Freedom of artistic expression or deliberate provocation: Behemoth vs Poland's blasphemy laws

In numerous countries there are regulations aimed at the protection of religious rights of their citizens, defending them from being ridiculed, mocked or in any other way offended, directly or by referring to the religious institutions, leaders or certain practices, by those who fail to share the same ideals. However, in a vast majority of those countries such laws are nothing else but a dead letter, as is the case of Northern Ireland and Scotland, where such a law was last successfully enforced nearly 200 years ago (in England and Wales the remaining blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008). In the era of secularization they seem to stand out as relics of the past; for the majority of European countries, which praise the value of pluralism, to let such laws dictate the pace of social life would be a contradiction in terms. Thus, rather unsurprisingly, according to a report from 2014, the list of countries actively penalizing religious offence is dominated by Islamic states, with only a handful of traditionally Christian countries present in the report. With a number of controversial laws – including penalizing insulting the head of state, protecting national symbols, and regularly enforced anti-blasphemy laws – Poland has secured its position on this list.

Recent years have seen many, more or less artistic, endeavours of Polish public figures reaching their finale in a courtroom as a result of infuriating some of their particularly religiously sensitive compatriots. Two examples are Doda, a pop singer, who was sentenced in 2012 to pay a fine of roughly £1,000 for claiming that the Bible was written by a person “intoxicated with wine and smoking some herbs”; and Robert Biedroń, the mayor of Słupsk (an average sized town in northern Poland), who only months after assuming office in 2014 became the subject of two requests to have his decision to remove a portrait of St. John Paul II from his office investigated by the prosecutor.

However, an undisputed record-holder in the area of religion-related controversies surrounding its activities is the heavy-metal band Behemoth. For at least several years, its members, and particularly the band’s leader, Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski, have been in the crosshairs of the Nationwide Defence Committee Against Sects, a right-wing non-government organisation whose members were the spiritus movens in both of the cases described in the previous paragraph. Always eager to exploit anti-Christian imagery, Behemoth has given Ryszard Nowak of the Nationwide Defence Committee plenty of ammunition in his attempts to have Darski convicted on a charge of insulting the religious beliefs of Polish Catholics. The first in this series of events was the Bible-tearing case from 2007. During a concert in Gdynia, Darski tore up the Bible, saying that it is a “book of lies”; this in turn incited outrage in Catholic circles and provoked Nowak and several Law and Justice(PiS) MPs to sue Nergal for insulting religious feelings. According to Article 196 of the Polish Penal Code: ”Whoever offends the religious feelings of other persons by publicly outraging an object of religious worship or a place dedicated to the public performance of religious rites, shall be subject to a fine, the penalty of restriction of liberty or up to two year’s imprisonment”. After a lengthy case and several appeals, the band’s leader was in 2014 finally cleared of charges; in the justification for the ruling, the act of tearing the Bible was referred to as vulgar, tasteless and hardly artistic, yet it did not amount to a criminal act since none of the concert attendees reported his or her feelings to have been insulted and the video clip on which the whole case was built was leaked despite band’s ban on taking photos or videos during the concert.

The aftermath of the, much-publicised, Bible-tearing controversy are the frequent protests by various religious organisations attempting to see band’s concerts cancelled. The most notable such incident took place two years ago in Poznan. Behemoth was meant to perform on the 6th of October 2014 in a club located on the premises of the city’s Medical University. After the protests, the then dean of the university, Prof. Jacek Wysocki, decided that the concert would not take place. In a similar vein, in September 2016, several people prayed the rosary on their knees outside the ‘Mega Club’ in Katowice where a Behemoth concert was taking place.

The most recent of the controversies surrounding the activities of Behemoth regards its latest Polish tour, the motto of which was “Infidel Republic”. Those two words and the promo poster presenting the image of an eagle resembling the Polish emblem supposedly ‘profaned’ by the addition of the images of snakes, skulls and an inverted, satanic cross. According to article 137 of the Polish Penal Code, insulting the Polish coat of arms is a crime punishable by a fine, restriction of liberty or up to one year’s imprisonment. The PiS governor of Wielkopolska, Zbigniew Hoffman, expressed his disapproval for Behemoth concert in Poznań and its promotional materials: “In the eyes of the law it is a crime; thus, I would like to point to the fine line separating art and law. I agree that art should not be censored in any way, but this cannot lead to extreme situations, where art goes beyond all boundaries, above all threatening ourselves, our national symbols and religious values”.

This is not a solitary view, as it is reflected in a more organised way by the efforts of the Krakow-based Father Piotr Skarga Association for Christian Culture, a non-government organisation. Their members are responsible for www.protestuj.pl, a communications hub for like-minded individuals wishing to express their disagreement with ‘leftist’, ’anti-Catholic’, or ‘anti-Polish’ initiatives in the form of petitions signed by thousands of people and sent mainly to the respective governmental bodies. The issues protests against include the European Union; the much-debated issue of immigrants; the recent women’s strikes protesting against the idea of a total ban on abortion; and the supposed ‘promotion of harmful and dangerous homosexual ideology in Polish schools’. There was also a chance to sign a petition directed at the Ministry of Culture, whose aim was to stop ‘Behemoth’s anti-Polish tour’. Rather conveniently, there is no mention, under any of the past protest campaigns, of any tangible result of their actions; however, almost 30,000 people signed the anti-Behemoth petition.

Obviously this is not a one-sided conflict, in a TV debate about the artistic value of Behemoth’s work and the rationale behind the attempts to have their concerts cancelled, Magdelana Środa, a liberal, left-wing sociologist, defended freedom of expression as a crucial element in all artistic endeavours and pointed to the arrogance of those wishing arbitrarily to decide what can be treated as art and what cannot aspire to this title. This being said, it is worth noting that liberal media in general seem to be far less interested in the topic and devote significantly less time and energy to its depiction than those on the right-wing, which is ironic since without their attention, Behemoth, albeit popular among fans of this music genre both in Poland and worldwide, would likely remain unknown to average Poles. What has to be admitted is that their marketing model is a simple yet remarkably effective one. Behemoth capitalizes on the insecurities of those who like to think of themselves as particularly devout and, recently, also patriotic, those who will not back down and feel obliged to protect the values which members of this band dare question. Whether it is artistically justified or constitutes a sort of added value is debatable.

However, it is equally crucial to note that the conflict surrounding the Behemoth case is just an echo of a broader problem that has been present in Polish public debate for a long time. Great and noble ideas of freedom of speech and expression, and the religious sensitivity of vast masses of Polish citizens, both equally vague and difficult to define, will likely keep on clashing. This paradoxical situation in which two values, naturally overlapping but also mutually exclusive, are protected by law is a recipe for disaster. As the society becomes more and more polarised such loopholes in Polish law may be easily exploited to spark conflicts in which none of the involved parties would be sincerely concerned about the artistic freedom, as was in the case of highly controversial play “Golgotha Picnic”, when the most elaborate and radical opinions were usually uttered by the most uninformed and ignorant of the politicians on both sides of the conflict. Thus, it would be only just to draw a fine line between the vision of the world which both left- and right-wing politicians try to force on the rest of society, their political interests and the world of art, as naïve as it may sound.