The Heretic of Helsinki

History may not repeat itself, but it does have a taste for irony. Finland is the nation that fought the Red Army to a standstill in the winter of 1939–40, armed with skis, rifles, and an untranslatable determination called sisu. Finns endured Soviet pressure for half a century precisely so that no commissar could ever tell them what they were permitted to believe, say, or print.

Yet on March 26 of this year, Finland’s Supreme Court accomplished what the Kremlin never could: it criminalized the theology of a Finnish grandmother.

The Detectives Brought a Bible

Her name is Päivi Räsänen, a physician, member of Parliament since 1995, former Minister of the Interior, and a Lutheran laywoman who actually believes her Bible. In 2004, she wrote a modest church pamphlet on marriage, its title borrowed from Genesis: Male and Female He Created Them. In 2019, she posted Romans 1 on social media, asking why her state church was sponsoring a Pride festival.

For this, she endured some thirteen hours of police interrogation over three sessions, detectives placing a Bible on the table and asking her to explain what she meant by the word sin, a question that has, in fairness, stumped better-equipped institutions than the Helsinki police.

The State That Would Not Take Yes for an Answer

Two courts acquitted her unanimously. The state prosecutor, displaying the persistence of a medieval inquisitor, appealed twice, having argued, remarkably, that one may cite the Bible, but that Räsänen’s interpretation of it was criminal. After nearly seven years, the Supreme Court split the difference: it unanimously acquitted her of tweeting Romans, but by a 3–2 vote convicted her and Bishop Juhana Pohjola for republishing the pamphlet online, fining them both and ordering the offending passages scrubbed from the internet.

Scrubbed. The passages rest on quotations from the best-selling book in human history. One wishes the censors luck.

“The prosecutor argued, remarkably, that one may cite the Bible, but that Räsänen’s interpretation of it was criminal.”

Then Britain Finished the Job

Then, last month, the story acquired a British chapter. Räsänen, returning from a meeting in America (where I had just met her), planned to change planes at Heathrow. Her electronic travel authorization was approved in June, and then, days before the flight, revoked. No reason was given. Bishop Pohjola, refused the same week, was at least told why: a criminal conviction within the past twelve months. Britain’s rules bar those convicted of offenses causing “serious harm,” and Finland files her conviction, she notes, in the chapter of its code titled war crimes and crimes against humanity. So, on a lawyer’s advice, a 66-year-old grandmother did not risk walking between gates at an airport, armed as she was with Romans chapter one. She flew home by way of Dallas.

Her August speaking trip to Northern Ireland now hangs in doubt. Here is the difference the First Amendment makes: Britain does not have one, and so a bureaucrat’s checkbox quietly finished what a Finnish prosecutor started.

The Soviet Union spent seventy years trying to make Christianity disappear, but collapsed first; it is a strange twist of history that the free nations, which outlasted it, now volunteer for the work.

Free Speech Was Purchased, Not Found

Europe has been here before, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the blasphemy statutes, the press licensing Milton thundered against in 1644. The West did not stumble into free speech; it was purchased, painfully, largely by dissenting Christians who insisted that conscience answers to God before it answers to the state.

A civilization that forgets where its freedoms came from should not be surprised when it forgets why it has them. Without the freedom of the mind, the liberty to believe, and to say what one believes, there is no freedom at all. Every other liberty is downstream.

“A civilization that forgets where its freedoms came from should not be surprised when it forgets why it has them.”

It Took Wyoming Ten Years

Which brings the story home to Wyoming. In 2015, I introduced legislation to plant that principle in our statutes: a shield ensuring the state could not burden a citizen’s conscience without the most compelling of reasons. It passed the House 36 to 23. The Senate President told me himself that it would not be heard, and it died there without a vote.

It took a decade of persistence by many hands before the bill finally became law in 2025, making Wyoming the twenty-ninth state to enact such protection. Ten years is a long time to argue for something the Founders considered self-evident. But Räsänen’s ordeal is the reason for the argument. Freedom is never more than one complacent generation from needing to be re-founded.

That is the ballot question this year, though it will not appear on any ballot by name. Wyoming must choose men and women who will stand, first and foremost, for the inalienable rights on which this nation was founded, rights our Declaration says are endowed by the Creator, not loaned by the government. Choose otherwise, and we will follow the Europeans, step by administrative step, into a world where Bible-quoting grandmothers face prosecutors, fines, and canceled boarding passes. That is why Wyoming Family Alliance put together a voter guide that asks candidates the deeper existential questions and posted it at WyoVoterGuide.com.

Strasbourg Is Not the Last Word

Räsänen herself has borne it all with almost embarrassing serenity, calling the ordeal an opportunity to testify, from a Helsinki police station to Capitol Hill, where she testified before a congressional committee in February. Her appeal now goes to Strasbourg.

Whatever the European Court decides, the pamphleteer has already won the older argument. States rise and fall; prosecutors retire; travel bans lapse. The text she is commanded to scrub has outlived Rome and buried the Soviet Union. The smart money, historically speaking, has never been on the censors.