BY SEAN WALSH
The London nightclub Fabric (which temporarily closed in 2016 after just a handful of drug-related deaths) has agreed a four-year contract with St Paul’s Cathedral (consecrated to the worship of God in 604 AD). Why?
This is how the club’s owner sees things:
Over the next four years, we’ll present a broad range of artists from across the contemporary music landscape, with each event shaped by the Cathedral itself: its acoustics, architecture and unique atmosphere will inform an important part of every performance.”
Fabric seems to have a thing for “electronic music,” which sounds worryingly like a Jean-Michel Jarre style to me – an artist to be avoided at all costs, and not (just) because he is French.
It would be nice to think that the higher-ups in the Anglican Communion have agreed to this as part of a deeper conversion strategy. But that would require a belief in God, and a concomitant habit of talking fondly about Him, so that’s probably not what’s going on.
Anglicanism’s version of doctrinal evolution seems to involve routine public humiliation. The most recent example, prior to this one, being the decision to pay reparations for Britain’s role in the dismantling of the international slave trade.
This proposal might make sense if the following questions were addressed. To whom, specifically, are these reparations owed? Who, specifically, is it that owes them? Where does that obligation come from? And what theological principle can be appealed to which explains the preservation of this obligation over many generations and several hundred years?
Nobody in the Anglican nomenklatura has answered these questions. Or asked them, come to that. And so, the issues around reparations have, as is usual, been absorbed into the ambient secular utilitarianism: just how many church renovations will need to be put on hold so that the modernist virtue architecture can be put in place?
It seems that for Anglicans baptism is sufficient for the expiation of Original Sin and yet inadequate when it comes to the absolution of far more contingent and politically contentious historical grievances.
The decision to go into partnership with a nightclub is a different mistake, but a mistake, nevertheless. It’s the same disordered thinking which motivates sympathy for the transgender idiocy. The error is to think that something which is essentially sacred can be contained in something which is essentially disposable.
The transgender activist assumes that the human person is only accidentally attached to a specific biology. The defender of Cathedral raving assumes that a church is no more than a building in which religious services just happen to take place.
But human bodies do not contain people, and churches do not contain the services that take place in them. In the same way that our biology is part of our selves, a church – a consecrated building – is part of the worship that takes place in it.
The architecture, material composition, interiority, and orientation of a church building have liturgical and sacramental implications, as well as acoustic ones. For this reason, they cannot be leased out for secular events without there being some consequence for them as sacred places. There is no separation of form and function within a consecrated space.
This is not to say that cathedrals cannot host dancing or musical events. It is to say, though, that these are interpolations to be tolerated to the extent that they are properly ordered to God.
It is possibly a stretch to insist that orthodoxy – right praise – will include the snorting of coke from a toilet cistern, casual groping, stabbings, or overdoses (no matter how infrequent). I no longer have much use for these rituals, but they seem very important to those that do, and it seems only fair to insist that they don’t risk being watered down through encounter with church etiquette.
We must not lose sight of the needs of the drugged-up raver in all this.
Churches are there for the pursuit of joy rather than pleasure and should be in the business of conforming the outside world to the ways of Christian faith and not the other way around. We are sent out at the end of Mass to be sleeper agents for evangelisation, and disruptors of the secular order. Our inheritance as Christians is one of subtle subversion.
It is very weird to the Catholic mind that Anglicans would choose to merge with the nighttime culture. In every Catholic church the Lord is present really and substantially, kept safe under lock and key in the tabernacle. It wouldn’t occur to us to keep Him up at night with noise, electronic or otherwise.
Anglicanism makes the same mistake all the time. It is happy to take what is sacramental and treat it as if it’s symbolic. And because it trades in symbols it loses sight of the fact that God is there in material things as well. Including buildings.
There is spiritual as well as natural acoustics. And if Christianity is not beautiful strangeness, if it is not a supernaturalist faith then – to adapt Flannery O’Connor – to Hell with it.