God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  ‘It is perhaps worth noting’, writes the British historian Andrew Roberts, ‘that it was surely from the Beatitudes that Churchill took the inspiration for his famous moral for his memoirs of the Second World War: “In War; Resolution. In Defeat; Defiance. In Victory; Magnanimity. In Peace; Goodwill.”’32

  BEYOND THE BEATITUDES

  While the Beatitudes describe some of the undergirding principles of Christian civilization, Jesus says much more in the Sermon on the Mount that may have instructed Winston Churchill and informed his perspective. In fact, Churchill referred to the Sermon on the Mount as ‘the last word in ethics’.33

  The following are some of the principles Churchill may have learned from the Sermon on the Mount and allowed to shape his thoughts and actions.

  The importance of being ‘salt’ and ‘light’ in the world

  You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavour? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless.

  You are the light of the world – like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden.34

  To those listening to Jesus teaching on the hillside that day, ‘salt’ would have signified flavour, healing and preservation. Without salt, food was flat, wounds might go unhealed and decay would set in. Jesus was referring to spiritual and moral ‘salt’, the truths that give zest to civilization, health to a society and longevity to its principles.

  Winston Churchill embodied these ideas as he led Britain and the Allies during the Second World War. He was thoroughly salty. Elizabeth Nel wrote, ‘From first to last we were utterly devoted to him, not because he was prime minister but because he was himself.’35 Nel also said that she had been careful to teach her children about Churchill ‘and the things he has stood for in his long lifetime. Courage. Strength. Resolution. Steadfast loyalty. Love of country. If I can only teach them these things, I shall have done something.’36

  Churchill was a conservative in the sense of preservation – conserving what is of value. He believed that Christian civilization and the institutions that propagated it were worth keeping – even dying for. He was not a bourgeois conservative, whose sole focus is on preserving the commercial order. Rather, he was a historic conservative in the style of Edmund Burke, whose concern was not merely the preservation of the economic order but also the conservation of those deeper values and principles on which all civilization rests.

  ‘Do not let spacious plans for a new world order divert your energies from saving what is left of the old,’ he told his Minister for Works and Buildings in 1941.37 No doubt, to his own mind at least, Churchill was referring not only to the reconstruction of bombed sections of London but also to the civilization they had once symbolized.

  Jesus said that his followers are ‘the light of the world’. One of Churchill’s gravest concerns in the face of the Nazi incursion was that ‘the lights are going out’ all over Europe.38 He recognized the darkness of Nazism as a vast abyss, the pit of evil.

  Churchill sought to warn others ‘of what may easily come to pass if Civilization cannot take itself in hand and turn its back’ on the alternatives, the ‘City of Destruction’ and the ‘City of Enslavement’.39 Centuries earlier, Augustine had set before humanity the concept of the City of God, the embodiment of light. Churchill’s words echoed the stark choice between the City of God and the City of Darkness.

  God’s revealed morality and ethics are absolute, not relative

  Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not even the smallest detail of God’s law will disappear until its purpose is achieved. So if you ignore the least commandment and teach others to do the same, you will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But anyone who obeys God’s laws and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.40

  Winston Churchill has been accused of being impious. Actually, he valued morality, but disdained moralism. ‘The life and strength of our authority springs from moral and not from physical forces,’ he said in a 1903 speech.41 In fact, such morality was crucial to national endurance and survival. Morality was the broad attitude of heart and behaviour that followed the values of the highest principles for individuals and society. Moralism, on the other hand, is ‘a double standard of conduct’ in a person’s ‘private and public’ life.42 True morality should guide a nation’s foreign relations.

  On 6 July 1944– exactly one month after D-Day – Churchill left the House of Commons, where he had just reported to the members that a Nazi V-1 rocket attack had killed 2,752 of their countrymen. Those missiles forced Churchill to conduct his staff conference in the underground war rooms. Churchill left the session and headed wearily to his office, where he dictated his thoughts to Marian Holmes, one of his secretaries, in a memorandum to his chiefs of staff.

  With the carnage from the rocket attack weighing heavily on his mind, he raised the possibility of using nonlethal mustard gas, ‘from which nearly everyone recovers’, against the Germans. This strategy would be employed only if ‘it was life or death for us’ or ‘to shorten the war by a year’, saving multitudes of lives.

  Churchill’s hope was to use a form of gas that would have only a temporary effect on an enemy soldier, allowing him to be taken prisoner and out of the war.

