God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  The challenge of reaching towards Jesus’ ethical ideals produces three effects in those who want to follow him. First, it makes us aware of our own flaws and failures, producing self-awareness and humility. Second, Jesus’ exhortations motivate us to keep reaching to a higher – even transcendent – quality of living. Finally, what seems an impossibly high standard makes us aware of our need for grace. Churchill, in his admiration for the Sermon on the Mount, would have known what Jesus taught about retaliation, and he may have recognized his own failure to measure up in his practical management of the war. This awareness may have helped to produce the humility that Churchill sometimes exhibited. More important, it could have made him realize how much he needed grace.

  Whatever the case, Churchill’s heart ached for many years. During his 1949 trip to the United States, someone told him about a monument to the Hiroshima victims at Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb had been tested. Churchill wondered aloud if this meant the Americans ‘had a bad conscience because the atom bomb was dropped’.67 Randolph, Churchill’s son, remarked that saturation bombing during the Second World War was ‘an equal horror’. Churchill’s eyes filled with tears as he talked about the bombing of Germany’s cities. ‘Tens of thousands of lives were extinguished in one night,’ he said. ‘Old men, old women, little children – yes, yes, little children about to be born.’68

  Thus, Churchill’s ‘impression of a future catastrophe’, which he had written about in the aftermath of the First World War, proved to be prophetic.69

  It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that war began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race… .

  It is established that henceforward whole populations will take part in war, all doing their utmost, all subjected to the fury of the enemy. It is established that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence… .

  Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.70

  The ethical treatment of enemies

  You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbour’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.71

  Churchill believed in ‘two opposite sides of human nature’. There was a place for righteous indignation or anger to defend a nation and a place for a gentle side, ready to make peace when the fighting was done. The two sides could not be ‘simultaneously engaged’.72

  Confidence in prayer

  In Matthew 6.6, Jesus teaches his disciples about prayer: ‘When you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private.’

  Though Churchill understood the importance of public prayer – such as when he ‘join[ed] fervently together’ with President Roosevelt ‘in the prayers and hymns familiar to both’ aboard the HMS Prince of Wales in 194173 – he reflected the attitude of Jesus about the privacy of personal prayer.

  But what part did personal prayer continue to play in his life? A clue is found in a letter he wrote to Clementine, on 10 August 1922, when she was pregnant with Mary. Both parents still mourned the loss of Marigold. Clementine wrote of her continuing sadness to Churchill in a previous letter. Then he answered her:

  I think a gt deal of the coming kitten & about you my sweet pet. I feel it will enrich yr life and brighten our home to have the nursery started again. I pray to God to watch over us all.74

  The treasure of true value

  Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.75

  Among the reasons Churchill was so focused on the survival of Judeo-Christian civilization were its intrinsic universal values. Of the biblical events at Mount Sinai, he observed, ‘Here Moses received from Jehovah the tables of those fundamental laws which were henceforth to be followed, with occasional lapses, by the highest forms of human society.’76 Churchill readily agreed with designating the highest civilization as Judeo-Christian. The Hebrew tribes wandering in the wilderness, though ‘indistinguishable from numberless nomadic communities, grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable’.77

  The Lord over this splendid society, said Churchill, is ‘the only God, a universal God, a God of nations’. All the values that mattered are embodied in him and arise from his holy character. He is ‘a God not only of justice, but of mercy; a God not only of self-preservation and survival, but of pity, self-sacrifice, and ineffable love’.78

  Churchill embraced these values, ‘with occasional lapses’, and believed they were worth fighting for. There is much more from the teaching of Jesus that Churchill would have incorporated into his thinking and world view. ‘I try to pursue, as it seems to me, a steady theme, and my thought as far as I can grasp it, measure it, is all of one piece.’79

  Among other things, it is clear that Churchill did not separate the principles revealed in the Bible from other areas of thought. ‘One piece’ meant there were no separate compartments in his thinking – not one for the ‘sacred’ and another for the ‘secular’.

  Churchill may have been an external ‘flying buttress’ in his relationship with the Church, but he was a serious Bible student, as his reflections and other writings and statements show. He liked to think systematically, and the teachings of Jesus were an integral part of that vast ‘one piece’ that comprised his world view.

