Six years ago, Päivi Räsänen wrote a tweet that changed the course of her life—and is still, to this day, challenging the definition of religious freedom in Europe.
Räsänen has been a member of parliament in Finland since 1995. She’s also a member of the nation’s Evangelical Lutheran Church—which in 2019 announced its official sponsorship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: “How can the Church’s doctrinal foundation, the #Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?” She posted this comment alongside a picture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homosexuality as shameful: “Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
The next day, she opened her morning newspaper to find out that she was being investigated by police for hate speech.
“In the beginning, I didn’t even believe it. It was so absurd,” Räsänen told me when we spoke recently. Surely she’d be the first to know if she was being investigated? And yet. “It turns out that a citizen had made a criminal complaint about my Twitter update and then the police started to investigate it,” she said. “The police had already informed the media before I got the information.”
During her time as minister of the Interior of Finland, between 2011 and 2015, she’d overseen the police. Now, they were interrogating her as an official part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, finally reaching the Supreme Court of Finland last month.
At its heart is a simple question with massive consequences: Can quoting the Bible be a crime?
