Great news from Finland

Last Tuesday, the Finnish government TV channel held a televised debate on gay rights and religion. The state church was represented by the bishop of Tampere, and also attending was Finnish Christian Democrat MP Päivi Räsänen. The frank discussion of gay rights led to an immediate result: over the last week, 15,000 people have left the Finnish state church. (HS)

This is nothing short of wonderful: the best way to get people to abandon organized Christianity is to get a bishop of the state church and a Christian MP on TV to talk about their opinions. I definitely hope they attend more TV debates.

Of course, the more liberal Christian circles are upset, as they feel that these people are misrepresenting the church and its ideas. I'm not entirely sure that's the case. From a historical perspective, the Christian church is built on 2,000 years of an aggressive hatred of anything they consider deviant. I realize there are lots of Christians who want to turn their church in a different direction, but the fact remains that for the entirety of its history, the cross has stood for intolerance and repression. Even today, for every progressive theologian who wants the church to tolerate gays and lesbians, there are at least ten angry and intolerant conservatives who hate fags.

Another way of looking at the recent boom of church-quitting is that this really reveals just how Christian the Finnish people are. For the vast majority of Finland's independence, practically all Finnish children were baptised into the Church on birth, this author included. Not belonging to a religion was actually illegal until 1923, and laws on blasphemy are still in force today.

All this led to an atmosphere where it was assumed that everyone belonged to the church, but religion never played a large part in everyday life. Belonging to the church was just something one was expected to do. These days, the church can be openly criticized, and more and more people are actually facing the facts of what the church really stands for, and finding they don't actually believe it. So in a sense, the discussion on gay rights isn't so much causing people to become averse to the church as exposing that they didn't believe in what the church peddles in the first place.

On the whole, these are some of the best news we've had all year. It's a wonderful testament to how far tolerance and even a kind of liberalism have spread that the best way to do anti-church propaganda is to get its representatives to talk about themselves.