Pussy Riot Feminism and the Orthodox Church

The arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of three members of Pussy Riot have been used around the world to highlight the political repression of Putin’s Russia. But for me, the Pussy Riot incident was a sharp reminder of trouble closer to home. The sight of women protestors crossing themselves and prostrating in the traditional manner and then being thrown out of an Orthodox Church was what one might call “triggering”, to say the least. Orthodox Christianity, the faith of my ancestors and childhood, is changing in ways I could have never imagined—and most of them are terrible news for Orthodox women.

While for most Americans, Eastern Orthodox Christianity is completely off the radar, regulated to cameos in films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it is actually one of the only growing Christian denominations in the United States.  At the same time, the faith is experiencing a rebirth in many traditionally Orthodox countries where it previously was crippled by Soviet rule, such as in Russia. One of the results of these developments has been Orthodoxy’s first real contact with modern gender and sexual politics. This is changing and challenging its traditional attitude towards women, and not always in ways that would be expected by those unfamiliar with Orthodoxy.

Instead of bringing progress, Eastern Orthodoxy’s contemporary resurgence has created reactionary change in its attitude toward women. In Russia and Eastern Europe, this is largely the result of residual anti-communist sentiment that sternly rejects anything even vaguely associated with the old regimes, including gender equality. In the U.S., the reasons are a bit less obvious and much more complicated. Until the last 30 years, the U.S. Orthodox Church was primarily an immigrant church whose membership has been primarily made up of those first generation immigrants, their descendants and those descendants’ spouses.

Now that has changed. Since the late 1960s, an ever increasing number of converts have come to the Orthodox Church, fleeing progressive change within their original faith traditions. Many of these changes center on issues of gender and sexuality, including the ordination of women and the sacramental inclusion of LGBT people. This phenomenon has included, among other things, the conversion of entire Episcopal congregations to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Shaped by the battles within their original faiths, many of these converts have politicized the conversation within Orthodoxy in a way that it had not previously been. They have been the prime movers behind encouraging an alliance between Orthodox Christianity, conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. These influences have changed the position of many Orthodox clergy and laity toward issues such as birth control, abortion and the role of women in marriages. What before had been either silence or a sort of noncommittal disapproval has become vocalized condemnation.

Orthodox Christianity was never, by any stretch of the imagination, particularly progressive around gender issues, but the Orthodox faith in its traditional folk practice is surprisingly fluid and allows a great deal of flexibility in individual practice and belief. The rich mystic theology of Eastern Christianity preserves a complicated understanding of gender that even postulates a God who is beyond gender. In liturgical practice too, the Orthodox Church offers glimmers of light to those who would seek greater equality. For example, women throughout Eastern Christendom were routinely ordained to the diaconate (the first order of the priesthood) well into the 11th century.

Most importantly, however, in many Orthodox cultures tradition has given women a great deal of de facto spiritual authority within the home and the wider community. This was certainly the reality of my childhood. It was my mother, grandmother and aunts who had dreams, spoke to saints at night in candlelight prayer and whispered the meaning of the liturgy and the secrets of the universe into my ears.

Orthodox Christianity has always had its hardliners, but these people were largely confined to the powerful, but largely separate, monastic communities. This separation between lay and monastic communities has allowed for the two traditions to grow up separately with relatively little conflict. The recent influx of converts has changed this. Many of these converts embrace the monastic position and have advocated for them at the parish level. This has inevitably led to conflict. The clash between the “cradle Orthodox” and converts is never more acutely felt than around gender issues. It is largely converts who have stood against the reintroduction of women’s ordination to the diaconate and have pushed for the Church to express a harsher position toward birth control (even within marriage).

In many ways, these Orthodox parishes are a microcosm of contemporary American gender politics, complete with a move of many to the far right. The difference, of course, is that unlike secular politics, Orthodox Christianity is a religious practice, one in which tradition is literally holy. Thus, traditional Orthodox practice surrounding gender, such as the order of the deaconess and the pan- gendered notion of God, might be used as a tool in both combating reactionary efforts to hijack the tradition and even proactively promoting a progressive feminist agenda, not just in Orthodox communities but in wider national debate—a debate in which religious sentiment remains important and where a religious challenge to reactionary politics has never been more necessary.

The obstacle that is most preventing this is the failure of people like me–progressive, “cradle” Orthodox women who are uncomfortable with the growing power of reactionary forces within American Orthodoxy–to influence the practices of the church. Perhaps the fate of the brave members of Pussy Riot might serve as a wake up call to us about the oppressive forces at work within our faith, both abroad and at home, and encourage us to move forward a tradition that has shaped us and that we have a responsibility to help shape for the future.

TOP LEFT: Photo of Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Red Square by Denis Bochkarev. RIGHT: Photo of a Russian Orthodox Church by Flickr user **Maurice**. Both photos licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.

 

About

Katie Billotte is a scholar and writer living in Berlin.