In October 2022, two young people from the environmental activist group, Just Stop Oil, walked into the National Gallery in London carrying tins of soup. They opened one tin and hurled it over the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting Sunflowers. The painting itself was unharmed. The seventeenth-century Italian frame was splashed. It needed some retouching.
The protestors, Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, then glued their hands to the wall and began to explain why they had acted: If fossil fuels are not rapidly phased out, the planet we pass to our children will be devastated.
At the time, headlines across the world roared in outrage. Commentators described the women as vandals, extremists, even terrorists. When the case came to trial, prosecutors argued the damage was worth up to £10,000.
Now, we have discovered, through a journalistic Freedom of Information request, that it cost the British National Gallery just £150 to restore the frame. The wall repairs and paint added another few hundred pounds.
And yet the two protestors were sentenced to three and a half years in prison between them.
Pause for a moment. Compare that to other cases of crime that cause far greater harm to human beings, yet often receive lighter punishments.
Something does not add up.
A Disproportionate Response
The legal system insisted that the precise cost of the damage was irrelevant. But if that is true, then we are forced to ask: Why such heavy sentences for a non-violent act of civil disobedience?
The answer is not that the damage was serious. It was not. Nor is it that the action risked harming anyone. The gallery was evacuated calmly and no one was injured. Instead, we have to consider a more unsettling explanation: peaceful climate protest is treated as such a threat precisely because it speaks a truth that powerful forces cannot bear.The fossil fuel economy is immensely profitable and deeply woven into our way of life. Governments talk about green transitions, but oil and gas companies continue to expand drilling, lobbying hard to protect their interests. When small groups of activists confront this reality in ways that break through public indifference – through slow marches, prayer vigils, or even throwing soup at glass – the message cuts uncomfortably close to home.
An Ecology of Protest
In a recent essay for our journal, Working Notes, Judith Russenberger, a member of Christian Climate Action, offers a helpful way to understand this. She speaks of a “healthy ecology of protest.” Just as natural ecosystems need a variety of plants and animals to thrive, so too societies need a diversity of voices, tactics, and movements to stay alive to the truth.
Some protests are quiet. Most even. Think of vigils, petitions, conversations on doorsteps. Others are loud and disruptive. They are more rare and more contentious–think of marches, sit-ins, direct actions like the soup protest. They may not all appeal to everyone. They may even irritate or offend (that is kind of the point), but together they form a kind of civic ecosystem that stops our public life from sleepwalking into dangerous consensus conclusions.Russenberger draws on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, which calls us to hear “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” Protest, she argues, is one way we can prompt ourselves towards this listening. When we are confronted with the at-first shocking scenes of a treasured artwork seemingly being destroyed, our normal logical processing is interrupted. Our business-as-usual default is challenged. And when we realise the protest has been carefully configured to avoid doing any real damage, room is made for questions that otherwise might be smothered.
Why the Harshness?
Seen in this light, the draconian sentences make more sense. They are not attempts at justice as we traditionally understand it. They are a defence mechanism generated by a system that feels threatened.
If protest is part of democracy’s healthy ecology, then punishing protestors so severely is like pouring poison into a river to silence the frogs. It tells us less about the supposed danger of the activists and more about the fragility of the powerful interests they challenge.Climate activists remind us that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with a livable planet. If that message gains traction, it could reshape economies, redirect subsidies, and disrupt profits. Far easier, from the perspective of those in charge, to paint the protestors as criminals and lock them away.
The Christian Call
For Christians, this moment poses a clear question. Jesus taught that we will be judged not by our politeness or respectability, but by whether we fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and stood with the oppressed. Today, as communities in the Global South face devastating floods, droughts, and heatwaves caused by a crisis they did least to create, silence is not an option. As our neighbours on the continent begin to grapple with the life-altering consequences of European climate collapse, it is fundamentally irrational to avoid grappling with the simple facts.
This does not mean everyone must join a protest group. But it does mean recognising the value of protest in our public life. It means supporting those who risk their freedom to speak uncomfortable truths. And it means resisting the temptation to dismiss them as troublemakers, when in fact they may be performing an essential service for democracy.
A Threat Worth Making
The soup-throwing protest at the National Gallery has been endlessly mocked. But the activists themselves asked a piercing question: What is worth more: art or life?
Of course, Sunflowers is a marvel, worthy of protection. But what about the precious lives of those already losing homes and harvests to climate chaos? What about future generations who will inherit the choices we make today? Ultimately, what hope is there for its continued survival if the very assumptions that ground our civilization are falling away?
The severe punishment of these young women – and many more – suggests that their question struck a nerve. The powers of our age do not tremble at vandalism! They tremble at the possibility that people might wake up, see through the lies, and demand change.
And that is why the ecology of protest must be defended. For without it, we risk a society that protects frames more fiercely than families, and oil profits more faithfully than God’s creation.
