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Marcus Walker has narrated this article for you to listen to.

When the Roman Emperor Justinian finished building the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople in 537 he compared it to the great temple in Jerusalem. ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee,’ he declared. Some 400 years later, as visiting ambassadors from Kyiv were led into the same ethereal structure, they remarked: ‘We did not know if we were in heaven or earth.’

There will be no such confusion when people enter the newly opened ‘multi-faith area’ in the free waiting zone car park of Bristol Airport. To the casual observer it looks like a bus stop with greyed-out Perspex glass windows and walls that do not quite reach the ground (presumably to prevent the homeless finding somewhere dry to sleep). Located ‘just off the Silver Zone roundabout’, the multi-faith area ‘provides customers with a private space to reflect and pray whilst waiting to collect friends, family or loved ones’.

It is tokenism to put up a prayer space for your customers but then shove it on a roundabout

This is almost the perfect metaphor for how our secular, bureaucratic state today views religion and prayer. When St Hilda’s College, Oxford, decided to replace its chapel with a multi-faith prayer room, its last Anglican chaplain commented: ‘When it comes to decoration and iconography, a multi-faith room inevitably tends to be lowest common denominator and therefore usually bland. Soulless you might say.’ He went on to sell the pass: ‘Much as we enjoy the colour and numinous atmosphere of, say, Exeter College Chapel, Christians can worship or pray in any space.’

Well, up to a point. Christians can worship God anywhere, and God is sometimes worshipped most deeply and powerfully in the most miserable of places. But that does not therefore mean this is the ideal way of worshipping. For all that the Church of England tried to tell people during the pandemic that they could worship God just as well from their sofa as in church, we are all rather glad that most people did not take us at our word now that we want them back.

Beauty matters, and it matters across all religions. ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ says Psalm 96, and we know that the Temple of Jerusalem where it was first sung was a building of outstanding beauty. This was not just the tradition of ancient Judaism as, for example, the astonishing Chagall windows of the chapel in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem demonstrate today.

Justinian hoped to echo Solomon’s temple in Hagia Sophia and created a work of magnificence which can still be glimpsed today. Down the road from it is the Blue Mosque, one of dozens of Islamic artistic gems which dot Istanbul. Beauty means something to human beings and has meant something in every age of man.

Not so for the officials behind the airport’s prayer area, who seem contemptuous of religion and the need to pray. They seem to think we are all the same, and that our mumbo-jumbo can be recited in any old box, so long as they’ve fulfilled their diversity, equity and inclusion objective of installing a multi-faith room somewhere on site. Box ticked; box built.

To be generous: there is some logic to the bare room. No religion should take precedence, and once you start awarding space to some divisions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) where does it stop – does every cult get its own chapel? Every faction of Anglicanism?

But it’s the sheer arrogance of the thing that gets me: the ‘you get what you’re given’ attitude – even if it’s a prefab bus shelter next to a roundabout in a free waiting zone.

And why should some secularists be able to breezily decide which elements of the amorphous blob that we call ‘religion’ are essential, and which are not? It demonstrates a refusal to appreciate that how we worship God is an outworking of deep philosophical and theological conviction, not a fashion taste.

The searing irony is that while the room is devoid of any iconography partially in order to satisfy the demands of Wahhabi Islam (and it does have a Qibla pointing in the direction of Mecca and rather attractive carpets), it is a room with walls that do not touch the floor. No thought has been given (of course) to the effect on carpets and kneeling worshippers of rainwater slopping under the prefabricated walls.

But this is about tokenism, not facilitating worship or prayer. It is tokenism to create a space that would not offend Muslims while having no regard for how Muslims worship. It is tokenism to affect enough care for your religious customers to put up a prayer space in an airport but then shove it outside on a roundabout. And it is astonishingly arrogant to think that thousands of years of subtle philosophy of art and liturgy can be boiled down to a bare plastic hut in a parking lot.

This car park cappella is an icon of our age. It speaks of an officialdom that views religion as either a nuisance or a diversity target. It stands in miserable glory as a reflection of everything the secular state does, and does not, hold dear.

Note, as a final reflection, that telling little word ‘free’. That there is a free waiting area suggests that somewhere in Bristol Airport there is an unfree waiting area, where a better class of traveller might lurk, the sort the airport presumes will be unlikely to feel the need for a multi-faith area./>