The problem with climate protesting clergy
by Fergus Butler-Gallie, Spectator:
Received wisdom suggests that you would not expect a vicar to disrupt Divine Worship. Now, anybody who’s worked with the clergy up close will know that in this case, as in so many areas, received wisdom is wrong. Still, there was shock in news outlets and on social media this week when a gaggle of Christians, including clerics, disrupted Evensong at Chichester in the name of climate action.
Their general propensity for mischief aside, there should be absolutely no surprise at all that clergy were involved in this very particular protest. Clerics are predominately older and predominately middle class. Their average age, their average level of education, their voting patterns and their general outlook on life puts them square in the catch zone for climate radicalism. So it was with the Chichester protest: white and wizened raisin-like heads peeped out from behind brightly coloured signs. On one level it’s rather sweet: like watching an elderly couple hold hands in public or those people in their eighties who discover skateboarding.
What makes this different and, frankly, quite annoying, is the implied religious superiority of the protestors. The implicit suggestion of ‘Look we’re like Jesus, in the temple! Socking it to the man!’
Except they’re not, are they. They’re doing the safest sort of protest in the safest sort of place in order to affirm the safest and most widely held bien pensant sort of opinion. That opinion – that the earth is, in climate terms, buggered – may yet be proved to be right; I suspect it probably will. But quite what the relative truth of what they have to affirm and the desire to ruin other people’s days have to do with one another is beyond me. I’m furious about any number of things, but I hope I’m sufficiently aware of my own relative unimportance to realise that ruining ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’ isn’t going to achieve anything.
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