Let Us Spray

Social media has been in meltdown in recent days about graffiti allegedly defacing the hallowed walls and pillars of Canterbury Cathedral.

The graffiti in the Cathedral has been seen as symptomatic of a range of ills – from the death of the Church of England to the final demise of Western Culture. Some have called for Anglican clergy to be 'strung up' for this blasphemous outrage. JD Vance and Elon Musk piled in, condemning the cathedral graffiti as ugly and disrespectful.

If you're fortunate enough to have missed all the furore, here is a little background.

No spray can has actually been wielded inside Canterbury Cathedral. The Cathedral is hosting an art exhibition called Hear Us, described on its website as a ‘major new art installation in which ordinary people pose questions to God’. Temporary graffiti-style stickers ask questions such as, Are you there?, Do you regret your creation?, and Does everything have a soul?

In other words, the exhibition asks questions about the language in which faith is expressed, who is speaking, and what sort of faith questions are permissible. All this with a nod to the venerable history of graffiti in cathedrals.

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Desecration & Revulsion

When images of the interior of Canterbury Cathedral covered in graffiti went viral on social media, the disgust felt in some quarters was visceral. An early, widely-shared, post on the social media platform X said it marked a ‘new low’ for the Church of England.

Many of the critics felt no need to give reasons for their disgust. Graffiti-style art on the walls of any cathedral was surely a self-evident act of desecration. Those who did take time to justify their revulsion gave a number of reasons. The arguments against the Canterbury graffiti that I saw fell into six main categories:

1) High Art v Low Art

2) Sacred v Secular

3) Graffiti v Tradition

4) Anglicanism v Catholicism

5) Appropriate v Inappropriate Prayers

6) Woke v Orthodox

I want to reflect briefly on each of these complaints, and see how well they stand up to scrutiny.

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1) High Art v Low Art. Graffiti is street art, often associated with vandalism and the defacing of public spaces. A chorus of critics compared the Canterbury graffiti to squalid railway underpasses and neglected urban hellscapes. By contrast, they said, the art of faith should be ennobling, lifting the viewer or hearer above the mundane and everyday.

Katharine Birbalsingh, outspoken head of a multi-ethnic school in inner-city north London, didn’t hold back on X:

Why don’t people understand sanctity and the degradation of culture? Graffiti in the CHURCH is an act of vandalism! It degrades all of us, whether we are religious or not, and immerses young people in a culture of moral depravity.

Birbalsingh’s salvo resonated with many, who agreed that low art, street art, everyday art, were inappropriate in any church setting, let alone in the grandest of historic cathedrals.

This is an argument I’ve heard many times down the years, in church as well as outside. High art elevates. The kind of art most appropriate to Christian worship is the sublime language of the 1662 Prayer Book and King James Bible, the finest choral music, and soaring architecture that lifts the spirit.

A preference for classical music, historic buildings and Shakespearean language is all perfectly fine. If you find Choral Evensong in a candle-lit Oxford college chapel spiritually uplifting, all good. I’ve enjoyed these services myself. But to claim high art and high culture are somehow more authentically Christian is not only misguided, it’s a distortion of Christianity.

The New Testament was written in Koine Greek. This was the simplified, everyday Greek of the street, home life and shopping lists. It was the language the armies of Alexander the Great spoke as they conquered the Mediterranean world between 334 and 323 BC. The implications of this are startling. The core documents of Christian faith and spirituality are written in the rough language of daily life, not the elevated Classical Greek of literature and philosophy.

Likewise, a central motif of the Christian faith is incarnation. The message of Christ taking on human flesh is that God meets us in the earthy and everyday. Christian spirituality is not about transcending the everyday world or popular culture, and never could be. The whole point of the Incarnation is that God is encountered in the down-to-earth, within everyday human cultures. In the words of the Brazilian bishop Pedro Casaldáliga: ‘The universal Word speaks only in dialect’. (a)

Beware identifying spirituality too narrowly with high art and culture. Cultural snobbishness is not the same as spiritual discernment.

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2) Sacred v Secular. Critics of the Canterbury graffiti complained not only that it was low art, but also that it desecrated the 'sacred space' of England’s most historically significant Cathedral. One histrionic outburst on X said the graffiti was 'the most shocking act of sacrilege ever carried out in Canterbury Cathedral'. Given that the Archbishop of Canterbury St Thomas Beckett was murdered there in 1170, that was quite a claim.

Our culture routinely contrasts ‘sacred’ space with mundane or secular space. Most of the graffiti critics underlined this point: it was desecration of a spiritual building. It was profaning England’s holiest historic Cathedral. In The Spectator, writer Bijan Omrani accused those behind the exhibition of disdaining ‘the sanctity of places where prayer has been valid’ and failing to respect ‘the holiness that has been entrusted to them’.

But is 'sacred space' even a valid Christian idea? It smuggles in a number of dubious assumptions. For a start, it implies other spaces are less spiritual. But biblically, all sorts of places are seen as 'holy ground’ for an encounter with God.

A famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins begins: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’.(b) Here is an authentic vision of Christian spirituality, seeing the fingerprints of God in all creation. The Christian looks at the world and sees a world alive with God’s presence. The psalmist trips over glory wherever he goes. He sees trees and valleys clapping their hands, seas and sky praising God. The whole creation is alive and vibrant.

It’s true that in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, a special holiness is associated with the Temple in Jerusalem, which is seen uniquely as a dwelling place of God. In the rest of the ancient world, pagan temples were routinely seen as the space in which a divinity dwelt.

