God and Churchill HB
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Christian civilization uses wealth and strength to serve, not to master
In a radio broadcast on 21 March 1943, Churchill included his own homily from the Old Testament as he made the point that the government should be the servant, not the master, of society. ‘In the Bible,’ he said, ‘the Shunammite acted out of kindness and not for personal gain.’18 Churchill was referring to a story in 2 Kings 4 in which a woman provides food and lodging for the prophet Elisha. The woman of Shunem was a prominent person, probably more affluent than her neighbours. Churchill observed that the world’s wealthier nations, some of which constituted Christian civilization, had a responsibility to be a servant to other societies.
He also considered that servanthood should guide the formation of foreign policy. ‘Churchill believed firmly’, writes Richard Langworth, ‘that the Empire had been a boon to the native peoples within it.’19 However, as Kenneth Thompson notes, ‘Churchill was too clear-eyed and self-critical for the moral ambiguities of imperialism to escape him.’20 Thus, as early as 1901, Churchill recognized that British colonial policy was good only as long as it was based on ‘a higher reason … a moral force – the Divine foundation of earthly power – which, as the human race advances, will more and more strengthen and protect those who enjoy it’.21
In spite of every calumny and lie uttered or printed, the truth comes to the top, and it is known alike by peoples and by rulers that on the whole British influence is healthy and kindly, and makes for the general happiness and welfare of mankind.
And we shall make a fatal bargain if we allow the moral force which this country has so long exerted, to become diminished, or perhaps even destroyed.22
Call him idealistic or just plain wrong about colonial perceptions of the British presence in their societies, but Churchill spoke an important caution to all the colonial powers in that age of empire. A Christian nation should have a different approach to colonial policy: one of service, not mastery. Though much of what Churchill said might be considered politically incorrect today, he emphasized a principle that nonetheless ought to guide foreign policy and international relations – namely, that wealthier, more powerful nations should see themselves as serving the global community.
In his mind, Churchill’s vision of the servant role that is ideally characteristic of a Christian society applied to the bloody struggles of lonely Britain against the Nazis before the Atlantic Alliance took shape. ‘Bearing ourselves humbly before God,’ he said, ‘but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose … [we] are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone.’23
Christian civilization values and promotes the discipline of self-restraint, making true liberty possible
‘It is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination,’ Churchill wrote in 1897.24 He contrasted the restraining element in Christianity with Islam, which ‘increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance’.25
Churchill would have been familiar with a passage from Edmund Burke, who (though he did not use the term) describes qualities of Christian civilization in which Churchill believed so passionately:
What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.26
Christian civilization understands the importance of the Golden Rule in the formation of government policy
After France capitulated to Germany in 1940, leaving Britain alone to withstand Hitler and the Nazis, Churchill saw the importance of the principles laid down in the Golden Rule. In a Bastille Day broadcast on 14 July 1940, he said, ‘When you have a friend and comrade at whose side you have faced tremendous struggles, and your friend is smitten down by a stunning blow, … you need not bear malice because of your friend’s cries of delirium and gestures of agony. You must not add to his pain; you must work for his recovery.’27
In an ultimate test of that principle, Churchill extended the same attitude towards the German people during the reconstruction of their devastated land after Hitler’s defeat. There is always an element of pragmatism in the Golden Rule because it focuses on reciprocal behaviours. Jesus was as much a realist as he was a visionary. The theme of sowing and reaping is both implied and overtly stated in the Scriptures. Thus, in his desire to help post-war Germany, Churchill practised principled pragmatism, an important component of Christian civilization.
Christian civilization recognizes the Ten Commandments as the basis of all morality and law
Again we recall Churchill’s statement from 1903: ‘The life and strength of our authority springs from moral and not physical forces.’28 That conviction only deepened through his later life experiences.
Churchill clearly knew the source of all ethical laws and universal values. In writing about Moses’ leadership, Churchill calls him ‘the supreme law-giver, who received from God that remarkable code upon which the religious, moral, and social life of the nation was so securely founded’.29
Christian civilization fosters true liberty of belief and practice
Churchill had the opportunity to engage with non-Christian belief systems throughout his life. During the time he served in North Africa, he observed the Muslim faith first-hand. In his younger days, perhaps influenced by the romanticism of Lawrence of Arabia, Churchill seemed enthusiastic about Islamic culture. In 1907, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, who later married Churchill’s brother, Jack, wrote to Churchill, expressing her concern. ‘Please don’t become converted to Islam,’ she pleaded. ‘Your conversion might be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed.’30
In Churchill and the Islamic World, Warren Dockter concludes:
Churchill’s fascination with Islam proved only to be aesthetic and passing. His knowledge of Islam was largely predicated on Victorian notions, which heavily romanticized the nomadic lifestyle and honour culture of the Bedouin desert tribes. As a result, Churchill never really acquired a deeper understanding of Islam.31
In his 1899 account of the Sudan War, entitled The River War, Churchill expressed his views of Islam in terms that some have seized upon in our day:
Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries… . A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity… . Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.32
Churchill emphasized that, without the union of reason and spirituality, destructive fanaticism could result from any religious system – even Christianity.
