by Mike Judge, Evangelical Times
In a shocking and alarming decision, Finnish Christian politician, Päivi Räsänen, has been found guilty of ‘hate speech’ by the Supreme Court of Finland for expressing her biblical beliefs about marriage in a decades-old church pamphlet. She was acquitted on a separate charge relating to a social media post she wrote, but it cannot gloss over the fact that Finland has just dealt a serious blow to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
If you haven’t been following the long-running case, it centres on Päivi Räsänen. She has been a member of the Finnish Parliament since 1995 and was Minister of the Interior from 2011 to 2015. She is a medical doctor, mother of five children, and grandmother of twelve. She is also an active member of the Finnish Lutheran church.
Her ordeal began in June 2019 when she responded to the leadership of her church and questioned its official sponsorship of an LGBT event in a social media post on ‘X’, accompanied by an image of a Bible text (Romans 1:24-27). She was arrested and interrogated about her faith by the police, who then went on a fishing expedition to find other ‘offensive’ material she may have written.
They found a church pamphlet she wrote for her church back in 2004, titled: ‘As Man and Woman He Created Them’ about sexuality and marriage. For this, and for her social media post, she was charged as a criminal. So too was Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola for publishing the pamphlet. In April 2021, the Finnish Prosecutor General brought three charges of ‘agitation against a minority group’ against her and Bishop Juhana under the country’s ‘War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity’ law.