Whose public space?

At 2.30 p.m., on Friday 21 October 2011, St Paul’s officials put out a press release saying they were closing the cathedral for the first time since the Blitz: “We have done this with a very heavy heart, but it is simply not possible to fulfil our day to day obligations to worshippers, visitors and pilgrims in current circumstances.”

Anti-global finance protesters (Occupy London Stock Exchange) had been camped outside cathedral for several days when this widely reported decision was taken, which conveyed the impression that the cathedral was thoroughly barracaded. In fact, Zoe Williams reported (accessed 27.10.11) that she didn’t meet anybody who was inconvenienced in any way:

You would see, by a factor of 100, more people obstructing one another if you walked three minutes to the tube station. And the clarification at the end of the St Paul’s statement – “Today is about our ability, practically, to carry on our mission with free and open access to this public space and treasured place and I hope that the protesters will understand the issues we are facing, recognise that their voice has been legitimately heard, and withdraw peacefully” – did not, frankly, clarify.

Why would a Christian church, supposedly in favour of truth telling, misrepresent reality? Was it because they no longer had the public square all to themselves? Did they see their territory – in this case, the physical space on the western edge of the cathedral – dwindling and did they feel compelled to make a stand?

Britain is an increasingly secular country, and all the better for the change, but beware those who are left behind, who see themselves on a shrinking island of influence, encroached on all sides by people they choose to characterize as their enemies – they do not always act within reason, although they are likely to act in their own interests.

Secularists who advocate a separation of church and state and an end to religious privilege are used to hearing apologists for religion stridently declaring that they will not be driven out of the public square. This is of course a misrepresentation of the secularist position, which simply opposes such political arrangements as, for example, the automatic right of a certain number of bishops to sit in the upper chamber of parliament. As a secularist, I am not interested in what religious believers get up to in the privacy of their own homes, so long as it’s between consenting adults and doesn’t involve child abuse. Equally, religious believers are free to come into the public square and inform the rest of us of their opinion that, say, gay marriage is an abomination. The point about freedom, which some followers of bronze age beliefs haven’t yet caught up with, is that we’re free to disagree and denounce their views, preferably courteously, but always reasonably.

(Incidentally, at last night’s Conway Memorial Lecture, Professor Philip Schofield talked about Jeremy Bentham’s rather low opinion of St Paul, whom he regarded as a power-hungry and opportunistic fraud who relied upon the credulity of his Gentile followers and tirelessly promoted his philosophy of asceticism. As for religion itself, Bentham saw it a series of well-defended fortifications, and that the best strategy was to attack each in turn in order to destroy the whole. He began with St Paul.)