Good news on the religious-liberty front from Finland: it is not a hate crime to quote the Bible’s views on homosexuality and marriage. If a government can punish religious expression that does not agree with prevailing societal ideas … then Christianity in its traditional, biblical iteration is vulnerable to governmental punishment as well.
As outrageous as it sounds, the top prosecutor of that Nordic country wanted to make it so, as she brought to trial in 2021 two citizens who promulgated such “offensive” Christian views that homosexuality was a sin and that traditional one man-one woman marriage was the only marital union ordained by God. When the district court decision didn’t go her way, she appealed the verdict to the nation’s appeals court in September.
That appellate decision was handed down last week, and it exonerated fully Juhana Pohjola, a Lutheran bishop, and Päivi Räsänen, a member of Finland’s Parliament. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: LeBron James’ Ego Trip)
The case, colloquially known as the “Finnish Bible trial,” has gained worldwide attention for its ramifications for free speech law and freedom of religious expression. Numerous conservative legal organizations, members of Congress, and some church bodies have all chimed in with support for the two Finnish defendants.
Räsänen, a 62-year-old medical doctor and grandmother of seven, said she was “deeply relieved” by the verdict. “It isn’t a crime to tweet a Bible verse, or to engage in public discourse with a Christian perspective. The attempts made to prosecute me for expressing my beliefs have resulted in an immensely trying four years, but my hope is that the result will stand as a key precedent to protect the human right to free speech.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who has been involved in an international effort to defend the two Finns, took the rhetoric up a notch: “A guilty verdict would have criminalized Christianity, silenced Christians, stifled religious freedom across Europe, and catalyzed further attacks on the foundations of Western Civilization.”
Of Bible Verses and Pamphlets
Räsänen, who has been in the Finnish Parliament since 1995, is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. When in 2019 that church body entered into partnership with “Pride 2019,” an LGBTQ event, Räsänen posted a tweet objecting to the alliance. Included in the tweet was a photo of Romans 1:24–27, a New Testament passage condemning homosexual relations.
A few months later Finland’s prosecutor general opened an investigation into whether Räsänen’s tweet constituted a crime of “ethnic agitation,” that is, whether she spread “an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed, or insulted on the basis of its race, skin color, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or disability or a comparable basis.”
However, Räsänen never criticized anyone. Her tweet merely questioned whether it was consistent with biblical teaching for her church to go all-in on a pride event. She was exercising her right to free speech, a bedrock principle in a country that prides itself on freedom.
The investigation into Räsänen also turned up a pamphlet she had written in 2004, entitled “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relations Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity.” This tract, laying out historic Christian doctrine on marriage and distributed by the Luther Foundation Finland, was considered by the authorities an attempt to cause intolerance, contempt, and hatred toward homosexuals. Pohjola, as president of the foundation, also functioned as publisher of the booklet, which is how he got dragged into this legal debacle. (READ MORE: Judge Orders Lawyers to Religious-Liberty Training)
A three-judge panel acquitted the pair in 2022, opining, “It is not the role of the district court to interpret biblical concepts.”
In the appeal, the prosecution did not offer new evidence against the two but argued that the district court judges did not apply the law appropriately. The appeal, like the original trial, centered on the religious beliefs of the defendants and the public expression of their faith.
Commented Pohjola about the appeal:
In the court today, although the prosecutor said that this is not about theological issues, the case nevertheless dealt with many basic questions of Christian doctrine: what is creation, what is the Bible, what is God’s love, what is sin. That is what is shocking: the prosecution is arguing that such religious and biblical teachings should not be protected in and of themselves, and that restrictions should be put on our speech. But in a free society, there must be room for religious groups to publicly teach and confess their faith.
The Ramifications for Conservative Christians
True, the appeals court in the Finnish Bible trial delivered a judgment endorsing free speech. But the fact that prosecutors used non-distinct allegations of “hate speech” to prosecute people who merely quoted the Bible’s long-standing, historic condemnation of sexual immorality should trouble conservative Christians worldwide.
It intimates a conflation of the traditional separation in Christian theology of a person and a person’s deeds. It says a person criticizing what a generic person does is hating the person that does it.
Long has the Christian community condemned homosexuality while loving, as commanded by their faith, the homosexual. This sentiment is usually expressed as “hate the sin, love the sinner,” and it applies not just to homosexuals but to every Christian. God hates the sin committed by all Christians but loves the one who commits it — loves him enough to save him from that sin by sending a Savior.
In the Finnish Bible trial, the prosecution questioned the “hate the sin, love the sinner” idea, calling it “antique” and based in “American fundamentalism.” The idea clearly butts up against the prevailing “love me, love my sin” mantra of the post-Christian West and is usually condemned as harmful by people, including Christians, who don’t believe homosexuality is a sin. In this thinking, to call homosexuality a sin, which the defendants in the trial clearly did, is the same as attacking persons who are homosexuals; it is, in that view, a hate crime.
Had the Finnish pair been convicted, traditional Christian ethics would have to be regarded as hate speech, comparable to ideas that expressly advocate violence toward individuals.
If a government can punish religious expression that does not agree with prevailing societal ideas, like endorsement of homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, or what have you, then Christianity in its traditional, biblical iteration is vulnerable to governmental punishment as well. (READ MORE: ELCA Professes Faith in Pride With ‘Sparkle Creed’)
It has not come to that yet in America, but a Biden administration that champions secularism has been intent on driving Christian organizations out of the public square. It has attacked religious liberty at every turn, from discriminating against Christians seeking to live their faith in their occupations, to keeping religious adoption agencies from accessing federal funds, to denying private religious schools funds granted to other private schools simply because they are religious.
As for Räsänen and Pohjola, they are unfortunately not totally off the hook yet. The prosecutor has a third card to play — appealing the case to the Finnish Supreme Court. She has until the end of the year to decide whether to do that.