  Then he reflected on the issue of morality regarding the use of mustard gas:

  It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.43

  To Churchill’s mind, the moral imperative was to defeat the Nazis. On this depended the survival of the civilization that could extend blessings of freedom and prosperity to the entire world. He found the moralists who objected to certain tactics to be reminiscent of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day: preoccupied with small legalisms that obscured the ‘weightier matters’.44

  Still, Churchill’s dilemma reveals the complexity and contradictions facing those in high leadership who must sort through the ethics of war and survival. It also reveals both his own struggles with moral questions and the limitations of his humanity in coming to grips with the highest ethical values and their application on the battlefield. Churchill’s position is not morally satisfying, but in the mood of the moment it addressed the contradictions between the ideal and the necessary – to his own mind at least. Here, however, Churchill’s pragmatism almost pushed him over the edge into an argument that the ends may justify the means – an attitude that does not align with Christian ethics.

  But no one could accuse Churchill of being a mere moralist. Neither could anyone reproach him for not believing in absolute morality, as revealed in the Bible. Churchill saw Moses as a historical figure who ‘received from God that remarkable code upon which the religious, moral, and social life of the nation was so securely founded’.45

  The importance of restraining anger, and its proper expressions

  You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.’ But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell… . When you are on the way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly.46

  Once, during an outbreak of tensions regarding Ireland, Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close friend of Churchill’s, were in a private and tense meeting with the Irish leader Michael Collins. The chancellor was intense in his opposition to Irish home rule, and Collins, according to Churchill, was in his most difficult m
ood, ‘full of reproaches and defiances’.47 The atmosphere was like a tinderbox awaiting a match, and an outbreak of temper might have sparked a conflagration. Here is Churchill’s account of the exchange:

  ‘You hunted me night and day,’ [Collins] exclaimed. ‘You put a price on my head.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘You are not the only one.’

  And I took from my wall the framed copy of the reward offered for my recapture by the Boers. ‘At any rate it was a good price – £5,000. Look at me – £25 dead or alive. How would you like that?’48

  After a moment, Churchill writes, Collins ‘broke into a hearty laugh [and] all his irritation vanished’.49

  Humour and restrained temper were part of Churchill’s political and diplomatic toolbox throughout his career. He counselled candidates who faced angry constituents to always ‘smile, be natural, detach yourself from the fray, never lose your temper, and the worse it gets, the more you must treat it as a puppet show’.50

  The importance of being reconciled to one’s brothers

  If you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.51

  Churchill’s battle to hold his seat in Dundee in 1922 was one of the most painful in his many years of electioneering. His opponent was Edwin Scrymgeour, a perennial adversary dating all the way back to 1908. Scrymgeour’s prime issue was Prohibition – for which Churchill had no enthusiasm. Churchill was Colonial Secretary in Prime Minister Lloyd George’s Cabinet, and he was dogged constantly by indignant suffragettes, who didn’t appreciate what they perceived to be his opposition to allowing women to vote. On top of it all, around this time he was forced into the hospital for an appendectomy.

  This time, Scrymgeour crushed Churchill by 10,000 votes. Nevertheless, Churchill was understanding towards Scrymgeour when recalling the events many years later:

  I felt no bitterness towards him. I knew that his movement represented after a fashion a strong current of moral and social revival… . He lived a life of extreme self-denial; he represented the poverty and misery of the city and its revolt against the bestial drunkenness for which it bore an evil reputation, and which I must admit I have never seen paralleled in any part of the United Kingdom.52

  Perhaps that attitude towards his ‘British brothers’ helped Churchill in the great challenge of forming and working with a coalition government as wartime prime minister. He had managed to offend all the parties and their members with whom he sat at the Cabinet table, and they him. Nevertheless, the unity that Churchill forged with his opponents was an example to the nation that helped its outspoken, philosophically diverse people pull together to defeat Hitler.

  The foundation of wholesome families that compose a healthy nation

  You have heard the law that says, ‘A man can divorce his wife by merely giving her a written notice of divorce.’ But I say that a man who divorces his wife, unless she has been unfaithful, causes her to commit adultery. And anyone who marries a divorced woman also commits adultery.53

  Churchill resonated with Jesus’ high view of marriage, for he cherished Clementine. One of his letters to her, written in 1935, was named as one of Time magazine’s Top Ten Famous Love Letters:

  My darling Clemmie, in your letter from Madras you wrote some words very dear to me, about having enriched your life. I cannot tell you what pleasure this gave me, because I always feel so overwhelmingly in your debt, if there can be accounts in love… . What it has been to me to live all these years in your heart and companionship no phrases can convey.54

  That love brought the whole family into its embrace and gave them all strength when the Churchills lost one of their children, Marigold, who died of septicaemia as a toddler in 1921. The following year, when Clementine was pregnant with Mary, Winston wrote her notes of encouragement. Decades later, Mary wrote of her childhood, ‘From the early days of his marriage to my mother, Winston had always been most attentive to their nursery world, regularly reporting its news to Clementine when she was away; now, many years on [at the news of the pregnancy], he seemed delighted to find nursery life revived.’55

  ‘My father and I evidently enjoyed each other’s company,’ Mary continues, quoting from a February 1926 note from Winston to Clementine:

  Mary is very gracious to me & spends 1/2 an hour each morning in my bed while I breakfast. Some of her comments are made in the tone & style of a woman of thirty. She is a sweet.56

  There would be hard times as Churchill’s responsibilities increased and the children grew older, but his marriage of fifty-six years endured until his death at the age of ninety.