But after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in AD 70, there is no sense for Christians that any ‘sacred’ building contains the magnified presence of God. Quite the opposite. The Apostle Paul says with the coming of Jesus, it is human bodies and Christian communities that are now the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’. (c)

Don’t get me wrong: sublime architecture can be inspiring. One of the most powerful experiences of my life was visiting Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church in Barcelona. I think it’s wonderful that Gaudí was a practising Christian. His masterpiece makes a powerful gospel statement in soaring stone and brilliant coloured light.

That said, the architecture of a sublime religious building is no guarantee that what happens inside isn’t dehumanising or even demonic. It’s no guarantee the religious leaders who operate there are’t manipulative or duplicitous, or that the money that built it wasn’t tainted.

Beware labelling some buildings sacred. For all its claims to profundity, ‘the sacred’ is a superficial label. It says nothing about authentic faith, and can mask horrors.

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3) Graffiti v Tradition. Some graffiti critics were horrified at the sheer incongruence of graffiti on cathedral architecture. What, they asked, could be more crassly inappropriate?

This complaint turns out to be ironic, given the long and intriguing history of graffiti in cathedrals. One historian who read my social media post on the Canterbury graffiti told me about the historic graffiti tours he leads in English cathedrals. Canterbury Cathedral itself has a skilled team who survey and record the historic graffiti in the building from the past 900 years. This includes marks left by stonemasons, scratched acts of devotion, tracings around the hands and feet of children, and medieval carved initials.

In the light of this, the use of graffiti as a medium to interrogate faith language in a historic Cathedral seems strangely appropriate, sparky and clever, rather than incongruous.

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4) Anglicanism v Catholicism. Some Roman Catholics found in the Canterbury graffiti an opportunity to lambast the Church of England for being a bad steward of historic church buildings. One site, Catholic Arena, posted images of the Canterbury exhibition, along with footage from a rave in the Cathedral the previous year, and a temporary mini-golf course in Rochester Cathedral from six years previously.

The message from some Catholic traditionalists was provocative and hard-hitting: time to return the English Cathedrals to the more respectful stewardship of Rome.

There is a current fad, in media and on social media, for comparing the Church of England negatively with the Roman Catholic Church. Sure enough, a barrage of posts held up the Canterbury exhibition as Exhibit A for their claim that the Church of England is dying, whilst attendance at Catholic churches is booming.

I’ve worked with Catholic priests for decades. When I led the Anglican Church in a French city, the Catholic Bishop went out of his way to be gracious and welcoming, and invited me to pray at the licensing of his new priest. I feel great affection for a Catholicism that is warm-hearted and grace-filled. And I know the flaws of the Church of England only too well.

But as a matter of accuracy, those who say the graffiti symbolises the demise of the C of E are simply wrong. Official statistics show the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales are both growing, and have been for several years. At the same time, ordination numbers in the Church of England are dramatically higher: around 400 new priests a year, compared to around 15 in the Catholic Church of England and Wales.

And it has to be said: Roman Catholics who accuse Anglicans of bringing the tacky and kitsch into their worship spaces prove that irony is not dead.

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5) Appropriate v Inappropriate Prayers. One young clergyman in the Anglo-Catholic tradition expressed outrage on X at the content of the messages on the Cathedral walls. He was appalled that questions were being asked about whether God even existed – and if he does, what God thinks he’s up to. The role of the Church, said this earnest high churchman, should be to teach and inspire faith, not sow seeds of doubt.

If that’s true, the biblical book of Psalms should come with a trigger warning. The psalmist spends much of his time railing at God, questioning God, and calling on God to destroy his enemies. In prayer, nothing is off-limits. No question is too disrespectful, no emotion too wayward, no protest too strident.

As Jacob found, authentic faith sometimes means wrestling with a mysterious stranger in the dark.(d)

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6) Woke v Orthodox. Many critics saw the Canterbury graffiti as indicative of a bigger and more sinister agenda. It was an attempt by a progressive Cathedral Dean and ‘woke’ artist to subvert the historic faith. This claim ran riot when it was discovered that the artist claims a non-binary identity. The mask, said the critics, had slipped. The graffiti was part of a plot to ‘queer’ orthodox Christianity.

Many of the features I’ve written in recent years have been on identity politics, particularly gender ideology. I believe telling children and teens they might have been born in the wrong body is deeply wrong. In a post-truth age, I care about Truth. I believe there is such a thing as historic, orthodox faith, and that it’s worth defending.

Having said all that, the ‘woke’ aspect of the Canterbury exhibition didn’t trouble me. The graffiti wasn’t a queer manifesto. It wasn’t a gender-fluid version of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to the door of Wittenberg church in 1517. The exhibition wasn’t attacking historic faith. It was asking questions about the language, ownership and content of faith.

In any case, even if the exhibition were asking provocative questions about gender, would that be that such a problem? Identity, particularly gender identity, remains one of the defining and most divisive issues of our day. It’s a cultural and pastoral issue that can’t be ignored. If the choice is between art opening up respectful discussion, and angry online culture warriors shutting it down, I know which I prefer.

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Wrestling With Questions

Nobody wants to see the walls of historic cathedrals defaced with sprayed-on graffiti. Nobody thinks the aesthetics of Canterbury Cathedral are improved by graffiti. Of course not. This isn’t what’s happening.

It’s a temporary exhibition, in a limited space, using stickers that will cause no damage to the fabric. The Cathedral is playing with received ideas and traditions, for a short time, with a sly wink at its own history.

It’s art, for goodness’ sake.

Art asks provocative questions. Let’s enjoy wrestling with those questions, rather than lashing out at those who ask them.

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a) Cited David Bosch, Transforming Mission (Orbis 1991), p453.

b) God’s Grandeur, 1877.

c) 1 Corinthians 3:16/17, 6:19; Ephesians 2:21-22.

d) Genesis 32:22-31.

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© Mike Starkey 2025

Pic: Canterbury Cathedral