Church buildings are one of the more under-appreciated aspects of Christianity. A similar thing can be said of mosques in Islam, and possibly synagogues in Judaism, and other religions as well. In general we don't spend a lot of time reflecting on the complexities of space in religion. Which is odd, when you think about it, especially for those of us thinking about "public life"; for public life is a life lived, to significant degree, in particular "spaces of appearance," as Hannah Arendt put it. The forum, the marketplace, the agora, the coffee-house, the university campus; space and place are pretty crucial categories to think with about public life. And private life as well, of course.
I think about this this morning because I came across a small piece in The Economist about Anglican Cathedrals in the UK. They are large and old buildings, and likely to be very expensive to keep up. Then again, they are buildings that are likely to be popular with people, and also treated in a conservative way by people--so that changes, or architectural remodeling, or even safety improvements, will be met with a good deal of skepticism by people. This of course is part of what hurt Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris this past spring, when it burned; certain fire defense measures had not been put in place, in part because of hesitations about modification.
The Economist piece is not well-designed, and doesn't stick to a single point, but perhaps that's part of the agenda: the cathedrals in the UK are ecclesiastically and legally anomalous, not being simply under the local Bishop's thumb, but being directly overseen by a Dean. Furthermore, beyond that oversight there is no direct accountability to the overall state system, even though the C of E is a state church. So these vast buildings--buildings, by the way, that largely define which urban complex counts as a "city" and which is merely a "town" (Oxford, with Christ Church Cathedral, is a city and has a bishop, but Cambridge, lacking any cathedral, is just a town)--exist in a curious space of legal obscurity.
They also exist in a curious space of theological liminality. Many people go to cathedrals as tourists; many fewer as worshippers. Tourism used to be worship, of course; think of the Cantebury Tales, and the many pilgrims to cathedrals as sites of especially dense holiness, locations of saints' or martyrs' bodies, relics, etc.. Still, we can see today that, when a service is happening at the front of a cathedral, there may still be tourists milling around at the back; so you can tell the sacred from the profane, in practice.
In his wonderful book Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmud MacCulloch makes the sharp point that the Anglican communion remains a curious Protestant denomination, effectively the only one that keeps not only bishops, but also cathedrals. Protestants in general were committed to bringing God as close to the laity as possible, making of the church as a whole a "priesthood of all believers," making the mundane sacramental. What are cathedrals doing here, in this world, for churches like this? They're not simply big churches. They have some other role. What is it? I'm genuinely interested in thinking about it. I think the C of E, and other churches in the Anglican communion, have a real opportunity to make something special of these spaces, if they will.