27/03/2026
I've never heard of this case before but it seems quite egregious.
It does always seem to be Christians who face such charges and not those of other faiths who have similar or far more extreme views.
https://tinyurl.com/4ctz8ys3 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.
In March 2022, the pair were unanimously acquitted at the District Court of Helsinki. In August 2023, they faced a second trial at the Finnish Court of Appeal. Another unanimous ruling followed as the District Court’s acquittal was upheld. But prosecutors were determined to hound Päivi and Bishop Juhana all the way to the Finnish Supreme Court. This morning, they were both found guilty in a narrow 3-2 decision for expressing their biblical beliefs about marriage.
This is how it starts. Not with sweeping bans. But with a single ‘narrow’ conviction, dressed up as balance, quietly redrawing the boundary between what may be believed—and what may be said. The Supreme Court’s ruling is a warning shot to Christians across Europe and beyond.
Yes, she was acquitted for posting a Bible verse on social media. That much will be cited, repeatedly, as proof that ‘freedom of speech still exists.’ But do not be distracted. That acquittal is the fig leaf. The substance of this ruling is far more ominous: a criminal conviction for expressing Christian beliefs in a pamphlet written nearly 20 years ago. A modern European democracy has just declared that it can reach back across decades, extract religious expression, and punish it today. That is not justice. That is a doctrine of fear.
What started as a police investigation into a tweet quoting Scripture spiraled into something far more invasive. Päivi Räsänen was subjected to hours of interrogation—not merely about her words, but about her faith. Biblical passages were dissected in a police station. Theology was treated as suspect material.
Then came the escalation: prosecutors dredged up a church pamphlet from two decades ago, written in an entirely different cultural and legal climate, and used it as the basis for criminal charges. This is the kind of retrospective scrutiny one expects from authoritarian regimes—not from nations that claim to uphold liberal democracy.
Lower courts saw through it and acquitted her. They recognised the obvious: that expressing traditional Christian teaching, however unfashionable, is protected speech. The Finnish Supreme Court has now shattered that clarity.
Make no mistake about what this conviction means. It means the State now reserves the right to decide which beliefs are acceptable—and which are punishable. It means that time offers no safety; what you wrote, preached, or published years ago can be reinterpreted under today’s ideological standards and turned into a crime.
And it means that Christians—and indeed anyone with deeply held beliefs—are now on notice. Today, it is a pamphlet. Tomorrow, a sermon. Next year, a conversation. This is how self-censorship is born: not through explicit bans, but through calculated uncertainty. Through the quiet, creeping fear that anything you say might one day be used against you.
Christians everywhere should be alarmed. Not because we seek dominance in the public square, but because we now see, unmistakably, that the ground beneath our freedom is shifting.
Some will call this a nuanced ruling. They will argue that the court has carefully balanced competing rights. But there is nothing balanced about acquitting a woman for quoting the Bible, while convicting her for explaining it.
Freedom of religion does not mean the right to silently possess a belief. It means the right to express it, to teach it, to live it publicly. Strip away that ability, and what remains is not freedom, but permission—revocable at any time.
This cannot be the final word. The case must now go to the European Court of Human Rights, where the stakes will be clear: is Europe still a place where citizens may articulate historic religious beliefs without fear of prosecution? Or has it become a place where those beliefs are tolerated only until they offend the prevailing consensus? If the answer is the latter, then the implications stretch far beyond Finland. They touch every church, every pulpit, every believer across the continent.
There is nothing entirely new about this moment. In the Book of Acts, the Apostles stood before authorities who demanded silence. Do not speak. Do not teach. Do not proclaim the name of Jesus. The response was as courageous as it was simple, ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29).
They were threatened again. And what did they do? They did not retreat into private belief. They prayed—not for safety, but for boldness. And then they went out and spoke all the more. That is the crossroads now. A State that can criminalise decades-old expressions of faith is a State that has stepped over a line.
The question is whether Christians of conviction will notice—and whether they will respond with the same clarity and courage as those believers who faced the same pressure at the dawn of the gospel era. May God give us all prayerful courage to say, we are not ashamed to own the name of Jesus in a hostile world.
ADF International
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.
