Pussy Riot Found Guilty of "Hooliganism Driven by Religious Hatred and Offending Religious Believers"

Earlier in the week, I linked to the closing statement of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the singing group Pussy Riot, which has been on trial in Moscow.  The group of women singers who are frequently described as a "feminist punk band" were thrown in jail after they went into the cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and, in a dramatic impromptu performance, prayed to the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Putin.  For their actions, they've been in jail for six months, and a verdict has just been handed down finding them guilty of "hooliganism."

To be specific: media reports say that the judge who found them guilty stated that their hooliganism is worthy of punishment because it's driven by religious hatred and the desire to offend religious believers.    The logic of this verdict strikes me as worth noting because of its close connection to the debates about religious freedom in the American context.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's defense of the theatrical prayer to the Virgin Mary that Pussy Riot offered in February very specifically calls out the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, who are, she maintains, collaborating with the Russian state to wipe out civil liberties and to establish authoritarian control of the Russian people by a church-state alliance.  The nation's top religious leaders are benefiting lavishly from the deals they have cut with the state, she argues.

And so she frames her group's protest in the Moscow cathedral in February as a protest against a collapse of church to state as a single governing entity, an amalgamation of secular-religious power in which notions of Christian truth and Christian propriety are dictated from the top echelons of the church and enforced--ruthlessly, if need be--by the state when ordinary believers like the three members of Pussy Riot dare to offer prayers in language or gestures that offend the sensibilities of those at the top.  And when they dare to offer public prayers that have revolutionary implications disdainful to the state leaders enforcing religious dictates to consolidate their own authoritarian power.

It's hard to think of a more clear-cut case of the state trampling on the religious freedom of believers--the kind of "coerced secularism" dealt out by the state that Paul Ryan's bishop Morlino and other right-wing Catholic hierarchs have been blathering on about in recent months--than this.  Only there's this slight problem for Morlino and right-wing Catholics, if they want to point to the actions of the Russian state as examples of the secular sphere "coercing" believers:

What the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, who are collaborating with the Russian state to abolish the religious freedom of ordinary believers like the Pussy Riot group, are advocating for is precisely the same thing that right-wing U.S. Catholic bishops like Robert Morlino are advocating for.  In the name of defending religious freedom, Morlino and his confreres want to deny women the right to have birth control coverage in their insurance plans--though 90%+ of married U.S. Catholics use or have used contraceptives, and nearly 90% of U.S. Catholics tell pollsters that they approve of the use of artificial contraception.

Morlino and his cronies praise Paul Ryan and are doing all they can to help the Romney-Ryan ticket win the fall elections because they want to restrict the religious freedom of American citizens, including American Catholics, who approve of and promote the right of civil marriage of same-sex couples.  As Terry Weldon reported recently at his Queering the Church blog, the support of American Catholics--of "ordinary" American lay Catholics as opposed to our top leaders--is "strong and surging," and has risen dramatically in the past several years.  58% of American Catholics now support same-sex marriage.

The notion of religious freedom that the U.S. Catholic bishops are promoting at this point in American history is directly opposed to the religious freedom of American Catholics, and, indeed, of American citizens in general, who reject the top-down formulation of Catholic teaching handed down by the Catholic hierarchy in the areas of contraception and same-sex marriage.  This is precisely why the top leaders of the Catholic church have, in recent years, invented that convenient (and entirely unprecedented and untraditional and overtly political) language about "intrinsic evil" and the obligation of Catholics to vote always against "intrinsic evil" as they cast their votes.

This pseudo-theological language gives the bishops a pretend-theological hammer to bludgeon the political consciences of lay Catholics and force them to do the bishops' bidding in the political realm.  It is a tool designed to impose on the secular realm--on the consciences and lives of all American citizens--peculiar Catholic notions of religious belief and behavior held increasingly only by top church leaders, and not even lay Catholics.

The U.S. Catholic bishops do not yet enjoy the kind of direct control of the state that the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church enjoy under the present regime.  But make no mistake about it: they and other leaders of the religious right are actively working to this end.

I cannot imagine the U.S. Catholic bishops and all the right-wing Catholics who do their bidding looking at the Pussy Riot verdict and the prison sentence the judge will no doubt dole out to the Pussy Riot group for its "hooliganism" with anything but envy.  Since this is the kind of theocratic power for which the bishops and their supporters salivate in American society.

They'd give their eye teeth to enjoy the kind of power Russian Orthodox leaders now have with the secular leaders of Russia.  And they'd give anything to have in place the kind of church-state arrangement that has developed in the former dictatorship of the Soviet Union--in which an anti-religious form of dictatorship has now been supplanted with a theocratic form of dictatorship shored up by corrupt Orthodox leaders collaborating with the secular state.

An arrangement the Pussy Riot group prays to the Virgin to unsettle because, as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova stated recently in her closing statement, it contradicts some of the most fundamental teachings of Jesus about authentic religious practice, and makes mincemeat of his core teachings.  And it's for that quite specifically religious protest that this group of young women have just been found guilty and may now find themselves in prison.

P.S. (a few minutes later): the sentence has just been handed down.  Two years in prison for each of the three young women.