US Vice President JD Vance is among the many critics of a controversial latest art installation at Canterbury Cathedral inspired by graffiti.
The display features temporary graffiti asking inquiries to God in regards to the meaning of life and the Christian faith but it surely has been likened to a number of the unattractive scrawlings seen around British towns and cities.
Examples of the questions scrawled onto the cathedral’s ancient partitions are “Is illness sin?” and “Why did you create hate when love is by way more powerful?”.
The Very Rev David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, defended the installation, saying: “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and never sanitised.
“This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres and allows us to receive the gifts of younger individuals who have much to say.”
Others have disagreed with the Dean’s tackle it, with Vance calling it “really ugly”.
“It is weird to me that these people don’t see the irony of honoring ‘marginalized communities’ by making a wonderful historical constructing really ugly,” he wrote on X.
Tesla owner Elon Musk called it “shameful”.
The Rev Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great within the City of London and chairman of the Save the Parish campaign group, told The Telegraph it was embarrassing.
“The leadership of Canterbury Cathedral may now not have a way of the sacred, but thousands and thousands do and so they have an obligation to maintain this a spot of prayer and worship for the remainder of us, not turn it into a personal plaything of the elites,” he said.
GB News presenter Emma Trimble said the cathedral leadership had made the sacred “profane”.
“Young people want serious religion. The lack of seriousness is why young people leave or dismiss Anglicanism,” she said.
“I feel the enormity of the backlash against [Canterbury Cathedral] is because this graffiti epitomises the sensation that those leading the church lack firm faith. Lack pious awe, and respect for the sacred.
“Young people visit our cathedrals and find self-indulgent egos fairly than Christ. The ‘Quiet Revival’ is a revolt against this.”
Former MEP Annunziata Rees-Mogg called it “illegible, unaesthetic, disrespectful nonsense from a church so eager to be seen as progressive, its leaders spiral it into irrelevance”.
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