Boris Johnson: Christ’s part in his downfall
Or: this time it’s Spiritual. Part 2 in the ‘Clownfall’ series
Parliament has a ‘Prayer Breakfast’?
Our Parliament? The British Parliament?
Yep, the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, to give it its full title.
It’s one of those revelations that jars in our weak-tea ears. Surely another American import that we’ve well-meaningly tried to staple ill-fittingly onto our body politic, like fixed term limits, TV debates and ‘taking the knee’? Surely an atavism from simpler times, when asking a fairy-tale father for blessings and abundances was the order of the day? Surely just…irrelevant?
Well maybe. But not in the Year of Our Lord 2022.
Because when a prominent member of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet attended this year’s NPBP, he heard words that inspired him to alter the UK’s political course. He heard the Reverend Isaac Lee — founder of both Street Pastors and the Ascension Trust — preach powerfully about the virtue of
“humility…the absence of pride and the ability to be down-to-earth and modest under all circumstances. This is Jesus in his life. Jesus came into this world to serve; to serve us, to serve humanity.”
…and going on to remind the congregation that Jesus expects his followers to imitate his humility, his service and so to live out “the story of Christ” in our own lives. Rev. Isaac praised examples of this Christian witness that had emerged across the country during the pandemic, with refrain-like repetition of the words asked by so many: “What can I do to help?”
But it seems it was the parting words that, leaving the lips of one minister, made up the mind of another:
“I want to remind us today that all of us have influence. All of us have the ability to influence and to make a difference. And we are called to serve. We are called to work together for the common good — not just for the party, not just for the denomination, but for humanity.”
Later that day, that minister stood up in the House of Commons and, directly invoking the reverend’s sermon, issued his resignation from Boris Johnson’s government, which — coming within an hour of Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s own resignation — all but finished Johnson’s premiership.
That the minister was Sajid Javid, a lapsed Muslim — and now perhaps the only politician to resign twice from the same government — is only a fraction of the curiosity. It confirms only what many of us Christians already know, that that story of Christ continues to work through individuals and society, toppling governments, bringing down the proud, as it has done since the enterprise began; even (apparent) non-believers can and do carry out its work.
It was also the juxtaposition. The Christian story had here not only brought down a government — that’s par for the course — but, arguably, brought down Britain’s first pagan Prime Minister.
What might that mean? Well, as we all know, Boris is a classicist, with the 2:1 from Oxford to prove it. He can recite Homer in ancient Greek, and presumably knows his amos from his amases, to say nothing of his amats. But as the controversies of partygate, Patersongate and Pinchergate blew up around him, so did examinations of the nature of the man himself; among them, suggestions that Johnson held more than just an intellectual oil lamp for our Greco-Roman forebears, but had actually imbibed their ways of thinking.
The historian Tom Holland (on the fantastic Rest is History podcast) presented Johnson as a “throwback” to the centuries between the Renaissance and the year 1900 or so, during which study of the ancients was essentially a “how to do politics” course for future leaders of the land.
“I think the thing that is intriguing about it is that he studied it as an example of how to get ahead. He had a properly Greek/Roman understanding of Fortuna, Tyche, chance, this great goddess who has her favourites. He genuinely, in an inchoate sense but in a sense that does seem to be authentic, saw himself as fortune’s favourite…”
The philosopher John Gray, interviewed for a (fantastic) portrait of the PM by Tom McTague, also sees Boris as a disciple of Fortuna, who implicitly rejects the linear Christian view of History’s “progress” toward a teleological endpoint. Instead he is guided by an essentially Greek, tragicomic, cyclical view of History, in which a man’s fate is decided not by a straight aim but by roulette. The wheel of Fortune.
But it’s Ed West, on his (yes, fantastic) Substack, who finally crosses the Rubicon and puts his denarii where his mouth is: Boris Johnson is “the first truly post-Christian prime minister, befitting an age of repaganisation”, though hastening to appreciate our own Fortune that “it was not Sulla nor Alexander he idolised, but Pericles, whose bust he kept in Downing Street”.
But maybe we should consult the man himself. When asked by McTague as to whether he subscribed to a pre-Christian pagan morality, Boris wafted away the question, insisting (correctly) that Christianity is “a superb ethical system” and that he identified as a “very, very bad Christian”.
Well Boris has never been anything other than transparent about his personal opinions and character so that’s that then.
Or not…
His (superbly entertaining) 2006 book The Dream of Rome adopts the mischief of a newly atheistic adolescent in pointing out the similarities between the story of Jesus Christ and another ‘son of god’ (Divi Filius) who was born in the Roman Empire, more than six decades earlier — the Emperor Caesar Augustus (p86, Harper Perennial, 2007). On whether the earlier influenced the later, Johnson then provides a masterclass in the dialectical bet-hedging that embittered Remainers would come to associate with his notorious ‘two articles’ on the eve of Brexit:
“Do you think [the gospel writers] were influenced by the idea of a son of god that had suffused the entire Roman Empire, including Judaea? Of course they were.
That is not a blasphemous suggestion — or not necessarily a blasphemous suggestion. To say that the Christmas story need not be wholly true or original is, after all, the position of most Anglican bishops. It is not fatal to Christianity, or not necessarily fatal.”
The gospel according to Boris. More Pontius Pilate than Pericles — and certainly not Paul. In fairness, he later sets out the deep distinctions between the Roman and Christian ethical worldviews but highlights the “great advantage” the Roman one had in that “their emperor-god actually existed…In the imperial cult, Augustus made a single channel, a confluence, for people’s religious and patriotic feelings.” (ibid, p99)
Do we have here an insight into Johnson’s self-image as Mundus Rex — his liberal-globalist incarnation as Mayor of Londinium, tribune of his own multi-ethnic empire? “…it was the pagan system, with emperor worship at its heart, that allowed the Romans to run Europe for so long.” (ibid, p100) If so, he does also call ahead to his later, less loved persona, acknowledging the obvious downsides to rule by a living god: “In the long run, the behaviour of some emperors was to become so disgusting that their claims to divinity looked pretty feeble.”
This wouldn’t be the last time Boris implied parity between Christian and pagan systems. When Occupy LSX set up camp around St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011, his Telegraph column sought to drive the money-haters from the temple with a rousing “In the name of God and Mammon, go!”
So Boris might be a bit more of an infidel than he claims. This however, does not mean he does not qualify as a very, very bad Christian. As Holland would say, the waters of Christianity are so deep, so immersing, that even the most flagrant pagan cannot help but swim in them. Even Julian the Apostate must have been given pause in his mission to outdo the ‘Galileans’ by ordering a massive welfare programme for the poor, as his insistence that “good works was our practice of old” fell on the bemused ears of (probably drunk) Cybelene priests (p120, Dominion, Abacus, 2020).
“What can I do to help?” — asked the Apostate.
Which takes us back to that influential sermon. Just as we all swim in Christian waters, so we can be swept under by their waves. Boris may or may not believe that it was simply Fortuna’s wheel that cut short his time in Downing Street, and that she will turn her favour toward him again in time. His amusing Latinate farewell to the House of Commons would suggest so, as would the clamouring of many in his party for his return.
But many more of us will know that it was another Revolution that overthrew Mundus Rex or if you like, that finally put down Magnus Canis; it was a Revolution that began not with a wheel, but with a Cross.
