Weed, Evangelism, and Sex Addiction: I Spent an Entire Day at Speakers' Corner

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It’s not even 2PM and I’ve already been threatened with eternal damnation more than five times. Turns out evangelical preachers – those with an eternal love for Jesus, a pretty chill guy whose USP was not judging strangers – are really hung up on judging strangers.

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I’ve come to Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner expecting to hear the kind of nonsensical ramblings you’d find under a YouTube video about the MH370 disappearance, but what I’ve witnessed so far has been so much more absurd.

Speakers’ Corner is a religious, political, and sociological battlefield; it’s probably the only place in the world where you can spend one minute bickering over atoms with Seventh-day Adventists and the next sparring with some dickhead in a monocle about the right way to eat a bacon sandwich.

However, what baffles me about all this is why anyone would want to? So much of our lives—from school through teenagehood through emails about new compulsory workflow systems—are spent being lectured at, so why would you consciously heave yourself out of bed on a Sunday (the corner’s busiest day) to be harangued by a load of angry shouters? Or, for that matter, choose to spend the day of rest screaming at indifferent passersby?

“Faith will explode inside you if you read the Bible!” cries the most enigmatic of the religious preachers, American evangelist Angela Cummings. Screeching feverishly about God and Jesus in a Baptist-y southern drawl, Angela rattles through an impromptu sermon.

Hecklers call out her passion as deluded (“How the fuck did you get through Heathrow?”), but it’s clearly infectious; she draws the biggest crowd of the day so far, even if no one in the audience actually agrees with her. After she’s finished sermonizing, I stop her for a chat.

VICE: Hi Angela, what are you doing here today?
Angela Cummings: I blow Jesus kisses and he sends me around the world. I’m traveling around the world and wanted to do a circle around the UK. I just came from Spain. Liverpool was the funnest. [sic] They threw wine and popcorn at me. They kicked me out of Chester for being antisocial—I was banned for four hours.

This is my second time at Speakers’ Corner. I was here in January last year and it was cold. I’ve been planning this trip since October.

Sounds expensive. How do you finance the trip?
I have lots of friends around the world. They buy me plane tickets. I call them up and a few days later my tickets arrive.

And apparently the devil is in London today?
The devil is a fallen angel and can only be in one place at a time. Today he is in London and some days he goes for luncheon with Obama. God is everywhere.

You mentioned that you haven’t been a Christian your whole life—maybe there’s hope for me yet?
I wasn’t Christian until I was 25. I was a crack cocaine addict heading to hell until God gave me the word to follow the scripture.

Angela is an intriguing case; she seems to relish in the criticism, apparently fueled by the almost exclusively negative reactions she receives.

The speakers might be the main attraction here, but stick around long enough and you’ll start to notice that audience members—some of them regulars—contribute as much to the discourse as those on the stand.

The first of the corner’s regular patrons to arrive is Terry. Watching, aghast, as speaker after speaker rambles on, he offers his two cents to anybody who will listen. Terry persistently reminds me that he is “not a heckler,” instead choosing to stroll off when he hears something disagreeable, which seems to happen almost constantly.

Much like Angela the preacher, he gives up the best part of his Sundays to indulge in the paradoxical pleasure of being pissed off.

For more on London, watch our doc ‘We Watched Weed Fanatics Get Arrested in Hyde Park on 4/20’:

Later on, self-confessed sex addict Omid Mankoo takes the corner, a lone figure performing some unusual exercise movements. He’s perched beside a sign of Microsoft WordArt promising “SEX ADDICTION SOLVED.” I ask him to share his secret.

Hi Omid. Why are you here talking about sex addiction?
Omid Mankoo: One minute I was interested in women, then I didn’t care. I don’t like the term “addiction.” I prefer “strongly fixated.”

How did you find the cure?
I don’t promise the cure, but I have solution material. Sex is exaggerated by media, society, and presentation materials.

