The first, and the lasting, impression one gets from Canterbury Cathedral’s new graffiti-style art instillation is just how reasonable and normal are the questions it quite literally poses. That’s some feat for an exhibition that purports to be ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘dynamic’ while simultaneously attracting such derision – even provoking the ire of the US vice president, J.D. Vance. Echoing the feelings of many people in this country, he asked why the cathedral’s curators had to make a ‘beautiful historical building really ugly’.
What really gets people riled about this exhibition is not so much the questions it raises, but its motives and its methods
Yet there’s nothing shocking in the concerns expressed in the brightly coloured tags affixed to the walls throughout the building (they’re actually stickers). Representing real questions made by members of a workshop assembled by the exhibition’s creators, regarding the one thing they would like to ask God, their queries are frequent and commonplace: ‘Are you there?’, ‘Is this all there is?’, ‘Why all the pain and suffering?’, or just ‘Why?’. Such questions may indeed strike some as hackneyed and trite, the kind of things infants ask their parents and elders. But they are the ones that race through all our minds in times of disaster, emotional crisis and bereavement.
Other callow petitions on display here are less forgivable, seeing that the Christian church already has at its disposal correct doctrinal replies. ‘Are you there?’ (answer: yes). ‘Will there be a next time?’ (again: yes). ‘Is illness a sin?’ (of course not). ‘Does everything have a soul’ (absolutely not). The eternal, and some would say, insoluble, problem of evil gets a prominent showing, and warrants more lengthy answers. ‘Why is there so much pain and destruction?’ repeats one daub. The explanation for this, according to Christianity, is that God endowed humans with free will, and evil exists because He allowed us to make bad decisions. Adam was the first man and the first man to do wrong. That’s why he was punished.
There’s no harm in asking ourselves and others these questions, even if some will never be satisfied with answers that only beg further questions: then why did an omnipotent God make humans susceptible to moral error in the first place? And rationalist atheists will never accept the hypothesis of an all-powerful, all-loving God. Logically, in light of the suffering in the world, He can’t be both.
What really gets people riled about this exhibition is not so much the questions it raises, but its motives and its methods. It encapsulates the incessant and desperate desire by the Church of England to appear relevant, by no matter how vulgar, disrespectful or cringeworthy means necessary. It was not enough for this exhibition to broach the problem of evil through the medium of ersatz urban scrawls – and in a decidedly dated style of clean, luminous graffiti last seen on the front cover of hip hop albums in the late-1980s – it had to do so via sub-par hip hop lyrics.
‘If you made us all in your form. Why the violence the killing the storm’, reads another graffito. And bad poetry: ‘This is my question for a god up above. Why so much violence instead of love.’ And soppy, saccharine sentiment: ‘Why did you create hate when love is by far the more powerful.’
Canterbury Cathedral, the principal church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has form in this department. In February last year it hosted four two-and-a-half-hour dance parties in its hallowed space, the ‘rave in the nave’, an event that was likewise greeted with exasperation. The carry-on at Canterbury has left many conservatives in a state of despair. Reacting to this exhibition’s unveiling, the Rev Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great in London and chairman of the campaign group Save the Parish, told the Daily Telegraph that he would like to challenge the cathedral ‘not to embarrass the rest of the Church of England for one clear calendar year.’
Yet many suspect that the cathedral isn’t out of step with the Anglican establishment. This is one that for decades has been eager to prove how aligned it is with progressive thinking and the trendy, niche causes beloved of the establishment. This is the same Church of England that seems eager to bankrupt itself under the spurious cause of paying reparations for its involvement with slavery over 200 years ago. This is the same remote, out-of-touch Church that shut its doors to its flock during the lockdown years.
This exhibition, entitled ‘Here Us’, represents merely the continuation of this spirit. In its press release, it says that it seeks to give a voice to the unheard and ‘marginalised communities – such as Punjabi, black and brown diaspora, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA+ groups’. Yet as anyone who has been paying attention to politics in the past ten years will tell you, there’s little that is marginalised about these groups. They are scarcely voiceless or unheard. Establishment progressives in recent years have seemingly been doing little else but giving them a voice.
Today’s liberals do so because they suffer from the delusion, or perpetuate the deceit, that they are the underdogs, as opposed to being the ruling class themselves. The values of the liberal left have been those of our establishment since the 1980s, when the right won the economic arguments and liberal mores became the dominant norm, capturing with it all the institutions: the schools, universities, the civil service, the BBC – and the Church of England.
Its clergy, like our secular liberal clerisy, either don’t know or feign not to know that they no longer represent the dispossessed or the marginalised. Today’s outcasts and voiceless, the ones who are openly maligned and slandered in polite society, are those who have since the summer been raising the Cross of St George throughout the country – and even they have been criticised by some Anglican clergy for doing so.
This exhibition, though well-meaning, represents regime art. It’s a gesture made on behalf of an elite that doesn’t understand most people in this country. This exhibition is not daring, challenging or radical. Its theology is inoffensive and pedestrian. That is both its virtue and its vice.
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