St Paul’s Cathedral has closed and asked the Occupy London Stock Exchange protestors to move on.

If the Cathedral becomes more insistent in its requests, it will no doubt confirm many of the protestor’s prejudices. We always knew whose side you were on…

They will ask, with a moderate amount of emotional blackmail, what they should make of the church’s public witness against the failings of global capitalism. Does it last only in so far as the gift shop takings remain unaffected?

Self-styled Christian radicals have already begun to criticise the Cathedral authorities for not giving more full throated support to the protestors. Why haven’t they flung open the doors and made the Cathedral a staging area for a winter of City protests? After all, didn’t Jesus turn the money changers out of the temple? It’s very muddled thinking but nevertheless, in the febrile moment, this becomes just another example of institutional Christianity evading the subversive teachings of Jesus.

There are, of course, interesting connections to be made here. As Nick Spencer observed in a lecture in Westminster Abbey on Thursday, Christianity has often been a source of radical political ideas (e.g., John Locke's biblical arguments for human equality). A blurring at the edges is inevitable - it’s unsurprising, for instance, that a spontaneous chaplaincy movement has emerged to serve the Wall Street Occupation protestors. Left of centre politics has often taken on an overtly religious tinge and in some quarters is doing so again, even on the account of atheists.

More deeply, it’s striking how often radical secular political movements unconsciously inhabit the Christian account of history and the future. Their goal is transformation of the global order (read the coming Kingdom) and their victory, while inevitable in the long run (the parousia), has to be fought for in the particular historical conditions by the avante garde of the new world order (the church). This, whether they be the proletariat of classical Marxism or anarcho-syndicalists currently camping out on the steps of St Paul’s, an argument made at length by philosopher John Gray.

So an alignment between ‘Occupy’ and the churches would be, if anything, a reversion to type? Tempting idea, but no. It’s easy then to read the mission of the Church back into these secular political movements, but in the end it would diminish it. The long, slow, hard – sometimes inspiring, sometimes limited – work of winning tangible improvements in the lives of the poor and the oppressed – the very real political radicalism of the Gospel – does not seem to me to sit well with ideological showboating.

The protestors like to think of their encampment as another

Tahir Square

, a boast which was empty before, but is now just in bad taste. At the least, they’ve overestimated public support for their description of the problem, and certainly their proposed solution. They hope, perhaps, that the church will fall in behind their agenda. I hope that the church, as it so often has, will prove a disappointment to revolutionaries.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.