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  "path": "/2026/03/27/free-speech-for-all/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-27T21:29:03.000Z",
  "site": "https://juicyecumenism.com",
  "tags": [
    "Democracy",
    "After years of prosecution",
    "been found guilty",
    "Free Speech for All?",
    "Juicy Ecumenism"
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  "textContent": "After years of prosecution, a parliamentarian named Päivi Maria Räsänen and a bishop in Finland have been found guilty of hate speech by Finland’s supreme court for their 2004 publication criticizing homosexuality, for which she was fined about $2000. Copies of the pamphlet and references to it must be destroyed. Many U.S. Christians have decried the ruling as an assault on religious freedom and for evincing increased European hostility to Christianity.\n\nThese concerns are valid but miss the larger picture. Governments should not criminally punish any kind of speech, whether Christian, anarchist, Marxist, Muslim, nudist, or Buddhist.\n\nAnd these concerns possibly don’t fully appreciate that the United States Bill of Rights, with its First Amendment (Congress shall make no laws…abridging the freedom of speech) is unique in the world. Other Western democracies lack it, and more permissively have always allowed prosecution of certain speech, such as defamation or sometimes forms of blasphemy or political extremism. Of late the fashion has been for laws against “hate” speech directed at groups, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual.\n\nThe Finnish court ruling should be denounced not just as an attack on traditional Christianity but more broadly an attack on freedom of speech and liberty for all. Hate speech laws, with their identitarian political assumptions, make such prosecution of free speech inevitable. Any religious or cultural disagreement potentially is deemed “hateful.”\n\nAnd of course, America’s First Amendment protects “hate” speech. In America, unlike in much of Europe or Canada, you can march under the Nazi flag, deny or minimize the Holocaust, smear immigrants, denounce whole religions, espouse racism, join the Ku Klux Klan, extol Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot, even defend (but not practice) child abuse. The First Amendment of course also defends religious liberty for all, including Baptists, Satanists, Catholics, Hindus, Pentecostals, and witches.\n\nIn America, you can be an antisemite and denounce antisemitism. You can be a Catholic or an anti-Catholic bigot. You can be a Communist and an atheist, and you can fiercely reject both as wicked. You can say horrible enormities about anyone, and they can respond with equal force. Even defamation, unlike in Europe, is largely a civil, not a criminal matter. Threats of physical violence are criminal but only if direct and plausible.\n\nThe American tradition of free speech is rooted in our Founders’ fear of state tyranny. A government that can legally suppress “bad” speech can legally suppress whatever is inconvenient for it or whatever is disruptive to the powerful. All governments, all groups, and all people, left to their own caprice, will abuse any power to silence others. The Finnish parliamentarian was queried by the prosecutor about her personal theology, which should never be law enforcement’s concern, and which most Americans would find intolerable.\n\nOur American tradition also has an optimistic confidence that, by common grace, truth, decency, and humanity will prevail if allowed an open contest. Falsehood, bigotry, and infamy will fail on their own contradictions if challenged. There is also the underlying assumption that every human, as a creature of God, should be free to come to their conclusions, without coercion or threats. Virtue is only virtue if freely chosen.\n\nBy and large, our American tradition has worked. Poisonous perspectives may arise but they typically recede eventually, exposed for what they are. More importantly, different religious, cultural and political perspectives constantly contend, none of them fully monopolizing truth, and each making its case, with the resulting debate hopefully uplifting for all. This energy is the secret sauce of American dynamism. We debate, we clash, we learn, we move forward, stronger than before.\n\nUnfortunately, such free speech is unusual in the world. Human nature often fears open debate. We want protection. Instead of rebutting what we disapprove, we want it suppressed. Authoritarians of all stripes naturally hate free speech as intrinsically threatening to them and their power. Free speech implies everyone is equal and has rights. This concept remains and will always be contested.\n\nSadly, some American Christians are losing faith in the First Amendment and free speech. Growing voices claim this experiment has failed. They advocate blasphemy laws and other restrictions, evidently afraid that Christianity cannot stand on its own, without government props. There is also the more common habit of defending Christian expressions to the exclusion of other expressions, as though religious liberty and free speech are only for Christians, especially those like us. Such an attitude is a shortsighted mistake, pragmatically and theologically. Christians rightly defend the humanity of all, equally. And Christians should fear any government coercion of speech and belief against any groups or people.\n\nChristians should defend the Finnish parliamentarian and her bishop not just because they are fellow Christians but because they are humans entitled to their own beliefs and free expression without fear. And we should oppose the Finnish court ruling, and all likeminded state coercions against free speech, as intrinsically hostile to liberty and humanity.\n\nTheoretically, in Finland, and elsewhere, atheists or Muslims or whomever could be prosecuted for critiquing sects of Christians. Christians should reject that course. Instead, Christians should invite all people of good will, and even those without it but who are smart, to join in defending free speech for all, because it protects everyone from humanity’s worst impulses.\n\nThe post Free Speech for All? appeared first on Juicy Ecumenism.",
  "title": "Free Speech for All?"
}