  Churchill’s concern for his children never flagged. There would be ‘broken marriages and other tribulations’ for the family, as one newspaper report put it.57 But the Churchills were not deprived of the many happy events of family life, couched in love and lived with exuberance.

  The nature of oaths and vows

  You have also heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not break your vows; you must carry out the vows you make to the LORD.’ But I say, do not make any vows! Do not say, ‘By heaven!’ because heaven is God’s throne. And do not say, ‘By the earth!’ because the earth is his footstool. And do not say, ‘By Jerusalem!’ for Jerusalem is the city of the great King. Do not even say, ‘By my head!’ for you can’t turn one hair white or black. Just say a simple, ‘Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Anything beyond this is from the evil one.58

  As a statesman, Churchill understood the importance of trust with respect to treaties and agreements. He had a high view of the Bible, reading and meditating on it often. He tried to connect its broad principles to his own times and personal challenges. For example, in considering Pharaoh’s behaviour when Moses challenged him to free the Hebrews, Churchill was struck by the Egyptian ruler’s vacillations. ‘Great interest attaches to Pharaoh’, he writes. ‘Across the centuries we feel the modernity of his actions.’59

  Churchill saw the leader of Egypt as a cautionary example for all who would lead nations, and Pharaoh’s fluctuations were among the characteristics that attracted Churchill’s attention. ‘At first he was curious, and open to conviction’ as the plagues came in sequence and Moses kept coming at Pharaoh like a plague. Finally, Pharaoh acquiesced and declared the Hebrew slaves free to leave Egypt. But then he realized how losing this base of labourers would, in Churchill’s words, frustrate his ‘building plans’ and ‘cause considerable derangement in the economic life of his country’. Therefore, Pharaoh ‘hardened his heart and took back in the evening what he had promised in the dawn, and in the morning what he had promised the night before’.60

  Churchill thought sanctity of covenant was crucial to world peace. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1936, he said, ‘I desire to see the collective forces of the world invested with overwhelming power … all bound rigorously by the Covenant and the conventions which they own… . [Then] you have an opportunity of making a settlement which will heal the wounds of the world.’61

  The proper principles of retaliation

  You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too.62

  Churchill has been pilloried for ordering bombing attacks on German cities and especially for what some call the wanton destruction of Dresden. Yet in June 1943, as Churchill watched film footage of an intense British attack on targets in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region, he cried out to a member of the War Cabinet sitting nearby: ‘Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’63

  Three years earlier, Churchill had fallen into an argument with a Member of Parliament in the smoking room of the House of Commons. The man was pressin
g for saturation bombing against German cities to break the nation’s morale. Standing nearby, Harold Nicolson, then a Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Information, jotted down the exchange. ‘My dear sir,’ Churchill replied, ‘this is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire … to destroy German military objectives.’64

  Churchill’s objective was to wage war to the point of complete victory. However, it was to be a moral war, a just war, not one that included the ‘terrorism’ of unrestricted bombardment.65

  So what sparked the change in Churchill’s policy from 1940 to 1943?

  During a raid on 24 August 1940, German planes that were bombing military objectives on London’s outskirts strayed and released bombs on the city itself, resulting in civilian casualties. Hitler had originally ordered that London not be touched, fearing retaliation against his own cities. However, when London’s centre was bombed, Churchill assumed it marked a change in Hitler’s strategy, and he ordered the bombing of Berlin – though, initially, only forty British bombers could get through.

  Churchill knew he had to strike back in kind, for two reasons. First, non-retaliation would have caused Hitler to believe he had licence to target civilians. Second, Parliament would have questioned Churchill’s fitness to continue as wartime leader of the nation.

  When Britain struck back against Berlin, the Nazis launched an aerial blitz against British cities, and the battle was on. Churchill was encouraged by Franklin Roosevelt, who contended that the Axis powers had ‘asked for it’ and now should be bombed ‘heavily and relentlessly’.66

  The biblical world view seems to set the bar impossibly high, creating tension in our flawed, limited human understanding. Churchill may well have experienced this tension as he wrestled with decisions about the proper and necessary response to the enemy.