The tiresome, tedious desecration of Canterbury Cathedral

As surely everyone knows by now, Canterbury Cathedral dismayed a significant portion of its ‘core demographic’ this week with a tiresome stunt involving garish simulacra of graffiti, seemingly spray-painted on to its defenceless walls.

These brash decorations, or desecrations, more familiar from and surely better suited to concrete underpasses and urban decay than some of the oldest and most venerable masonry in Britain, were, it turns out, just stickers.

With a glee more suited to a TikTok prankster than guardian of one of the world’s great Christian monuments, Canterbury’s dean, David Monteith, reassured us that the stickers can and will be easily removed in a few weeks’ time with no lasting damage expected – except, he seemed to suggest, to the fragile sensibilities of a few silly old fuddy-duddies who think churches are not just skate parks for the soul.

The project, entitled Hear Us, is intended to give ‘marginalised communities’ a chance to articulate the questions they would like to put to God. Although all it has achieved so far is to have frightened the horses of social media and brought clarion condemnation from the likes of JD Vance.

Why these ‘marginalised communities’ are presumed to be better represented by spray-can urban scrawl than more traditional, harmonious and even tasteful modes of address, is not entirely clear. Especially given that, when one gets close enough to actually read the text of these stickers, the questions themselves strike one as not merely perfectly reasonable, but really somewhat banal. These are questions anyone might ponder in a Cathedral, such as ‘Are You there?’, ‘What happens when we die?’, ‘Why did you create hate?’. And after a couple of hours on an unforgiving pew, ‘Why can’t I feel my legs?’.

Regardless of the actual text contained therein, one does not need a postgraduate degree in cultural semiotics to recognise that the intent of such daubing, the message of this medium, is invariably to demonstrate callous indifference to any claims of property or propriety one might read into the stonework itself. To impose a claim at odds with that of the builders or its subsequent stewards. To gleefully upset and disabuse anyone of the notion that their gratitude for solidity and dependability of these structures is shared and equally valued.

Of course, those who commissioned and realised these screaming rips in the hallowed space-time continuum of a 1,400-year-old cathedral will claim they meant no such aggression. That the artworks are instead intended to awaken us from our complacent slumbers and force us to engage afresh with the shocking truth, the implications and demands of the original gospel. The kinds of questions to which modern society – from which this aesthetic emerges – still has no answers, and which Christianity remains uniquely well placed to answer.

They will regard the response, ranging from full-throated outrage to weary disappointment, the range within which this column is now playing its part, as proof of their having ‘started a conversation’. They will weigh their press rather than read it, and congratulate themselves. They will ignore the vast majority who register it not as a revivification of the argument for faith, and more as just the dog of modernity having once again lifted its leg on the lamppost of decorum. A sense of insult scarcely soothed by learning that the subsequent stain is merely temporary.

It is, once again, all so very tiresome. Not least for those of us who would be delighted to know these ‘marginalised communities’ felt heard, of course, but also treated with enough respect to assume that they need not be represented by the infantile bubblegum worm-casts of their most troubled adolescents.

There is nothing wrong with the demand to ‘shake things up’ from time to time. As Tom Holland so conclusively proved in his book, Dominion, Christianity is the water we have all been swimming in for so long that it is very easy to miss it entirely. There’s no harm in dropping a few bath bombs in it from time to time to make it visible.

Still, as the initial clanging dissonance subsides and something approaching lucidity is regained, one thing is obvious. In a time when we fear that many of our most cherished traditions are being traduced, and our most fundamental national institutions hollowed out and deracinated, it is surely with some relief that we realise that one such tradition is still alive and well – that of the trendy vicar.

These types have been with us for decades. They have been mocked by many of the greatest comedians of the postwar era. Monty Python, Dave Allen, Dick Emery, Not the Nine O’Clock News. Perhaps the most iconic was Bill Connolly’s ‘Thought For the Day’ sermon 40 years ago, on ITV’s An Audience with…. Connolly’s priest takes his son to see Tottenham Hotspur, and asks him afterwards if he had appreciated the match on a spiritual level. ‘Did Jesus play for Tottenham Hotspur, daddy?’, responds the dutiful child. ‘And you know, in a funny way, he did…’, retorts the vicar.

Many have said, one way or another, that the whole of woke has just been a huge insurgence of trendy vicars, a long pilgrimage through the institutions. No longer able to meaningfully impose their authority on society, yet unwilling to abandon their role altogether, they seek to harness the energy of youthful exuberance and radicalism. They insist that Christianity, too, has always been about confronting the establishment, holding it to account, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted – whatever the sheer heft and longevity of the great cathedrals might suggest to the contrary.

The whole thing is reminiscent of last year’s catastrophic car-free ‘Copy Nothing’ Jaguar commercials. Once again, a faithful customer base has been abandoned to appeal to another illusory one that will never bestow the relevancy the institution craves. It’s enough to make one suspect the same hand at the tiller. But unless Satan himself is exposed as the root, I’m afraid it looks like just another lesson unlearned.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.