Use or Lose Your Rights

It’s great to be with you. I want to begin in a place you might not expect after that introduction, which is Finland with a woman named Päivi Räsänen.

Paivi is a long-standing member of the Finnish Parliament. She’s a physician, she’s also a pastor’s wife, and she is a member of a religious denomination there. And when her church in 2019 said that they would be sponsoring the local Pride parade, Paivi tweeted a message out questioning her church’s alignment with Scripture, and including a Scripture in her tweet.

Now you might have thought that would cause some controversy, and it certainly did, but what Paivi didn’t expect was that Finnish authorities would actually launch a full-bore investigation combing through over two decades of every public statement she made, looking for a possible crime that she may have committed with her speech. And they ended up charging her with three different hate crimes—crimes that actually fall under Finland’s War Crimes Act—because of these public statements on biblical human sexuality.

They then not only charged her, but she went through a full trial where she was questioned on her beliefs, and she was asked, essentially, will you follow Finnish law, or will you follow the Bible? This is in a Western democracy that this occurred.

We were privileged to support her case, and we won at the trial court level, but that wasn’t enough because Finnish authorities needed to make an example of Paivi, so they appealed it to the Court of Appeals. We won again at the Court of Appeals. But that, too, wasn’t enough because Finnish prosecutors have seen fit that they need to send a strong message to all of the citizens of Finland that they can not only go after the citizens, but they can go after someone as prominent a leader as Paivi.

Now, nearly five years have passed, the Finnish Supreme Court is poised to hear her case, and the process itself has become much of the punishment.

Now you might think this is an extreme example to provide, but I can tell you that all of the Western democracies in this moment are posing the same types of questions to their citizens. If you’ve been reading the news, you can look at what happened in Brussels just last week—the political heart of Europe—where a conservative conference was supposed to be shut down by a mayor’s order because the mayor disagreed with the views of that conference—views as extreme as ‘life begins at conception.’ We had to stand up a legal team in the middle of the night just to keep the conference open.

Or you might be paying attention to what is happening in Scotland right now, where a law has just been passed, and in Ireland where they’re considering a similar law. These are the new blasphemy laws. You might see them in third-world countries play out differently, but here, in Western democracies, they’re called “hate speech laws,” and Ireland has said the quiet part out loud, which is that they shouldn’t define what hate speech is, because that would limit the number of prosecutions they can have under the law.

It’s chilling in many respects, but I’m guessing you may be thinking, “Well, what are we worried about? We have the First Amendment.” Well, now I need to tell you that most of the governments in the Western democracies around the world have religious freedom and free speech guarantees in their governing documents, but they’re not worth the paper that they’re written on when activists and judges are able to come in and gut those protections, and when citizens are too apathetic to stand up for their rights, to insist on their enforcement.

So right now, as we stand here, in your generation, the United States is the last Western country in the world that is resisting this type of government censorship. The last country in the world. And surely you know that major corporations and government officials right now are trying to impose a new orthodoxy—an orthodoxy that silences, punishes, and ruins those who would give voice to the truth that life begins at conception, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, or that we’re fearfully and wonderfully—but immutably—made in God’s image. This is the new orthodoxy that we’re facing.

So that’s one of the reasons that I bring up Paivi’s example, because again, this test of truth leads to human flourishing, and we know: what more would the enemy of our souls want to do but to silence that truth to this generation?

The second reason that I bring up Paivi as an example is that I believe she’s displaying a profound amount of courage in this moment, with a lot at stake. And if you ask her why, she says, “Because we have to speak the truth.” Speaking the truth in this moment is loving our neighbor. It’s not just about our freedoms. It’s about the message that we’re speaking. It’s about being Christ’s hands and feet.

Because it’s not just about us getting the message out; it’s about the person that gets to hear that message. It’s about the person who gets to receive that ministry. These freedoms aren’t just focused on the freedom holder, but on the beneficiary. The book of Hosea says that we’re living, right now, in a time when we live without the Creator, we eat the bitter fruit of lies. Think about that. Do you feel, do you taste the bitter fruit of lies in our culture? Because when laws embrace those lies, what we know comes is injustice, misery, and human suffering. And that’s the moment we’re in.

But when we dare to speak and live the truth, we can help other people. So I want to give you a few examples today of how these freedoms are in jeopardy right now in the United States.

The first is Shane and Jennifer DeGross. They’ve been foster-care parents for nine years, but they recent went to get the renewal of their foster-care license and they were told they’re no longer fit to serve as foster parents because they don’t embrace gender identity and they decline to take kids who may identity as the opposite sex to Pride parades or to have other “gender affirming” treatments.

Now you might say, well, why don’t you just not place a child of that age in their home? It’s not good enough under state law. It doesn’t matter the age of the child. What matters is what your ultimate beliefs are. This is happening around the country. It’s not an isolated instance.

Grant Park Christian Academy is a religious institution. They serve a number of families who are below the federal poverty level, which means that those families rely on the school to give those children two meals a day and a snack through the National School Lunch Program. But the federal government posed to Grant Park that they need to make the same choice as Paivi and the same choice as the others: choose between your faith and your biblical beliefs, or serving. And the school quicky realized that in that instance, they’re not only called to feed the body; they’re called to feed the soul. They have to bear witness. They stood against the federal government, and now that policy is changed to protect religious schools.

A last example I want to raise with you is Kaley Chiles. Kaley is a licensed counselor, and sometimes she has young kids who come to her and adolescents who are confused about their bodies. They want to learn to live at peace with their bodies. But her state’s law forbids her from sitting and listening and having those conversations. What it doesn’t do is forbid her from helping to “transition” those kids to identify as the opposite sex. This is regardless of the fact that the science tells us more than 80 percent of all children who have these conversations, who receive counseling, live at peace with their bodies for the rest of their lives. Over a hundred jurisdictions right now have this law in place. It’s a violation of free speech. It’s a violation of our right to practice our faith. It’s religious discrimination.

Abraham Lincoln told us a long time ago that if this nation fell, it wouldn’t be because of foreign armies. It would be a free people’s suicide. Because we’re apathetic and we don’t steward the inheritance of our freedom. Nietzsche said that in a post-Christian society we would feel disoriented—as if the earth were unchained from the sun.

Certainly, the earth does feel unchained from the sun in this moment. And yet this is the moment that God created all of us to live in, and it’s a moment of great opportunity. Because when we are facing a world that is looking at compromise, we offer the joy of conviction. In a moment where we’re grappling with what human dignity is, we offer conviction and a vision of real life, of real equality, of real dignity, because we’re made in God’s image. In a moment with broken families, we offer a vision of what family stability looks like through sacrificial love and sexual fidelity. And in a moment where now power is seen as a means of oppression, we offer a vision of government that recognizes that we are all fallen creatures, so checks and balances work well, and religious freedom and free speech curb government authoritarianism.

These freedoms are critical to our success, and they’re critical to Western civilization. At root, they’re all biblical ideas, and they’ve made the West the envy of the world. In fact, what you may not know is that the United States Constitution is actually the longest-enduring constitution in the history of the world. And it’s in jeopardy right now. In your lifetime.

So what do we do in this moment? I’ll give you four keys.

Align your conscience with God’s word, not with what the world says. Don’t let cancel culture get to you. Spend time with Jesus, not necessarily CNN and Fox News.

The second thing to do? Don’t violate your convictions. Don’t rationalize it in the moment. Because light shines brightest in darkness.

The third thing is: know your rights. They can’t force you to say something that you don’t believe. The government doesn’t have the right to do that, nor can it infringe on your right to practice your faith or to raise your kids consistent with it.

And lastly, talk to your kids. Parent them.