Do you mean porn?
Yes. First I studied God in ancient Indian scripture, then I applied it to sexuality by studying my aroused self.

Sounds interesting. Is it an abstinence type of thing?
No, I don’t promote abstinence—it’s all about freeing the mind.

Have you had much success?
I helped myself, and over 180 people have the book. But it takes over three years to have a significant impact once the tricks are revealed.

Perhaps discouraged by the lack of audience (most visitors to Speakers’ Corner prefer the more off-the-wall debates), Omid packs up and walks off after about an hour. He declines my handshake as he leaves.

We’re just weeks away from one of the most chaotic elections in British history, but there’s a startling lack of politics on offer today.

Tired of the endless religious monologues—all of them ostensibly different, but really exactly the same (energetic fear-mongering in place of any salient points)—I turn my attention to the 4/20 rally passing through. It’s hard not to, really, considering the cloud of skunk smoke hanging above their heads is pretty much inescapable, enveloping you in a dome filled with nylon hoodies, very impractical bongs, and far too many balding white men with scalps barely clinging on to the few dreads they have left.

A little later “Seriously Fun Politics” gives us a break from all the proselytizing. A bemused gaggle of Spanish school kids and a man on his fourth can of cider watch as Labour voters battle it out with Tory voters via some wildly general comments and zero actual facts.

“It’s all shit, though, isn’t it,” mutters a retreating Scottish man, capturing the mood succinctly.

Later, a heckler visibly shakes with anger as a socialist speaker repeatedly tells him he is being “shafted up the arse” by the government—an analogy he will frequently return to.

This isn’t the first time today I’ve heard anal sex referred to in a negative light. Will, who’s also been here most of the day—seemingly with the sole intention of trolling speakers for his own amusement—tells me there are three pillars that prop up most of the speakers’ beliefs: homophobia, misogyny, and anti-semitism. This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise; it’s inevitably always the pricks shouting the loudest in any social situation.

Mind you, despite Will’s cynicism, I’ve seen more touched on today than those three topics alone. I’d posit that Speakers’ Corner is less about spreading hate and more about simply providing a platform to people who would usually be actively, aggressively ignored.

One of the real superstars of the corner is a representative from the Brotherhood of the Cross and the Star, who I’m told is here week-in, week-out.

He chants about how the religion’s founder, Olumba Olumba Olu, is the Holy Spirit personified, making me assume that the Brotherhood of the Cross and the Star is a kind of distorted version of Christianity with a bit of reincarnation thrown in for bonus fantasy points (which, after a Google, I learn was a very precise assumption to make).

His reception is respectful for the most part, until he claims Muhammad as a follower of the Brotherhood, which doesn’t go down too well in front of the predominantly Muslim crowd.

By 5PM the makeshift boxes and step ladders descend and it’s more of a back and forth vibe among everyone in attendance. Every minor conversation, including a couple of my own, are swarmed upon by onlookers hungry for a fight. Attacks might verge on the startlingly personal, but some unwritten code keeps things non-physical and largely good natured.

The closest thing to a ruckus is an encircled battle of words between an Egyptian Christian and a British Muslim. Tongues whirl and hands swerve just millimeters away from faces, but that’s as far as it gets. An elderly woman, Isla, tells me they are both “silly men” and starts to explain (at length) how we are all united by one god.

I’m not sure if anyone ever turns up in Hyde Park on a Sunday to have their mind fully changed. For many of the speakers it seems to be either an exercise in very public narcissism or a marathon devotion to whatever cause they happen to be peddling. I see no new converts, but we humans are a stubborn bunch—can we really be won over by anything in less than an hour?

I chat to one elderly man who’s been coming here “on and off for over 50 years.” He believes such free speech couldn’t happen anywhere else in the world—not even on any other corner of Britain—and he’s probably right.

You might not agree with everything—or anything—said at Speakers’ Corner, but in a nation that champions free speech, it’s important that there’s a space for people to say it.

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