Missionary churches do not invite graffiti installations in their cathedrals; they invite people to join the faith.
Missionary churches do not invite graffiti installations in their cathedrals.
U ntil recently, a Google search of “church graffiti” yielded a litany of sad cases of church walls defaced by young ruffians. Now, those cases have been replaced by the curious incident of a church — one of the most famous and influential churches in the world, no less — voluntarily vandalizing itself.
Last week, The Times reported that Canterbury Cathedral, the ecclesiastical capital of the Church of England and home of the archbishop of Canterbury, had opened a new “art installation” in its sanctuary. The installation, which greets churchgoers as soon as they enter, covers many of the church walls with questions like Why the suffering? and Why did you create hate when love is by far more powerful? written in stenciled graffiti and applied as stickers that The Times helpfully identifies as “tags,” “throw-up lettering,” and “wildstyle designs.”
Church officials explained that in making the installation, a “poet and curator” had teamed up with “marginalised communities” and “skilled artists to create vibrant handwritten literature responding to the question: ‘What would you ask God?’”
When asked why the cathedral had put up such an installation, Dean of Canterbury David Monteith said: “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles, and genres and in particular allows us to receive the gifts of younger people who have much to say and from whom we need to hear much.” It is due to last until the January enthronement of Sarah Mullally, who will become the first female archbishop of Canterbury.
Criticism of the installation, including from the X accounts of Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, has focused mainly on the aesthetic outrageousness of making one of the most beautiful buildings in England look like the underside of a highway overpass. This is a tempting reaction, as is (for this author) a jolt of cheap Catholic self-righteousness. But the significance of the Church of England’s architectural self-abasement goes far deeper than that.
The Anglican church is the world’s second-largest Christian denomination, with more than 80 million communicants worldwide. In some parts of the world, the church is doing quite well. But in its home country of England, it is in crisis. Since 1980, attendance at Church of England parishes has halved from 1.3 million to 659,000, with 169,000 of those losses occurring just between 2020 and 2024. Between 3,000 and 5,000 out of England’s 16,000 Anglican churches are now used intermittently or not at all.
Meanwhile, most of the Anglican church’s healthiest communities are in former British colonies, cultural lightyears away from Canterbury. The church’s fastest-growing outpost may be in Nigeria, where between 18 and 25 million people belong to Anglican churches.
When I read about the self-vandalism of Canterbury, my first instinct was to try and imagine the Anglican archbishop of Lagos, Nigeria, announcing that his cathedral will now be welcoming visitors with a graffito reading Is illness sin? above the church door.
It was unthinkable.
Why? Because in places like Nigeria, the Anglican church remains what it once was: a missionary faith. In the past, those missionaries were English; today, they’re Nigerians. But vitally, they retain the courage of their convictions as leaders of a faith that can save the world by spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.
And that is what the Church of England has lost. Missionary churches do not go find lonely lost boys graffitiing subway stations and ask them to come design a graffiti installation for their cathedrals. They go find those boys for the purpose of saving them through the faith. Dean Monteith, who speaks of “receiving the gifts of younger people” through this installation, has it precisely backward. It is those younger people who need the gifts of the church.
This is one reason why the Church of England is performing far worse than other Christian churches in England and worldwide. And the other reason, its prioritization of identity politics über alles, is equally manifest in the Canterbury graffiti incident. The suggestion that “marginalised communities” will somehow start attending church regularly because they see graffiti on the walls somehow manages to degrade both those communities and the church. To those communities, it says that graffitied walls — and not the beauty of an unblemished cathedral — are their natural milieu. The church, for its part, is told that it is no more elevated than a grungy subway tunnel. No wonder the Church of England is hemorrhaging members.
But this is all, in a pure business sense, rather obvious. So why do they do it? They do it because for the current leadership of the Church of England, the leading motivator is the expungement of guilt. Guilt for colonialism, guilt for religious zeal, guilt for racism, guilt for Western chauvinism. Just as the Reverend Dimmesdale of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter put himself on the scaffold, the Church of England is doing the same at Canterbury. One wonders whether a charitable Nigerian cleric might pay a visit to the Mother Church to snap them out of it.