A few years ago when I was in Salisbury, my wife and I attended an evensong in Salisbury Cathedral. The choir was exquisite and the acoustics perfect. In the bulletin was a notice to the effect that the congregation should not join in with the choir since it would almost certainly ruin the whole performance.

What the comment revealed was that the evensong was primarily an aesthetic rather than a religious experience: the choir were the performers and the congregation the audience. The performance made the paltry efforts of the average congregational singing sound like the caterwauling of tormented hyenas. The choir’s singing, on the other hand, conveyed a sense of God’s majesty and perfection. What it was not, however, was an act of congregational worship, since an expression of worship takes participation.

Sadly, in liturgical churches aesthetics are frequently mistaken for worship: when we worship, God is the audience, the congregation are the performers and, if their hearts are right with him, the apparent aesthetic value is of little consequence.

That is why this article by Damian Thompson is thoroughly mixed up:

Graham Kendrick, composer of the most loathed of all happy-clappy hymns, “Shine Jesus Shine”, has been named by Quentin Letts in a new book as one of the 50 People Who B*ggered up Britain. I can hear cheers emanating from pews up and down the country.

But Quentin is an old friend of mine, and I want to tell him: be careful. Kendrick is not one of the useless, drippy mediocrities who have ruined Catholic music with their folk Masses. He is – and I’m not making this up – a leading practitioner of what he calls “spiritual warfare”, and he may well conclude that Letts’s attack is demonic.

Letts certainly pitches into Kendrick with devilish glee, describing him as “the nation’s preeminent churner-outer of evangelical bilge, king of the happy-clappy banalities … Pam Ayres without the humour”. And he adds: “The jazzy chorus of ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ is particular agony, accompanied, as it often is, by a couple of emotionally incontinent show-offs in the front pews raising their arms and swinging them from side to side.”

What will Kendrick make of that? I dread to think. For he is not just a hymn-writer, but a leading proponent of a scarily hard-edged theology of spiritual warfare in which the earth is crawling with demons. Or, as he once wrote: “Satan has the real estate of villages, towns and cities overshadowed by ruling spirits which work untiringly to bring about his malevolent will.”

As for the proposition that demons are at work in the world: does anyone who has recently picked up a newspaper have any doubts?

The photo of the raised arms is there just for Damian and Quentin.