The members of Pussy Riot did an indecent thing: they revealed (a revelation?) the complicity between the Church and its true gods: nationalism, corruption, and profit-seeking. It would be easy to dismiss their antics as extreme and to see our American context as utterly dissimilar from the Russian one. But that would be an easy out, wouldn't it? We ourselves have millions of political prisoners, not necessarily held for their political beliefs, but as a way to further certain political careers. We still have LGBT discrimination, especially around transgender persons and threats of rollbacks of laws affirming their dignity. We too have Christian communities whose ultimate loyalty seems to be the furtherance of economic exploitation (to the extent that they are indifferent, silent, or complicit in our planet's degradation).
I don't know what, if any, faith tradition the members of Pussy Riot identify with, but I do know that their action was not primarily an anti-religious one. In fact, I see an act of great faith and hope in their performance, of radically being church even as they witness against "The Church." In a sane world, they would be the performers at the Olympics' opening this year, helping viewers uncover both the reality of oppression in Russia today, and pointing back to our own responsibility to resist oppression in our locale. So today, during this winter Olympics, maybe we need to get a bit subversive, to have our own outrageous actions to shake us from our slumber, so that we can again be faithful to that dissident prophet, that holy rebel, that indecent messenger we proclaim as the Christ. And in doing so, perhaps we'll have our own pussy riot in church.
Yours in indecent faithfulness,
Timothy Murphy
Executive Director