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A banner reading Capitalism is Crisis is displayed in the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in October 2011. The protesters were forcibly evicted at the end of February. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
A banner reading Capitalism is Crisis is displayed in the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in October 2011. The protesters were forcibly evicted at the end of February. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Giles Fraser: my hopes for the Occupy St Paul's drama that puts me on the stage

This article is more than 8 years old

When anti-capitalist protesters set up camp on the steps of St Paul’s in London, its canon chancellor found himself at the heart of a crisis that shook the church even more than the City. As a new play, Temple, explores the affair, he questions the very existence of the cathedral itself

On the afternoon of 26 October 2011, the cathedral chapter of St Paul’s came together for a hastily convened meeting. Some were absent, but there were enough of us to make a decision. And there was only one item on the agenda: the eviction of Occupy. Everyone was tired. Everyone was emotional. The previous weeks had taken their toll. And we all dealt with it differently. During the meeting, I felt almost unable to speak, perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. The dean reached across the baize table to hold my hand and break my silence. It was a simple act of kindness in an impossible situation. He, too, was tired and angry. I don’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t enough. The vote was close but it didn’t go my way. A few hours later, I rang the dean’s doorbell and handed him the letter. I couldn’t just pop it through his letterbox. He knew what it was.

Demonstrators watch as bailiffs, with police as backup, move in to clear the Occupy camp on 28 February 2012. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

“These have been very difficult days for us all at the cathedral,” I wrote, “and I want to thank you a great deal for the generous way in which you have led us though this testing period. I feel hugely privileged to have been a part of the thoughtful discussions we have had since the protest camp arrived. And I also want to thank you personally for your sustained kindness towards me throughout my time at St Paul’s. So it is without any sort of acrimony or bad feeling that I regret to say that I cannot travel down the path that chapter has now chosen. I have been clear and calm in my own mind that I will not be able to sign up to any course of action that may result in violence done in the name of the church. And I feel that the decision we made this afternoon makes that a real possibility.”

It was a day of high drama. Part of the reason why Occupy captured the public imagination was that it was played out on the steps of St Paul’s, which made for a natural and compelling stage. It was designed as such, of course – as a set for the marriages of princesses and the funerals of prime ministers, as well as for the public performance of beautifully choreographed religious ritual. But, for me, the most intense drama took place behind the scenes. And I suppose it is therefore unsurprising that someone would turn this into a play, as Steve Waters has done with Temple, which opens at London’s Donmar Warehouse this week.

Simon Russell Beale plays the dean, someone to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. And playing me – or the chancellor – is the remarkable Paul Higgins, who himself spent some time in seminary thinking about the priesthood, and who also demonstrated his capacity to swear like a trooper as Jamie, the other ferocious spin-doctor in The Thick of It. Some might call this typecasting.

Rebecca Humphries and Simon Russell Beale as the Dean in rehearsal for Temple. Photograph: Johan Persson

It could be argued that Occupy’s expression in London had a far greater effect on the church than it did on the City. Within a year of the protesters having been forcibly evicted from the steps of St Paul’s in February 2012, the Anglican Communion had appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury specifically chosen to speak moral purpose to bankers. Indeed Justin Welby, a former oil executive, once blamed me for his becoming archbishop. In an interview I conducted with him, in the summer between the eviction and his appointment, he made his position on the protests perfectly clear: “Occupy reflects a deep-seated sense that there is something wrong, and we need to think very hard about what’s wrong.” Did that mean, I asked, he thought Occupy were right? “Of course they were right. Absolutely. And everything we are hearing now says that.” After the whole St Paul’s debacle, that needed to be said.

Though I find it uncomfortable – painful even – to have these events revisited, there is an issue here that extends far beyond the personalities involved. Perhaps that’s why it makes a good subject for a play. The St Paul’s/Occupy thing was not just a little bit of local difficulty. What was at stake, for all involved, was a theological question that takes us back to the very foundations of the Christian faith.

For the first few hundred years of its life, Christianity had no need of specialist religious buildings. Christians met in each other’s homes. When they spoke of church, they meant a group of people and not a place of worship. And the story they told to each other was that of an itinerant preacher who had nothing good to say about the preeminent religious building of his day, and little good to say about the priests and officials who staffed it. Like many of the Hebrew prophets before him, the Temple was often regarded as a distraction from God and not a means of God’s presence.

