The protesters about to be removed from the steps of St Paul’s could have helped the cathedral find a compelling new narrative writes Giles Fraser in The Guardian
Institutions like St Paul’s Cathedral live or die by the myths that surround and define them. In St Paul’s case, several narratives remain powerful. Dominant among them is the story of the Blitz. As German bombers pummelled London with thousands of tons of high explosives, the survival of the great dome of St Paul’s became a symbol of national defiance. Which is why Winston Churchill repeatedly phoned up the chief fire officer to tell him: “Whatever happens, you must save St Paul’s!” I have lost count of the number of cabbies who have proudly boasted that their grandfather was a fire watcher on the roof of the cathedral. Many who have never been inside the place still think of it as their own.
A more recent narrative is that of the wedding of Charles and Diana: the people’s princess in the nation’s church. This narrative remains especially powerful for Americans and other visitors from overseas. Despite the fact that Westminster Abbey has the official royal connections, St Paul’s has a more populist feel. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” was the original complaint of the abbey (official name, the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster) at the cost of building St Paul’s, but the best way to feel the difference between them is to hear the choristers sing. St Paul’s: powerful, energetic, Dionysian. Abbey: note-perfect, restrained, Apollonian.
The war, the wedding and the choristers – these are all engaging narratives, but they are mostly old ones. And they can easily play into the idea that St Paul’s is a concert venue run by the National Trust. As the Bishop of London has rightly pointed out for several years now, St Paul’s needs to find new stories about itself and what it’s for. Which brings me to Occupy.
St Paul’s is not the parish church of the City, with its banks and livery companies. It is the cathedral church for the whole of London – for Hackney and Hammersmith and Hounslow. Its constituency includes some of the most deprived inner city estates in the whole of Europe. It does not exist as a gilded dressing-up box for the 1%, nor simply as a place of protest for the 99%, but a place of prayer for the 100%.
And that means there are some huge social divisions for the church to bridge. No doubt this is a tricky business. But the response of St Paul’s to the Occupy movement has been a lost opportunity to reach out to a wider demographic and thus to construct a new and compelling narrative for itself. As Occupy faces eviction, St Paul’s remains trapped in stories of past glory.
Occupy does not herald the beginnings of a world revolution. But it has given many world leaders a good kick in the pants and made them know, in no uncertain terms, the degree of frustration that exists about an economic system that, among its many other crimes, rewards the rich with huge bonuses and penalises the poor with cuts to welfare.
But to St Paul’s, the existence of the camp has been seen too much in terms of a little local difficulty – graffiti, hassle, problems with income and visitor numbers. This is a mistake of perspective that comes about through years of ingrained thinking that the building is the purpose of the cathedral. After a decade-long fundraising campaign to find £42m needed to clean the building, it may be inevitable that the cathedral’s whole administrative infrastructure is bent towards this end. Thus it becomes just too easy to worship Christopher Wren and not the God who spoke of the rich having to give up all their possessions. Which is why the forcible eviction of Occupy will be far more a failure for the church than it will be a failure for the camp.
Last week the archbishop of York complained that the Church of England had become too middle class. Nowhere is this tension more evident than on the steps of St Paul’s in recent months. For the biggest problem the cathedral has with the camp is that it has not played by the rules expected of middle-class Englishmen. Whereas the cathedral has wanted to address the financial crisis with well-meaning seminars and reports, the camp is all about nonviolent direct action. It is angry, it is scruffy and it is loud. Much more like John the Baptist than your average Anglican cleric, who can be too easily conscripted within the bosom of the establishment.
The task of the church is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. For far too long the posh bits of the church have comforted the comfortable and allowed those struggling on in poor parishes to comfort the afflicted. The Church of England has never had much stomach for afflicting anyone (except, of course, homosexuals).
With a few tents and shedloads of determination, those who have huddled outside the cathedral in the freezing cold have acted as sentinels for an idea of social justice that can be found on almost every page of the Bible but which the church has too often lost sight of.
Which is why the American author Chris Hedges has posed the challenge thus: “The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalise traditional Christianity or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance.”
See also:
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/005334.html