NASHVILLE, Tennessee — The United States should defend religious freedom everywhere, including in ally countries such as NATO membership-seeking Finland, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo reflected on a Helsinki court dismissing incitement charges against Christian Democratic Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen last spring after Finland’s former interior minister criticized the Finnish Lutheran Church for sponsoring a 2019 LGBT pride event.
“When you see things like this, where free speech is trampled on and its sister, its cousin, religious freedom, is trampled upon, in this case, that’s a step backwards,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “The United States ought to address that and call it out wherever we find it.”
As former President Donald Trump‘s top diplomat, Pompeo said the previous administration “tried to do that with friends, with adversaries, and with those folks in between.”
“Religious freedom goes hand in hand with freedoms more broadly and more stable nations as well,” he said. “There’s a deep connection between religious freedom and national security.”
Rasanen’s trial alarmed at least five U.S. senators, who expressed concerns to Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain that her successful prosecution could create a “secular blasphemy law” to persecute Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Rasanen did distance herself from a separate 2004 pamphlet in which she wrote homosexuality was “a disorder of psycho-sexual development.”
Pompeo similarly underscored the importance of religious freedom, a key organizing principle of his State Department, during his keynote speech last weekend at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference. There, he received the group’s Ronald Reagan Defender of Freedom award.
During his remarks, Trump’s former CIA director and a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate described “the decay inside our nation” as the country’s most pressing challenge. He reiterated that sentiment backstage during a one-on-one interview.
“When you lose those institutions that, in my judgment, were central to making the United States of America the greatest nation in the history of civilization, when those things begin to disintegrate, when they no longer perform that connective responsibility that they have, the capacity to put human beings in contact in ways that build families and build communities, you run real risk,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And we’re seeing that today.”
