Murder at the Cathedral
And the Zio-killer of Oxford
The big furore
A few days ago the social media sky fell on the heads of the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, an exhibition curator and a poet. Between them they had managed to gain the easily distracted attention of the US Vice President J.D. Vance, the world’s richest man and owner of X-formerly-known-as-Twitter Elon Musk and the senior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.
An irate post about an exhibition that was just about to open in Canterbury cathedral had caught Vance’s eye and he in turn posted on X writing “it is weird to me that these people don’t see the irony of honouring ‘marginalized communities’ by making a beautiful historical building really ugly”.
In turn Musk described the exhibition as “shameful” before using it for this alarming generalisation:
Relentless anti-Western propaganda has made so many people in the West want to suicide their own culture. Unfortunately, propaganda works.
The pedant in me bridles at the use of the word “suicide” as a verb, but Musk’s reaction was almost overtopped by that of Cruz, who immediately pronounced the entire country to be finished:
It’s tragic how great Nations are fallen. Consumed by self-destructive pathologies embraced by their “elites.” God help England.
So here’s my pissy reminder that the homicide rate in fallen England is roughly an eighth of that in Cruz’s Texan neo-paradise. I can also find no record of Cruz ever having visited the UK. The same of course is not true of Musk.
None of these three is Anglican. Vance is a Catholic convert, Cruz is a Southern Baptist and Musk only sees God when he is tinting his eyebrows. They are all isolationists, but nevertheless our business seems to be very much theirs these days.
More exotically, from Budapest the Orban-funded American convert to the Eastern Orthodox church and regular speaker at National Conservative functions, Rod Dreher, made his attack personal, writing:
The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral is openly gay and partnered. He also hosted a rave in the Cathedral last year. This disproves the shibboleth that all gay men have good taste.
This is hardly a pleasant thing to say about the Dean’s partner. Who might retort that Dreher himself is the father of three children, who, along with their mother (they are now divorced), he left behind when he migrated to Hungary. Judge not lest ye be judged, as the best of all books has it.
I looked for historical precedents for US vice presidents, Texan senators or the richest man in the world all angrily commenting on the affairs of the Church of England but could find none. Folks like Teddy Roosevelt, Spiro Agnew, Lloyd Bentsen and Jay Rockefeller all seemed to have other things on their minds. As for Dreher, he is unimportant, but I included his post as a reminder of how uncharitable some of the most loudly devout can be.
What had actually happened
In the words of the cathedral’s publicity people in a release on October 9th…
A major new art installation at Canterbury Cathedral in which ordinary people pose questions to God has split public opinion ahead of its official launch, with visitors reporting visceral reactions to the bold graffiti-style graphics and thought-provoking questions displayed on the ancient walls. Whilst many have reported their delight and intrigue, others have been discomforted by encountering the artworks.
The idea was to frame common “questions to God” graffiti-style, to which end brightly coloured artwork was posted on various surfaces in the cathedral with legends like “Do you ever regret your creation?” and “are you there?” As the website makes clear the exhibition ends (ie the graffiti will all be removed after) mid-January.
The public furore
Very quickly the cathedral’s exhibition was taken up on social media and one of the most re-posted reactions belonged to an Australian blogger called Drew Pavlou, whose post began by quoting the partnered Dean as saying of his exhibition that:
“There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised…This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres and allows us to receive the gifts of younger people who have much to say.”
From which Pavlou extrapolated this:
It’s actually stunning how much the elite of Britain hate their own culture and civilisation. You couldn’t even invent this as satire. They are literally scrawling graffiti on the walls of ancient cathedrals. Everything beautiful is just torn down and destroyed.
Pavlou followed up with a link to his…
…new blog post explaining why the Canterbury Cathedral Graffiti is essentially an act of cultural genocide…
Genocide, of course. The biggest word anyone can think of, alongside “pedophile”. Immediately another poster responded:
Saints built that and now it’s defiled by homosexuals. And then people wonder why their nation is under the judgement of God.
Where angels fear to tread
I am not a fan of pile-ons and this one was turning nasty, and could well lead to threats and abuse aimed at people who, from my experience, will have not been expecting such a violent reaction. Deans, artists and curators are not always quite of this polarised political world. So I posted that “the graffiti exhibition in Canterbury cathedral is temporary and the graffiti will be removed when it’s over. Not that you could possibly know this from the hundreds of posts from the permanently outraged”.
