On Monday, a trial in Helsinki came to a low-key ending. On trial was a 62-year old member of parliament, chairwoman of the Christian Democrat party, and former interior minister Päivi Räsänen and 49-year-old Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. The charges they faced were two counts of “incitement against minority groups,” which were “likely to cause intolerance, contempt and hatred towards homosexuals.” Tellingly, this offense is in the same part Finnish penal code as war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Her crime was holding fast to orthodox Christian beliefs on human sexuality. His was to publish a booklet she had written titled “Male and Female He Created Them.”

Ms. Räsänen apparently came to the attention of federal prosecutors when she started tweeting out Bible verses that challenged her denomination’s collaboration with the various Orwellian-named “Pride” events celebrating homosexuality and other outré lifestyle choices. As a result, the state prosecutor opened a more in-depth investigation of Räsänen and discovered a 2019 radio debate on marriage. In addition, they found her objecting to homosexuality on social media.

On June 17, 2019, she asked in a Twitter post how the sponsorship was compatible with the Bible, linking to a photograph of a biblical passage, Romans 1:24-27, on Instagram. She also posted the text and image on Facebook.

If you aren’t familiar with the quote from Romans 1, it is below.

²⁴ Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

²⁵ Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

²⁶ For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

²⁷ And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And they found the booklet “Male and Female He Created Them” that Bishop Pohjola had published.

Her arrest and interrogation is the stuff of really bad, overwrought melodrama.

She says she told the police she would not recant her Christianity and that it is not a crime in Finland, which is officially a Christian nation with a state church, to be a Christian.

“The police also asked three times in each interrogation if I agreed to leave these teachings, in writing,” Rasanen said. No, she replied: “I stand behind the Bible, whatever the consequences are. For Christians, the Bible is the word of God, and we must have the possibility of agreeing with it.”

Three times? Really? Were the cops making a joke of the matter or just pig ignorant?

This is how the prosecution framed the case during the trial. (emphasis added)

Prosecutor Anu Mantila said it is quite clear that Räsänen has a freedom of religion, but that does not exclude responsibility in using Bible verses.

“If so, the views of the Bible have supplanted the Finnish Constitution”, Mantila said.

The prosecutor made a distinction between the internal and external side of religious freedom: people are allowed to think what they want, but the expression of faith can be restricted. “I emphasise that freedom of thought and conscience is unrestricted. This court does not address the religious views of the Bible and homosexuality. It is addressing the expression of these views.”

The prosecutor reiterated her earlier position that human deeds and identity are indistinguishable. “When one judges deeds, the whole person is judged. Actions cannot be separated from identity because actions are part of identity. Understanding deeds as sin is derogatory”.

According to the prosecutor, the insulting nature of Räsänen’s expressions is obvious. Offensive is emphasised by the focus on sexual identity, the “core of humanity”.

Unsurprisingly, the modernist wing of the Lutheran Church is all for sending her to the camps:

ELCF-affiliated theologians have for the most part resisted the argument that the prosecution is essentially about theology and the state deciding that some theological ideas are unacceptable in Finland. Niko Huttunen, for example, a theologian with the ELCF’s Church Research Center, said the case is really about whether LGBT people are adequately protected from intolerance in Finland.

Huttunen believes that Räsänen’s reading of the Bible is “hermeneutically näive,” and he wonders how educated Christian leaders in the ELMDF—such as Pohjola—can uncritically accept a politician’s interpretation of Scripture.

But he hurries to add, “My aim is not to say how Räsänen must or must not read the Bible. Räsänen is being prosecuted for inciting hate towards homosexuals, one of the minorities which are seen to be in need of a special protection under Finnish law.”

This reads very, very much like how Barack Obama re-interpreted Freedom of Religion as Freedom of Worship. You can believe whatever you wish and observe your arcane practices for an hour or two each week inside a specific building, but the moment you bring that superstitious bullsh** out in the open, we’re going to crush you like a bug.

The case against Räsänen is nothing more or less than a campaign against Christianity as a belief system. We are called by the Great Commission to spread the Gospel. That, of necessity, means talking to people who are not receptive to the message. It is also based on a malformed idea of what “love thy neighbor” means. Contrary to popular belief, the opposite of love isn’t hate; it is indifference. If you encounter people living in a sinful situation and say nothing about it, you aren’t exhibiting tolerance (unless you believe in what they are doing). On the contrary, you are saying, “Hey, you be you,” and allowing people to continue on the road to eternal damnation. That is about as far from the Christian ideals of love and charity as you can get. At least if you taunted and mocked someone, they might take away a message that all was not well with their immortal soul.

While this is playing out in Finland, the same thing happens daily in boardrooms and on college campuses across our country. People are fired, and faculty and students disciplined for speaking capital-T Truth in the face of a culture that wants nothing but self-affirmation and to gaze at smiley-faces while having its genitalia stimulated. We can’t look at this and dismiss it as something happening in Finland. A decade ago, Archbishop Charles Chaput, then archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote a must-read essay on Christianity’s challenge in America.

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

A verdict is expected sometime in March. Under Finnish law, the prosecutor can appeal a verdict of “not guilty.”