Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently blasted church leaders in England for failing to sufficiently address a spiritual void that has persisted in the nation, where issues such as obesity rates have surged. According to Johnson, there is a deeper spiritual emptiness plaguing the nation that the church should step in to fill.
“You talk about living bread of spiritual sustenance, well, it’s not being provided by the blooming church, I can tell you that much,” Johnson said, before describing the U.K. as the “land of fatsoes,” calling out church leaders for not doing more to promote an enriching lifestyle.
“When I was a kid, it was very rare for there to be a fatso in the class,” Johnson added. “Now they’re all fatsoes, and I’d be shot for saying they’re fatsoes, but that’s the truth,” he added, attributing much of this shift to children “sitting on screens and being told that it’s all too dangerous to go outside.”
Furthermore, Johnson directly called out the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, suggesting, “Instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury balling on about slavery reparations, he should ask himself why people in this country are so bloody fat.”
Arguing that people will turn to self-indulgence of all forms when left without connection to something greater than themselves, Johnson said the clergy should seek to mitigate “what is obviously an aching spiritual void in people’s lives, that drives them to gorge themselves.”
The Christian Tribune reported on other criticism toward the state of Christianity in the U.K. when Catholic priest Calvin Robinson gave a dire warning to the United States, urging American followers of Christ to stand firm behind their values and replicate what has occurred in Europe. “Please don’t do what we did,” he said during a recent interview. “Please don’t just sit back and let the liberals deteriorate the rest of everything that you know and love,” he added.
“We’re starting to see the bad fruits of that. And so, without our Christian moral compass, without our Christian values, without our Christian ethics, without any of that, we are grasping at straws. And this is why we’re seeing some woke ideologies temporarily take the place of what used to be Christian,” he continued.
Criticizing the Church of England, he said, “The Church of England has become very liberal in terms of divorce, sex outside marriage, same-sex relationships, transgenderism. And every time the Church tries to be more inclusive, it actually becomes more exclusive to Christianity and to Christian values, and more inclusive to worldly values and just further plummets that downward trajectory.”
“These kinds of trends are happening in the States, too, I think,” he noted. “Be careful. American culture is a fantastic culture. Hold on to it, promote it, encourage it. If you want to become multicultural and let other cultures in, that’s something you have to consider. But do not give it up to the detriment of your own.”
Featured image credit: U.K. Prime Minister, OGL 3 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johnson_signed_Brexit_Withdrawal_Agreement.jpg