‘The testing of your faith produces perseverance’ – James 1:2-3. That may be the case, but too much testing can also result in secularism apparently. In an interview with the Beeb, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch has said that while she was ‘never that religious’ growing up though would have ‘defined myself as a Christian apologist’. She revealed, however, that all this changed in 2008 – due to Josef Fritzl.
The Tory leader said that when she discovered what Fritzl had done to his daughter Elizabeth – imprisoning and repeatedly raping her in his basement over 24 years – it changed her attitude to religion forever. Badenoch – whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister – stopped believing in God as a result, confiding to the Beeb that: ‘I couldn’t stop reading this story.’
It’s not the first time this claim has been made. Last year, Lord Ashcroft published Blue Ambition, in which he documents Badenoch’s rise through the ranks of the Conservative party. The Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Badenoch-backer Alex Burghart remarked:
That foundation was that God does not test you beyond your endurance. She read about the poor woman who’d been locked in a cellar by her father and how she prayed every day that she’d be rescued. Kemi thought about all the prayers she herself had said, often for trivial and silly things. She told me how she’d have given up every single one of those for the victim not to have experienced the horror that she did. She told me that at that moment, she thought to herself, ‘There is no God. If there was, he would have answered her prayers before answering mine.’
It’s certainly quite the revelation…
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