Mammon's Bells: The Church of England's Fraught Relationship with the Protesters

“The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call” said the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, after the debacle surrounding St Paul’s cathedral and its fraught relationship with the protesters camped outside seems to have subsided for the time being. One might point out that St Paul’s has heard that call rather belatedly, to say the least.

About 200 people and dozens of tents have been pitched in the churchyard since October 15^th to protest against “corporate greed and inequality” in the City, inadvertently sparking a massive public debate about the Church’s position in society. The Church’s first response was to close St. Paul’s for a week, because of health and safety concerns.  The next episodes in the saga saw the resignations of the canon chancellor Dr Giles Fraser because of the recourse to legal means, and the dean of the cathedral, the Right Reverend Graeme Knowles over his mismanagement of the case. This rapid succession of events seemed to prompt the sharp U-turn in the cathedral’s position, which in the space of two days announced the suspension of legal action against the protesters.

The convoluted evolution of the debacle has led many to question where the Church of England stands when it comes to the competing demands of God and Mammon. The location of St. Paul’s in the middle of the financial centre of the UK could not be more apt to highlight the situation. It professes to be a friend of the poor and marginalised in society, thus leading one to assume it would throw its full weight behind the protesters’ cause, however vague and ill-framed it might be. Its initial actions, both the closure of the cathedral and the resort to legal means, belie this traditional stance. The week-long closure to the public could not contrast more stridently with Dr Chartres’s later overtures to the protesters. It visibly showed a disinclination to engage with the protesters and more importantly to kick-start a public discussion on economic justice and the broader societal issues regarding the role of finance, all within the church’s remit. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University has said, “it’s not the business of the Church to be a set of economists. What the Church can do is to invite people to think thoughtfully, be honest and to ask the right questions”.

However we may be going too far in claiming that the Church of England actively sought to shun its role in helping the most vulnerable elements of society by attempting to evict the protesters. Nor does it follow necessarily that the Church ought to position itself squarely in either the establishment or anti-establishment camps. Church historian Stephen Tomkins argues that this debate stretches back 2000 years to the birth of Christianity itself. The Church has ambivalently been both a radical and conservative force in society, thus making it too diverse a phenomenon to be on one side or the other. Furthermore, from the article on the Financial Times written by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, it transpires that he sympathised significantly with the protesters in backing a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions. It is regrettable that he did not speak out sooner to assuage the public ire. Thus whilst the Church’s fudging response was indeed shambolic and plain incompetent, it is inaccurate to lambast it for having forgone its duties to society. In excessively prioritising and mismanaging the practical issues of health and safety it allowed the broader philosophical debate to run ahead, scuppering its chance to be at the forefront of it.