  Judeo-Christian presuppositions shaped not only many of his responses but also his views of the conduct of civil society. In a 1949 speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Churchill repeated his conviction that ‘the flame of Christian ethics is still our highest guide’, which should be guarded, cherished, and brought into ‘perfect application’.80

  The perspective and values arising from the Sermon on the Mount, and from the Judeo-Christian world view in general, framed a quality of society that, to Churchill’s mind, no enemy should be allowed to destroy. He was ready and willing to lead the battle for the survival of that cherished civilization and its ‘certain way of life’.81

  7

  Preserving a ‘Certain Way of Life’

  Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, RADIO BROADCAST TO AMERICA AND LONDON, 16 OCTOBER 1938

  WINSTON CHURCHILL TREASURED ‘a certain way of life’ to the extent that he thought it was worth the sacrifice of one’s own life. Churchill knew the source of that cherished manner of living. It had arisen at ‘the dawn of the Christian era’.

  Thus, for Churchill the Bible was not only a book of mystical revelation; it was also an ‘operator’s manual’. Its principles spoke not just of heavenly, unseen things but also of earth and its rawest realities.

  Churchill the historian had great admiration for King Alfred, the ninth-century monarch who Churchill believed had laid the foundation in the British realm for what would emerge as ‘Christian civilization’. It was Alfred who linked biblical principles with existential practices and who connected the dots so skilfully between revelation and reason, faith and function.

  In the first volume of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill writes that King Alfred’s Book of Laws ‘attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs’. These prototypical laws, ‘continually ampli
fied by his successors’, led to the common law that has since guided Western civilization. The results in Alfred’s day were clear, especially in contrast with other societal forces. ‘The Christian culture of his Court sharply contrasted with the feckless barbarism of Viking life.’1 No doubt these contrasts were in the back of Churchill’s mind as he contemplated the viciousness of the Nazi regime.

  In studying King Alfred, Churchill wrote, ‘We are watching the birth of a nation. The result of Alfred’s work was the future mingling of Saxon and Dane in a common Christian England.’2 Alfred himself gave a clue to his vision for a biblically structured society in a missive he sent to the Bishop of Worcester:

  I would have you informed that it has come into my remembrance what wise men there formerly were among the English race, both of the sacred orders and the secular; and what happy times those were throughout the English race, and how the kings who had the government of the folk in those days obeyed God and His Ministers; and they on the one hand maintained their peace and morality and their authority within their borders, while at the same time they enlarged their territory abroad; and how they prospered both in war and wisdom, … how foreigners came to this land for wisdom and instruction.3

  Alfred’s letter to the bishop was prompted by the king’s great concern that such an understanding of Christian civilization had ‘so clean … fallen away in the English race that there were very few … who could understand their Mass-books in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English’.4

  Thus, when Churchill spoke of ‘Christian civilization’, he was not using a facile platitude for political purposes nor describing an ominous theocracy; rather, he was drawing from the example established by King Alfred’s application of biblical principles. It was this high civilization, so meticulously, tragically, and sacrificially formed, that Churchill feared would be destroyed by the Nazis. The Third Reich would be to Christian civilization what matter is to antimatter: the collision might obliterate the anti-civilization Nazis, but it might also wipe out Christian civilization in the process.

  A theocracy is a society ruled by God through his chosen leaders. Old Testament Israel was unique in that regard, and only for a portion of its history. At its best, Israel was to be an example of the blessings inherent in a God-honouring culture. Israel’s high mission as a theocracy was to display the fruits that come to a healthy society when God truly rules, and to provide a partial foreshadowing of the great day when God’s kingdom is established on earth.

  Though Churchill had high regard for Moses and for the universal authority of the law given through him, he did not see Christian civilization as a theocratic domain. He had studied the Old Testament and apprehended the significance of Israel in that context.

  Kingdoms and other forms of human government exist because humanity has fallen away from God. In human society, the default is always towards anarchy and chaos – as the history of the twentieth century in particular amply illustrates. Something must resist and restrain the downward spiral into disorder. Therefore, God institutes and permits governments.

  Even in the theocracy of ancient Israel, God mediated his rulership through humans: Moses, Aaron and the priests, the judges, and a succession of prophets. But God’s desire is that everyone be their own ‘governor’, embracing God’s principles at the core of their being. According to God’s ideal, love and grace are the natural restraints against the influx of evil and discord.

  God’s model of government is not from the external to the internal but from the inner core of the human soul to our relationships in the external world. As Jesus says, ‘A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.’5

  Edmund Burke referred to this ideal when he said that people ‘are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites’.6 Thus, when humanity rejects love and grace as natural restraints against anarchy and chaos, law becomes necessary and essential. Governments are instituted to secure the rights threatened by tyrants – whether kings, priests or mobs.

