“Vice President Vance’s speech was a much-needed reflection of the dire state of fundamental freedoms in Europe. Adam Smith-Connor was prosecuted and convicted on the basis of his silent thoughts—it doesn’t get much worse than that in a society that claims to be free. When individuals can be interrogated, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for silent prayer, we must conclude that the state of fundamental freedoms is in crisis.”

Vice President JD Vance confronted the European elites with their hypocrisies at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. He detailed the democratic failings of Europe’s leaders; highlighted their fear of dissident voters who stubbornly insist on voting for populist parties; noted the growing migration crisis across the continent. But perhaps most importantly, he addressed an issue that few Western leaders are willing to discuss out loud: the growing censorship and prosecution of Europe’s Christians.

Vance’s speech has become something of a Rorschach test. For some, it was a deplorable and deliberately disruptive salvo aimed at the heart of the post-war international order. For others, it was a desperately needed and long overdue exercise in difficult truth-telling. The speech was effective because Vance brought in specific details. He cited the case of Adam Smith-Connor—the man arrested after praying for his own aborted child near an abortion clinic in the UK, the first conviction for a thought-crime in modern Britain—and the draconian “exclusion zones” in Scotland, in which even thinking pro-life thoughts is illegal.

Those outraged by Vance’s speech dismissed these examples, and this is no surprise—they have been doing so for decades. The same commentators who are reduced to wild-eyed babbling over the Hungarian government declining to subsidize institutions opposed to its values are content to dismiss the arrests and prosecutions of Christians as a bug (if not a feature) of the “norms” they seek to defend. But Vance could have cited dozens of additional cases from the past few years.

Anne Applebaum, for example, is one of the most prominent public prophets warning about the “twilight of democracy” in Europe, but has yet to mention the years-long persecution of Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen for merely quoting the Bible—and Räsänen isn’t just a veteran like Smith-Connor. She was Finland’s Minister of the Interior for 2011 to 2015. One would think that the criminal prosecution of a political leader for citing Scripture in public media interviews would be precisely the sort of thing Applebaum and her comrades are so concerned about. You would be wrong. 

But there is little doubt that if Räsänen was defending LGBT ideology in Hungary or Poland, the elites would rush to the barricades and shriek about the coming darkness.

Others are thrilled that Vance was willing to speak out.

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