So many young people in this city have now died, as victims of gun crime; so many routinely carry guns, as something glamorous. In the communities where they have grown up, what are the main organisations actively protesting against this gun culture? Everywhere the churches play a key role. Each year in this Cathedral we hold a service to commemorate the victims. 

Then a well-known global corporation produces a photo-realistic computer game, in which the players, armed with machine guns, attempt to slaughter as many enemies as possible, some of them alien monsters, others human. And one of the scenes they use is the interior of our Cathedral.

How is this different from, say – the action of vandals daubing swastikas on Jewish graves? Both actions involve aggressively superimposing upon a set of sacred symbols another symbolism, representing the exact opposite world-view.

One difference here is that Nazi vandals don’t do it for money. And another is that the Jewish community can at any rate clean up afterwards. We can’t. But, surely – it will be objected – ‘the game is just a game’! Is it? The hate mail we’ve received for having protested indicates that, to those who sent it, this is no mere game. And why use a church as background? To us believers, nothing that happens in church is ‘just a game’. Given the symbolic meaning we invest in our churches, the game-designers’ choice of a church, for this purpose, looks like a symbolic way of their saying: ‘Nothing is sacred’. In other words: ‘Everything in life is, really, just a game’. Or, by implication: ‘Let’s refuse to grow up!’

Obviously not all those who play such games share the violent mentality of the hate mailers. For the great majority, no doubt, it’s just an idle pastime. The propaganda message operates as all propaganda messages operate: not as a rational argument, but as a reinforcing prod at already existent prejudices.

‘We aren’t stupid’, say the gamers, ‘It’s just a game to us. We aren’t being corrupted’. But you don’t have to be stupid to be manipulated by propaganda – all you need is a bit of prejudice. In this case: against the sort of adult moral seriousness that church buildings, for example, represent.

Civilisation depends upon that sort of seriousness. SONY’s game is a blasphemy, not only against Christ or against religion in general. It’s a blasphemy against civilisation itself.