  THE CORE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

  As we survey Churchill’s speeches and writings, the specifics of what he meant by ‘Christian civilization’ become quite clear. In the previous chapter, we surveyed what the principles meant to Churchill personally, as evidenced by his writings and actions. Here, we examine what Churchill believed about the ways those principles shape civilization.

  Christian civilization rests upon the foundation of the Bible

  Churchill agreed with ‘the words of a forgotten work of Mr Gladstone [that] we rest with assurance upon “The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture”’.7

  The Bible was vital not only to civilization, but also to Churchill personally. The King James Bible, notes Darrell Holley, was Churchill’s ‘primary source of interesting illustrations, descriptive images, and stirring phrases’.8

  His knowledge of the Bible manifests itself in direct quotations, in paraphrased retellings of Biblical stories, and in his frequent, perhaps even unconscious, use of Biblical terms and phrases… . For him it is the magnum opus of Western civilization.9

  When Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were planning for a rendezvous in Egypt, Roosevelt sent a cable warning that if they met in Cairo they might be exposed to air attacks by the German Luftwaffe. Churchill’s reply to Roosevelt’s concern was simple: ‘John 14.1–4.’ If Roosevelt opened the King James Bible to John 14, he would have read these words of Jesus:

  Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

  Churchill understood Jesus’ words in personal terms. ‘The old man is very good to me’, he once remarked to Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe.

  ‘What old man?’ Fyfe asked.

  ‘God,’ Churchill replied.10

  Churchill believed the Bible to be true history, not fantasy or myth. His view of the historically literal nature of Scripture was displayed unambiguously in his essay ‘Moses: The Leader of a People’:

  We believe that the most scientific view, the most up-to-date and rationalistic conception, will find its fullest satisfaction in taking the Bible story literally, and in identifying one of the greatest of human beings [Moses] with the most decisive leap forward ever discernible in the human story… . We may be sure that all these things happened just as they are set out according to Holy Writ.11

  However, Churchill did not want squabbles over literal interpretation to block people from the Bible’s important principles. He also pondered biblical themes that very probably affected his own self-perception. Recall his idea that ‘every prophet has to go into the wilderness … [and] must serve periods of isolation and meditation.’12 Perhaps such insight from his reflections on the Bible encouraged Churchill during the periods he was exiled from public life.

  In another section of his essay, Churchill paraphrases God’s command to Moses from the burning bush.

  You cannot leave your fellow-countrymen in bondage. Death or freedom! Better the wilderness than slavery. You must go back and bring them out. Let them live among this thorn-scrub, or die if they cannot live. But no more let them be chained in the house of bondage.13

  Such words from the Scripture resonated with Churchill, and perhaps buttressed his own resolution.

  God went a good deal further. He said from the Burning Bush, now surely inside the frame of Moses, ‘I will endow you with superhuman power. There is nothing that man cannot do, if he wills it with enough resolution. Man is the epitome of the universe. All moves and exists as a result of his invincible will, which is My Will.’14

  Was Churchill perhaps unknowingly foreshadowing his ironc
lad determination to meet and beat the Nazis on the field of battle?

  Churchill may have been a humanist, but he was one in the sense of classical Christian humanism – which, unlike secular humanism, starts with God at the centre. Whatever is good in human beings is because of the indwelling presence of God.

  There is little doubt that Churchill understood that the wellsprings of Judeo-Christian civilization were both the historical experience of Israel recorded in the Old Testament and the fulfilment of its ‘types and shadows’ in the New Testament. Furthermore, Churchill believed that the history of the Jews recorded in the Old Testament pointed to a great event coming in the future.

  Many centuries were to pass before the God that spake in the Burning Bush was to manifest Himself in a new revelation, which nevertheless was the oldest of all the inspirations of the Hebrew people – as the God not only of Israel, but of all mankind who wished to serve Him; a God not only of justice, but of mercy; a God not only of self-preservation and survival, but of pity, self-sacrifice, and ineffable love.15

  Thus, Churchill concluded,

  Let the men of science and learning expand their knowledge and probe with their researches every detail of the records which have been preserved to us from these dim ages. All they will do is to fortify the grand simplicity and essential accuracy of the recorded truths which have lighted so far the pilgrimage of man.16

  Christian civilization recognizes healthy pride but rejects destructive arrogance

  In war, Resolution.

  In defeat, Defiance.

  In victory, Magnanimity.

  In peace, Goodwill.

  Churchill first proposed that this maxim be carved into a war memorial in France after the First World War – an offer that was rejected. The phrase became a centrepiece of his memoirs of the Second World War, capturing his personal attitude. For Churchill, and the civilization for which he fought, ‘the life and strength of our authority springs from moral and not physical forces.’17