Giles Fraser, then canon chancellor at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in December 2011. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Guardian

For all of this, the worldly success of Christianity – measured in terms of numerical growth – had much to do with the Roman passion for architecture. For when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he traded in its early radicalism for a tame, establishment other-worldly quietism, something that was easily manipulated as an adjunct to the state and its power. Hovering over the Council of Nicea, Constantine ensured that the early church’s stories of the radical Jesus were airbrushed out of the definitive and official summary of Christian faith: “…Born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried.” Jumping from birth to death, there is no mention here of anything Jesus ever said. No mention of forgiving enemies or rich people having to give up all their money. The Roman Empire didn’t just kill Jesus. They stole his religion, too. And from here on in, Christians would swap the rags of the oppressed for the ermine of high office. Great church buildings, like the ones Constantine constructed in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, would become their symbols of power. The church and the state had fused into a dangerous pact we now call Christendom.

Christendom blessed the state with moral purpose and, in return, the state granted the church an exclusive franchise on the souls of its citizens. It took over 1,000 years for the likes of Martin Luther to begin a revolution against this increasingly corrupting arrangement. But such was the embedded power of Christendom, so well-rehearsed were its self-justifications, that even this revolution stalled, requiring constant and continual renewal. In the end, it was not so much the protesters – ie Protestants – who did for Christendom, but the long process of secularisation. The intellectual argument over the separation of church and state has now been won, and won decisively. The Church of England may retain its bishops in the House of Lords but few people can think up a good reason for why they are there. They are an anachronism, a hangover from the age of Christendom.

For me, the relationship between the Occupy protests and St Paul’s Cathedral has to be understood within this context. Occupy had a legitimate protest against another corrupting partnership: that of the state with high finance. In the months that preceded Occupy, the state intervened to bail out the banks, who had been caught out playing in the casino with other people’s money. Instead of letting the banks fail, the state gave them billions of public money, thus retrospectively subsidising their Bollinger lifestyles. What about the 99%, Occupy shouted, legitimately? And the question has yet to be answered.

“WWJD?” was another legitimate question. “What would Jesus do?” For some, the issue was about the cathedral and its protection from the ragbag of activists that camped outside its precious entrance. Running so large, expensive and iconic a building inevitably made the cathedral itself the subject of disproportionate attention for those who worked there. The dean himself felt this was a problem just as keenly as I. He once preached a fiery sermon to the effect that if St Paul’s did not speak fully of God then we might as well just go and hand over its keys to the National Trust.

He was right. But where we differed, I suppose, was the extent to which he believed it was possible for such a fabulous building to speak about the life of a man born in a shed and who lived in solidarity with the down-and-outs of society. St Paul’s, designed by a scientist, speaks vividly of the cosmological God, the omnipotent God of the stars and the heavens. But it finds it much harder to speak convincingly of the poor, incarnate, vulnerable God of Bethlehem. That God was, to my mind at least, much more clearly articulated within the camp itself. Perhaps, then, one might say that the internal dynamics and tensions within the cathedral were those of the Trinity itself, each an articulation of the same God but pulling in different directions, one towards the eternal, another towards the temporal. If the play captures something of this theological dynamic, with justification on both sides, it will have succeeded. For this is a tension inherent within the Christian faith itself.

Occupy protesters stand on a barricade outside St Paul’s Cathedral in a bid to prevent their eviction. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

I have found the years that followed my resignation difficult – depression and divorce followed. Being a canon of St Paul’s was good for the ego. It made you feel important just to be there, among important people, always at the centre of things. But precisely because of this insidious temptation to self-importance, it’s also a place that contains a great many dangers for the soul, as it certainly did for me.

Two things pulled me through: a few years of psychotherapy and a refusal to give up on the Christian promise that, despite everything, all is well. Neither were a comfort blanket. Both stripped me down and built me up again. Both made me face things about myself that I had spent too long avoiding. Both helped me to spend more time on my own, and not to seek acceptance in the reflected glory of other people’s passing applause. It remains work in progress, of course. But this is why, despite everything, I do not regret my resignation or its emotional fallout. I did what I thought was right. And I still don’t see that there was any other way.

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