Since the events of September 11, 2001, Churchill’s views of Islam, especially those expressed in The River War, are often taken out of context and used by those who see all Muslims, without regard, as evil. The brutality of emerging Islamic terror movements has reinforced this simplistic conclusion. However, reflecting the world view of Christian civilization, Churchill sought to see the human beings within the movement, not merely the movement itself. He drew a careful distinction between fanatical Muslims and peaceful Muslims, albeit in terms that today may appear rather patrician and condescending: ‘Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.’33
For Churchill, the charity of Christian civilization meant justice and fairness, freedom and equa
lity. There was no official policy by which the British sought to force people into Christianity. Hinduism continued to flourish in India, and mosques continued to dot the landscapes of the Middle East and Africa. Christian missionaries were free to propagate their faith, but the people in the far-flung reaches of the British Empire were also free to reject Christianity. There was no subjugation based on religious affiliation, no special tax imposed on non-believers, and certainly no executions for those who followed other faiths. Such would be the antithesis of Christian civilization.
Christian civilization promotes the importance of forgiveness
Upon becoming prime minister, Churchill could have sought revenge against those who had mistreated him. Like Hitler, he could have sought to arrest those who were opposed to his leadership of the nation. He could no doubt have used the army or British Secret Service to murder those people, just as Hitler had done at the end of June 1934. As prime minister, Churchill could have labelled all Germans as evil. However, throughout the Second World War, he was determined to distinguish between the German people in general and the Nazis.
In his Commentary review of Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941, Spencer Warren writes:
Churchill’s generosity was displayed in his attitude toward Germany. Even when the German threat to Britain was at its greatest, he spoke of the need for a magnanimous peace after what he was sure would be Britain’s final victory. Only the Nazis, he once commented, ‘would be made to suffer for their misdeeds.’ His hatred of the ‘Huns,’ as he called the Germans in his (usual) fighting mood, was only ‘professional.’34
Christian civilization celebrates and encourages true courage, not mere bravado
In the Judeo-Christian world view, courage results from faith in God and in oneself as a servant of God and humanity. As God said to Joshua just before the nation of Israel crossed the Jordan River to take possession of the Promised Land: ‘This is my command – be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.’35
Bravado is different from genuine courage. Courage comes from humility – the recognition that we draw our strength from a power beyond ourselves. Bravado is merely the bluster and arrogance of pride. Goliath blazed with bravado. The youngster David, aware of his limitations, trusted God and went forward in courage.
As a young man, Churchill saw much of the bravado of his age. Barbara Tuchman describes the world view that flourished in Europe prior to the First World War.
Since [the end of] the Napoleonic wars, the industrial and scientific revolutions had transformed the world… . Industrial society gave man new powers and new scope while at the same time building up new pressures… . Science gave man new welfare and new horizons while it took away belief in God and certainty in a scheme of things he knew… . Society at the turn of the century was not so much decaying as bursting with new tensions and accumulated energies.36
The Britain of Churchill’s early years ‘had an air of careless supremacy’ and a mindset of ‘splendid isolation’, writes Tuchman. The British ‘felt no need of allies and had no friends’.37 It was this attitude of pride and self-sufficiency, which the British seemed to want to slip back into after the First World War, that Churchill had to work so strenuously to overcome during the 1930s as war approached once more.
Churchill himself saw and experienced first-hand the bravado flourishing in Germany during his trips in 1906 and 1919 to observe the German military.
