This week’s unexpected public smackdown is… vicars versus wedding photographers. What a time to be alive! The latter have hoisted a petition on the website change.org, which has already attracted more than 900 signatories, demanding that vicars be nicer to them.

‘Not all church leaders are problematic, but a LOT are – and those that are problematic are not only hindering professional video/photographers from doing the job they’ve been paid to do, they’re more often than not rude, humiliating, aggressive and abusive.’ An example is given as a link: a TikTok of an extremely unsmiling bald clergyman telling the photographer to get the hell out of the way or he’s going to stop the ceremony.

What we’re seeing in this story is, under the skin, a clash of faiths

‘We come in PEACE,’ say the snappers. We have jobs to do too, they say: they don’t mind respecting boundaries and fitting in with the solemnities of the day, but they’d like not to be treated with contempt just because they’re holding cameras. Let’s have ‘a public conversation’, they say. The veiled threat lands last: ‘More and more couples are choosing not to marry in church whilst more and more video/photographers are avoiding taking work in churches because of this.’

Online petitions, as this confirms, are these days less about campaigning for a concrete change than about having a giant moan in public. What could this petition expect to achieve even if it passes a million signatures? An intervention by an Archbishop to enshrine the rights of snappers in canon law?

But it indicates that there’s a tension there. Wedding photographers and vicars occupy the same evolutionary niche, even if the former are relative latecomers to it. These days they increasingly depend on one another for survival… but both will from time to time resent the hell out of it. Here it is breaking into open strife.

Wedding photographers, naturally, are employed to take the best photographs they can. That means the freedom to roam, to capture the bride and groom from the front (they are, after all, usually facing the altar), and one way and another to put themselves about even as the climactic solemnities of the ceremony are underway. It’s tough on them to be expected to sit still in a pew four rows back, where if they’re lucky they’ll get a shot of the back of the bride’s head, visible in the gap between Aunty Doris’s ill-advised hat and the hairy red right ear of Uncle Sid.

You can see why the vicars are cheesed off, too. You start out annoyed that your Sunday congregation must be sustained by a rotating cast of parents hoping to get their kids into the local church school… at which point you’ll never see them again. These, you will no doubt punish with extra boring sermons, taking (may He forgive you) carrion comfort in watching their resentful fidgeting and strained smiles at the Sign of Peace.

Then it’s the same story for the big days. People who don’t show any sign of engaging, week in week out, with the quiet and outwardly unrewarding practice of faith suddenly decide they absolutely need a church wedding. Your church – having a particularly picturesque rood screen or a nice bit of gothic vaulting – is the place they have fixed on. And – fancy! – they are much more interested in the camera angles than they are in the solemn vows. To hell – figuratively, at least, because He forgives as a rule – with those guys, right?

All cursed modernity is here in this apparently marginal argy-bargy, I think. We start with an obvious point: the dust-up between vicar and wedding snapper can and should be mediated in each case, and long in advance, by the bride and groom. It’s up to them to find out what the church will allow – God’s house, God’s rules – and to square that courteously with the instructions given to the photographers. But heaven forbid those around whom the whole day revolves be expected to take any responsibility for it.

More intriguing is not the dreary practical stuff but the spiritual question. What we’re seeing in this story is, under the skin, a clash of faiths – if ‘faith’ is understood in its broad sense, not of belief in a set of propositions but as a way of understanding your relationship to the world and to other people.

The church, for the vicar, is a house of God – and a place in which ritual connects the life of the individual to the life of the community under God. That is a sacred charge; literally. The decorative beauty of church buildings, and the solemn obeisances therein, serve that charge.

For the wedding photographer, though, the church is something more like set-dressing: a vital frame for the photographs which will enliven the happy couple’s social media accounts and shape their memories of the day in their real or virtual wedding albums. Wedding photographs used to be a marginal part of the day: now they are more and more the heart of it. They serve what we sometimes call, with suggestively religious language, the cult of the selfie.

That isn’t to denigrate or sneer at that form of engagement. Self-fashioning and spectacular self-presentation aren’t an invention of the digital age. They are as old as humanity. The Instagram story and the Facebook page simply give a very visible and direct (and sometimes transactional) force to an old idea, which is that our lives and selves are meaningful inasmuch as we perform them and they are witnessed by others. We live in the gaze of the community.

And here, we’re at once not all that far from the position of the vicar. That is what weddings have always been about. Hatches, matches and dispatches structure the church’s intervention in an ordinary human life, and the public-facing aspects of even the most secular of lives. As a non-believer, I still thought it worth going through the formal ceremony of a wedding – admittedly in a register office rather than a church – because it seems to me that the essential part of getting married is that it is a public, rather than a private, commitment.

Wedding photographers and vicars are on the same side then. The latter may look with distaste on the shallow and idolatrous habits of the Instagram generation, but the impulse to be witnessed, and to be validated by being witnessed, is something very like a religious one at root. It is about seeking something larger than yourself. In the Russian orthodox tradition, I have been told, the holiness of an icon grows with every prayer addressed to it: a spiritual ‘likes’ counter.

The value of the church to the Instagram generation is more traditional, then, and more in line with its original purpose, than it might at first look. The vicar and the wedding photographer should make peace with one another. Theirs is a marriage of sorts, and every marriage needs compromise if it’s going to last.