked about in Revelation is 1,260 actual days, or 3½ years of punishment, soon to afflict the world. God will punish the end-time descendants of physical Israel—as well as the lukewarm saints within spiritual Israel, God’s true but rebellious Church—for their sins and for not heeding His warning message.

We are headed back to the Dark Ages.

This means that the largest suppression of free speech and religious liberty is yet ahead. This also shows that the censorship machine will take on a new focus and suppress views that oppose those of the Holy Roman Empire.

Read Mr. Flurry’s article from the May-June Trumpet, “Reviving the Dark Ages,” to deeply understand this history and these prophecies.