US Vice President JD Vance is among the critics of a controversial new art installation at Canterbury Cathedral inspired by graffiti.
The display features temporary graffiti asking questions to God about the meaning of life and the Christian faith but it has been likened to some of the unattractive scrawlings seen around British towns and cities.
Examples of the questions scrawled onto the cathedral's ancient walls are "Is illness sin?" and "Why did you create hate when love is by far more powerful?".
The Very Rev David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, defended the installation, saying: “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised.
“This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres and allows us to receive the gifts of younger people who have much to say.”
Others have disagreed with the Dean's take on it, with Vance calling it "really ugly".
"It is weird to me that these people don't see the irony of honoring 'marginalized communities' by making a beautiful historical building really ugly," he wrote on X.
Tesla owner Elon Musk called it "shameful".
The Rev Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London and chairman of the Save the Parish campaign group, told The Telegraph it was embarrassing.
“The leadership of Canterbury Cathedral may no longer have a sense of the sacred, but millions do and they have a duty to keep this a place of prayer and worship for the rest of us, not turn it into a private plaything of the elites," he said.
GB News presenter Emma Trimble said the cathedral leadership had made the sacred "profane".
"Young people want serious religion. The lack of seriousness is why young people leave or dismiss Anglicanism," she said.
"I think the enormity of the backlash against [Canterbury Cathedral] is because this graffiti epitomises the feeling that those leading the church lack firm faith. Lack pious awe, and respect for the sacred.
"Young people visit our cathedrals and find self-indulgent egos rather than Christ. The ‘Quiet Revival’ is a rebellion against this."
Former MEP Annunziata Rees-Mogg called it "illegible, unaesthetic, disrespectful nonsense from a church so desperate to be seen as progressive, its leaders spiral it into irrelevance".
