The world is full of idiotic and inexplicable things: Geordie Shore, One Direction and the ongoing success of the Daily Mail. However, from the perspective of many lovers of rock & roll, perhaps there is nothing as crass, small-minded and anti-progressive as religion, and specifically Christianity. The two year sentence for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” handed down to Fem-Punk outfit Pussy Riot is only the latest example of what many will perceive as Christianity’s fear of Rock. After all, from the moment Elvis wiggled his hips in a suggestive manner c1955 and Southern Baptists swooned in distress, the relationship between popular music and Christianity has so often been portrayed as antagonistic, one might reasonably be permitted to yawn.
Clearly examples abound and they are almost too tedious to be listed. Everyone knows how Lennon’s off-hand remark suggesting that The Beatles were “bigger than Jesus” led to album burnings by the Christian Right. Equally, the absurd manoeuvres of the Parental Music Resource Center, a US Christian lobby group in the 1980s, underlined the apparent ‘conflict’ between Christianity and Rock/Metal’s ambitions. They portrayed rock and metal acts as a threat to the young and to Christian values, leading to Tipper Gore’s (Al Gore’s other half) notorious list of 15 ‘acts’ categorized (bizarrely) as ‘Porn Rock’. Acts on this list included Madonna, Mercyful Fate, W.A.S.P and, I’m not making this up, Cyndi Lauper. To the joy of bands and record companies alike, record sales rocketed, especially as the PMRC was buying LPs specifically so it could burn them. If the PMRC was essentially a group of absurd ‘Washington Moms’ backed up by their politician husbands one of the key effects of their campaigning is the existence of parental advisory labels on ‘offensive’ records. Rock & roll lovers – instinctively wishing to side with the outsider, the rebel and the revolutionary – have got an awful lot of evidence to show that Christianity is the religious face of ‘The Man’ who wants to stifle our human spirit, creativity and desire to be free.
The treatment of Pussy Riot is just one symptom of a deeper malaise demonstrated over and over again: that Christianity is the enemy of all right-thinking people. Consider, for example, the famously embarrassing encounter in 1979 between Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark and two members of Monty Python over the blasphemous content of The Life of Brian. The very worst of the matter was that the self-styled “defenders of Christianity” hadn’t even bothered to see the film; watching their feeble attempts to prove the innate nastiness of the film only gets worse with each viewing. Equally there were protests about Jerry Springer the Musical, although they emerged less from the bosom of the National Church, but from a marginal, if noisy pressure group called Christian Voice. Others will cite Church responses to the caricatures of Muhammed published in 2005 by Jyllands-Posten as examples of its antipathy to free speech. The then Bishop of Oxford, the Rt. Revd. Richard Harries, said that newspapers that decided not to publish the cartoons had acted wisely. He told The Sunday Times: ‘Freedom of speech is fundamental to our society, and all religions need to be open to criticism, but this freedom needs to be exercised responsibly with a sensitivity to cultural differences’.
I’ve spent a huge part of my life involved in three different things: listening to and loving rock music, often of an extreme and brain-curdling nature; being a Christian disciple and then vicar; and, finally, studying and writing about philosophy, culture and theology. I know, better than most people, how idiotic and ridiculous religion can be about any number of things. In our socially liberal times, words like “Christian”, “Jesus” and “faith” are understandably tied up with negatives. Christians – as if they were all essentially homogenous Daily Express readers with added religious bile – hate en masse gay folk, or social protest, or science, or, well, basically anything that is about making our society more open or kind or wonderful. And the Pussy Riot case does remind us – religious or not – of a very worrying truth: that when faith gets too cosy with the centres of power and social control, it risks betraying itself.
Pussy Riot’s defence centred on the claim that they were engaged in political critique rather than aiming to cause religious offence. They were keen to criticise the extent to which the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church had cosied up to Vladimir Putin. The song ‘Virgin Mary, Chase Putin Out’, whatever its musical merits or religious connotations, was focused on Putin and his cronies. As I read it, Pussy Riot were calling for the Russian Orthodox Church to in a sense be faithful to the way of Christ and be prepared to criticise corrupt political structures. Sadly, however, it strikes me – admittedly, someone far removed from the realities of life in Russia – that the Orthodox Church has simply become too comfortable with the political status quo. It has overly identified its “good” – like so many religious institutions before it – with the regime.
Pussy Riot are certainly right about one thing: Christianity doesn’t have to be a slavish expression of the state. I am a vicar in the Church of England. It is the state religion. This is something that makes me very nervous and which, personally, I’d like to end. The over-identification of church and state or church and power can lead too readily to abuse. In World War I, some Church of England bishops acted as recruitment sergeants for the state, becoming complicit in sending thousands to their deaths in Picardy and Flanders. The Church’s treatment of protesters outside St Paul’s during the Occupy protests was, with the notable exception of the actions of Canon Giles Fraser, a demonstration of the dangers of faith getting caught up too closely with power.
Christianity, so easily our whipping boy or Aunt Sally, holds within itself resources to be more daring and more troubling than anything Pussy Riot can serve up. At its heart is a hardcore dissident, Jesus Christ. One of his abiding gifts was, to be blunt, pissing off the religious authorities of his day with such aplomb that he was ultimately put to death for it. We don’t have to be religious or (heaven forfend!) have watched Jesus Christ Superstar to know he was the guy who entered the cathedral of his day, the Jerusalem Temple, and turned the tables over for the sake of truth, hope and good news. This was a man who stirred up his local religious and political authorities with his commitment to love. And this wasn’t love defined as it might be by Rihanna – slick and soppy or a quick bump and grind – but the kind of love which says there are things in life worth dying for.
Pussy Riot were accused of causing offence and blasphemy. I find it ironic that Christianity so often seems to struggle with offence. At the heart of the Church is a figure who was, to put things theologically, utterly unafraid of the world’s contempt for the holy. The religious and political authorities who put him to death thought they were acting for the good and in defence of the holy. And yet, in crucifying Jesus, they actually tried to destroy it. Christ’s willingness to embrace this humiliation, through death on a cross, invites religious people to be unafraid of the offensive. If Jesus can embrace all that the world dishes out, so can we. Sure, be prepared to defend what you believe, but we can do this without being defensive. A confident church might even be so bold as to live in a way of being that does not need to defend the holy. As Kenan Malik crisply puts it, “The giving and accepting of offence is a natural part of living in a plural world. If we want the pleasures of pluralism, we have to be grown-up enough to accept the pain too.”
One of the notions at the heart of the Christian faith is forgiveness. Whatever anyone thinks about whether Jesus was or wasn’t physically resurrected, one of the reasons it matters to Christians is that it signifies the importance of forgiveness. Jesus has been unfairly and cruelly put to death, but how does he respond after the resurrection? At a human level we might expect him to come back seeking revenge and retribution. If he was a second-rate action hero this is precisely what he’d do. The tag line would be, “He’s back, and this time he’s angry!” Instead, he is resurrected and offers peace and reconciliation – to both those who killed him and those who abandoned him. It remains utterly staggering that a church like the Russian Orthodox Church, which claims to have Christ at its centre, has not sought to offer reconciliation and forgiveness to Pussy Riot. It is a failure of faith. It is a failure of human love.
