Russia, Pussy Riot and the Church

 It is clear that Russia is becoming more oppressive, undemocratic, corrupt and unwilling to allow open debate. It is driven by powerful elites which have Putin at their centre. The arrest and gaoling of Pussy Riot is just the latest example of a ruling elite that will suffer no alternative voices.

Of course it’s easy for us in the West to get into Russian bashing. Memories of the cold war, and simplistic readings of the Russian opposition to American interference in Syria make it easy to make Russia the bad guys yet again. It’s not like Russia is the only country where elites rule for their own benefit, and democracy is a well-orchestrated game.

What fascinates me about the Pussy Riot case is less the big picture of political oppression than the meaning that the members of the band gave to their actions. Five members of the band staged an action on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. For less than a minute, the women danced, singing “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” and crossing themselves. They were removed and arrested 10 days later and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

What is clear from their statements in court is that these people were not attacking religion as such, nor trying to stir up religious hatred. They used this action to confront the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church had allowed itself to be part of the political strategy of Vladimir Putin and his re-election as President. They used punk rock, and a performance in an most unexpected space to challenge the way that space had been co-opted by Empire.

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Kirill Gundyayev, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s. The band members claim that Putin has used the Church, and this Cathedral to support his power. He has offered to return to the church some of the spiritual values and power it lost in Soviet times, to help it reclaim its history. During the Soviet era the Church was an oppositional culture, but under the new head of the Church now confronts the evils of contemporary culture and its desire for diversity and tolerance.

At least that is what band member Yekaterina Samutsevich claimed, and in terms of the point I want to make, that is what is important. To quote Ms Samutsevich, “In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic religion and the spirit of protest in Russia” (speech to the Court at her trial).

I think what they did was a wonderful use of theatre to challenge the way the church allows itself to be co-opted by empire; to take the church’s own symbols and turn them back upon us for the sake of the world. And it did this in ways that speeches and reams of writing never could.

What face do we show the world?

I cannot help but be fairly outraged by the groping consensus to process asylum seekers off-shore, which essentially means bullying another country to deal with people who are our responsibility.

There are thousands of people around the world who live in the most extraordinarily dangerous places – because of war and civil strife, because other people don’t like their religion, because they are caught in drought and floor, because they are poor or because they are enslaved.

For many of these people – men, women and small children – the only way they can survive is to flee the place where they are and find refuge in another country. To live with a minimum of safety and well-being – things we take for granted – they have to leave the place of their birth and culture and move to a strange place.

Politicians talk about people ‘jumping the queue’, insisting that people who seek asylum and take risking trips by boat are pushing other people out of an orderly line. How do you take a place in a line when there is no Australian embassy in your country, and because of war and poverty you don’t have papers, and because of the threats to your life you don’t have much time to wait for the slow processing of your application – you may be dead before you get a reply.

Australia has signed a treaty with other nations. We have agreed that people may come to this country seeking asylum. We have agreed that it is our right to determine if they are genuine refugees. We have agreed to take a certain number each year.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that because king Herod was worried about threats to his throne, he set out to find and kill Jesus (2:13). The family fled to Egypt. Fortunately they didn’t have to visit the Egyptian embassy in Jerusalem, fill in papers and wait for months, because in his anger Herod slaughtered all the children two years and under who lived around Bethlehem (2:16). Joseph, Mary and Jesus became asylum seekers.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has called the recommendations of the Houston report into the processing of asylum seekers as racist, and says it will lead to the needless punishment of some of the most vulnerable people – including children – in the world. Because the children would be held in detention overseas, the Minister for Immigration would no longer be their guardian, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child would mean nothing.

Luke Bretherton has recently suggested that the debate between open and closed borders is an unhelpful one. One open under-values a sense of place, and the other over-values the nation as a closed political community. He argues, rather, that we should see borders neither as filters nor fences but as the face we turn to the world which tells them what sort of country we are. (Luke Bretherton, Filters, fences or faces? Asylum seekers and the moral status of borders. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/06/3535073.htm)

I think the present debate and decision shows a very poor face to the world, and does not speak well of who we are as a nation. It creates false crises for political purposes and because politicians actually will not show moral leadership. When Fraser was PM  246,000 refugees came into Australia. Our current humanitarian intake is 13,750 a year.