by Damian Thompson, First Things
When it was announced in October that the next archbishop of Canterbury would be a woman with progressive views on homosexuality and abortion, social media erupted with a combination of outrage, congratulations, derision, and triumph. A few days later, an even noisier eruption was caused by the news of subway-style graffiti plastered over Canterbury Cathedral, which prompted even the vice president of the United States to express disgust. The consensus among the loudest Christian voices on X was that the most ancient see in England had been desecrated: spiritually, by its impending occupation by Dame Sarah Mullally, a former nursing administrator fast-tracked into the post of bishop of London by her public-sector allies; and physically, by the graffiti “workshopped” in consultation with “Punjabi, black and brown diaspora, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA+ groups.”
In fact the graffiti were merely stickers, a temporary art installation commissioned by a dean and chapter anxious to get down with the kids—a preoccupation of liberal Anglicans since the 1960s, when “with-it” bishops fawned over hippies in debates on BBC Two. Also, under English law, cathedrals are effectively owned by their chapters: The bishop’s role as visitor gives him or her no authority over what happens inside them. Even if Dame Sarah were already occupying the chair of St. Augustine, she could do nothing about the graffiti.
Yet it is understandable that the two events should be linked in the minds of commentators. We’re not in Barchester anymore. We’re not even in the era when television viewers would spend an hour on Sunday nights listening to a bishop waffle about current events. In the 1960s about 1.5 million people attended weekly Church of England services; now it is a little over half a million. Factor in population growth, and the proportion of the population attending Anglican parishes on Sundays has fallen by three-quarters. About 20 percent of Sunday worshippers didn’t return after Covid. The Canterbury graffiti project, a farcical attempt to seem “relevant,” ironically underlines the Church’s loss of relevance.