Of the multiple reasons why, from a Christian perspective, blasphemy laws make bad theology, one in particular comes to mind in the context of the Pussy Riot sentences. The basic Christian tenet that all human beings are made in the image of God is undermined by laws against blasphemy and heresy, and especially by their gender-biased application.

More often than not, what has been deemed insulting or offensive to God in history has originated in the body or voice of a woman. The Inquisition and the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries were low points for all Christians, but particularly for the female faithful.

Church fathers like St. Augustine inherited a dualistic understanding of spirit and body from the Greeks and assigned the female half of humanity the role of body, and the male half the spirit or intellect. St. Augustine’s take on Ephesians 5:23 (“For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body”) was that a woman had no head of her own. Her husband was to be her head, and she was to be his body.

Well before the Pussy Riot sentences, my own experience serving at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City showed me — in far paler shades — the gendered character of God-offense as it is understood by many religious people.

Even in this bastion of liberal Christianity, nothing elicited more cries of “blasphemy” than the decision in 1984 of the then dean, James Parks Morton, to install “Christa” — a three-foot bronze sculpture of a woman’s figure hanging on a cross by the British artist Edwina Sandys. Echoes of the controversy could still be heard when I joined the cathedral clergy almost two decades later.