A Christian politician from Finland has come under fire for sharing scripture on Facebook.
Christian Democratic MP Päivi Räsänen called out the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for its participation in the Helsinki Pride events back in June, sharing a passage from Romans 1 to prove her point.
“How can the church’s doctrinal foundation, the Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?” the politician asked.
As a result of this robust remark, Finnish Police have reportedly opened an investigation into Räsänen, who is a member of The Christian Democrats party and the former Minister of the Interior.
“The pre-trial investigations have yet been completed. Police will provide more details once the investigations have been completed or presented to a prosecutor for consideration of charges. There will be no further comments prior to that,” said Pekka Hätönen, the officer in charge of the investigations at Helsinki Police Department, according to the Helsinki Times.
The specific Bible passage shared by the politicians was from Romans 1 :24-27 and reads as follows:
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
A fierce pro-life advocate and doctor by training, Räsänen courted controversy in 2013 when she asserted that her country was more committed to animal welfare than the protection of unborn babies.
“The law on animal protection gives better protection to an animal about to be put down than the law on abortion does to an unborn child,” she said during a Lutheran church service.
“It is forbidden to cause the animal pain when slaughtering it, but no one dares to even discuss the painfulness of abortion. Abortion is defended on the grounds that the fetus is not a human person, even though it is a biological human individual from the moment of conception.”
Responding to the news that she may be under criminal investigation for reciting of scripture, the politician tweeted: “I am not worried about myself, as I trust that this will not go to the prosecutor.”
“But I’m concerned,” she continued, “if the Bible cited by even being considered “insignificant” to be unlawful. I hope this does not lead to Christian self-censorship. Room 1: 24-27.”
In a column at The American Conservative, author Rod Dreher urged the politician to “stand strong.”
“In Finland, if you so much as question whether or not a Church ought to be approving of a gay pride march, you can be investigated by the police,” he wrote. “In the US, if you did that, the police won’t bother you, but depending on what you do for a living, you could still have your job taken away and your career destroyed. So you tell me: with that kind of social control in place, how free are we, really?”
Faithwire has reached out to Päivi Räsänen for further comment on the investigation. We will update the article when we hear back from her office.