In the Review which preceded the manoeuvres 50,000 horse, foot and artillery marched past the Emperor and his galaxy of kings and princes… . The very atmosphere was pervaded by a sense of inexhaustible and exuberant manhood and deadly panoply. The glories of this world and force abounding could not present a more formidable, and even stupefying, manifestation.38
Meanwhile, in Austria-Hungary, whose empire of façades would provide the detonation for the First World War, there was, in the words of the historian and Vienna native Frederic Morton, ‘a nervous splendour’.39 In the summer of 1888, as Winston Churchill was entering the adventures of adolescence and Adolf Hitler was about to be conceived, ‘Vienna, that scrollworked bastion, smoldered with more demons of the future than the most forward-minded cities of the West. Its officials were obsessed with the need to continue a great Imperial image.’40
That obsession meant much bravado, which created tension within the royal family. Emperor Franz Joseph was focused on readying his son, Rudolf, to transport the Austro-Hungarian Empire into the twentieth century. But whereas young Rudolf had developed a vision for reform, his father’s solution to the challenges facing the empire was more often to table the discussion or create ‘a prettier façade to cover the problem’.41
But the cracks in the façades were becoming too vast for mere cosmetics. ‘Other empires were approaching modern greatness much faster than Austria,’42 writes Frederic Morton. To the east, Russia was expanding; in the south, Italy had taken back Lombardy and Venice; to the north and west, Kaiser Wilhelm was dreaming of his Reich and Britain was proving her mastery of the seas. And then there was France, whose magnificent capital city, Paris, bore the ‘dynamic shadow’ of General Boulanger – ‘The Man on Horseback’ who ‘seemed fated to turn the Third Republic into a united phalanx under his dictatorship’.43
In the end, all the bravado devolved into the trench-scarred battlefields of the Great War.
By the time Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he had seen enough of bravado – especially that which was displayed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels at their grand rallies. It would take real courage to win the battle for Christian civilization. Churchill was certainly not thumping his chest when, just after his appointment as prime minister, he said, ‘We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind … many, many long months of struggle and suffering.’ His solution was to wage war all the way to victory, ‘with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us’.44
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS: A CHALLENGE TO JUDEO-CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION
By the blessing of God, and with the support of his late-arriving allies, Churchill pressed on to victory. Christian civilization would live to face its next challenge. That test would come early and subtly in the swirl of legal complexities surrounding the Nuremberg trials of the captured Nazi leaders who had worked the levers of the German war machine.
One way to discern what Churchill meant by ‘Christian civilization’ and its ‘certain way of life’ is to study the consensus in the West, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regarding morality, ethics and law – all core components of a civilization. We see these issues writ large in the efforts of the victorious Allies to provide a fair trial for Nazi war criminals. That there would be concern for justice and fairness for the most monstrous people of the twentieth century is a testimony to Judeo-Christian values.
At Yalta, in 1945, Churchill initially told Roosevelt and Stalin that the most appropriate resolution to the problem was simple – summary executions. Roosevelt seemed to agree, but as the trials neared, the American Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, ‘opposed the idea of summary executions and argued for a trial that would reflect democratic notions of justice, in contrast to the tyranny and mayhem the world had just witnessed’.45 A new consensus continued to grow among those who were thinking seriously about the possibility of the trials and what they might look like.
Gordon Dean, who later became press secretary for the Nuremberg trials, prepared a report for the Overseas Section of the Office of War Information detailing why summary executions should not be the outcome. One of the items captured the presuppositional world view of true Christian civilization regarding justice:
The concept that guilt should be fairly ascertained is so embedded in the charters of the countries of the civilized that we cannot afford to abandon it here simply because the guilt is great. We fought a war because of what other powers stooped to. Now that victory is here we must
not allow ourselves to stoop to their level. In short, we want a just judgment.46
Furthermore, ‘summary execution … would only result in the world’s forgetting of their major sins, and these sins must never be forgotten.’47
The whole business must have presented awkward challenges to US Army Colonel Burton Andrus, the commandant of the prison that housed Hermann Goering, chief of Hitler’s air force; Hans Frank, the ‘Jew butcher of Poland’; ‘gas chamber expert’ Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff for the German High Command; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi foreign minister; Alfred Rosenberg, who helped plan the extermination of the Nazis’ opponents; and other Nazis.
It must have been extremely difficult for Colonel Andrus to exert the discipline and restraint of a civilized man when he first faced the perpetrators of some of the worst inhumanity seen on the stage of history to that point. When Andrus’s army unit had driven through defeated territories in Germany, he had seen first-hand the instruments of their terror. In a letter, Andrus wrote, ‘Many of their infernal devices have slaughtered innocent maidens, helpless widows, and defenceless orphans. They are making war on the Christian religion and all it stands for.’48
Yet, in his direct encounters with the men who had plotted and carried out those atrocities, Andrus wanted to reflect the principles of the very Christian civilization they had sought to destroy. Andrus told the prisoners: ‘Be informed that the considerate treatment you receive here is not because you merit it, but because anything less would be unbecoming to us.’49
Churchill eventually concluded that the Nuremberg trials were justified. In a speech to the House of Commons in November 1946, he called them ‘a purgative’.50
Most of the crimes against civilization and humanity that were exposed in the Nuremberg trials arose from the ‘perverted science’ Churchill had warned about in 1940. However, the twisting and corruption of science by the Nazis was the outgrowth of theories that had been developing for more than a century.