What was God’s involvement with our great wartime leader?
‘I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.’
So said Winston Churchill, our great wartime Prime Minister, in his ‘Their finest hour’ speech on 18 June 1940. But this was far from the only time he spoke about Christianity and ‘Christian civilisation.’ Here are some other examples. In an article in The Strand magazine in 1931 he wrote of preserving ‘humane, enlightened Christian society.’ As he contemplated the defence of London during the Blitz he referred to ‘this strong City of refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilisation’. In his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of 1946 he identified Communism as constituting ‘a growing challenge to Christian civilisation’.
So what exactly was the great hero’s view of God and of Christianity? This is investigated in a new book, God and Churchill, authored by his great-grandson Jonathan Sandys and former White House aide Wallace Henley. They bring into focus the spiritual aspect of Churchill’s life, obviously present but often neglected by secular biographers. It would be difficult to defend the idea that Churchill was a clear-cut Christian. He had glaring faults. He could be spiteful, insensitive and unpredictable. He was not even a regular church-goer. But the book identifies him as a ‘Christian humanist’ and sees him as a 20th-century equivalent to King Cyrus, God’s appointed deliverer.
Destiny and foresight
First of all, Churchill had a great sense of destiny. A friend from schooldays at Harrow recalled a conversation with Churchill, aged 16, one summer evening in 1891. Quite distinctly and without hubris as they discussed their futures, Churchill commented: ‘This country will be subjected, somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London, and I shall save London and England from disaster.’ In the light of subsequent events in WWII this is striking.
His foresight was notable throughout his life. When he was in his 30s his friend Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Prime Minister Asquith, wrote that her father was ‘deeply impressed’ by Churchill’s forecast of the beginning of the First World War, a prediction which was ‘uncanny in its exactitude’. She later wrote: ‘Once again Winston’s daemon was telling him things.’
Elizabeth Everest
Churchill’s parents, Lord Randolph and Lady Jennie, were rather immoral high-flyers who inhabited ‘society’ and by modern standards woefully neglected their boy. The greatest friend and source of stability in Churchill’s early life was his nanny, Elizabeth Everest. It is likely that through her – he called her ‘woomany’ – that he came to have a deep respect for the Bible and for Christian faith. She was ‘low church’ and wanted no part of the ‘popish trappings’ in the Anglican Church.
The writer Stephen Mansfield says: ‘But she was also a passionate woman of prayer and she taught Winston well. She helped him to memorise his first Scriptures, knelt with him daily as he recited his prayers and explained the world to him in distinctly Christian terms.’ He often paraphrased or quoted biblical passages in his speeches. She, not his parents, visited him when he was away at boarding school. She was the one to whom he poured out his child’s heart. He remained a devoted friend to her until her death in 1895.
Prayer
This regard for God which Elizabeth Everest taught him spilled over into his life. In particular he learned to pray, especially when he faced trouble and danger.
Having hidden on a train after escaping from prison in South Africa during the Boer War, he had to get off, knowing it would be searched. Finding himself in open country, he was in desperate need of help. Seeing the lights of a kraal some distance away, he walked towards what turned out to be a mining village. But, overcome with fear of being handed over to the authorities, he stopped and backed away. He didn’t know where to turn.
This is how he records what he did next: ‘I found no comfort in any philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease… They seemed only fair-weather friends. I realized with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that Higher Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are prone to admit, I could never succeed. I prayed long and earnestly for help and guidance. My prayer, as it seems to me, was swiftly and wonderfully answered. Suddenly, without the slightest reason, all my doubts disappeared. It was certainly by no process of logic that they all dispelled. I felt quite clear that I would go to the Kaffir kraal.’ He proceeded and knocked on a door. To his astonishment he was met by the only Englishman for miles, John Howard, who hid him and later enabled him to get out into Portuguese territory and safety. This escape made him a hero in the eyes of the British public.
He took part in conflicts in India, the Sudan and in the trenches of WWI. He wrote: ‘I found that, whatever I might think and argue, I did not hesitate to ask for special protection when about to come under the fire of the enemy: nor to feel grateful when I got home safe to tea.’
Wilderness years
During the 1930s Churchill was out of favour and in the political wilderness. It was in these years that he warned repeatedly of German rearmament and the great dangers of appeasement. It was also at this time he studied the leadership of Moses. ‘Every prophet has to come from civilisation’, he wrote, ‘but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.’
The Sermon on the Mount influenced him. Andrew Roberts writes: ‘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.”’
Vision for society
Out of such thoughtful periods Churchill’s vision of Christian civilisation emerged. He saw it as a civilisation which rested on the Bible. ‘For him’, writes Darrell Holly, ‘it is the magnum opus of Western civilisation.’ Unlike the ‘perverted science’ of social Darwinism which shaped Hitler’s Germany, such a civilisation would use wealth and strength to serve, not to master. It would promote the discipline of self-restraint as making true liberty possible. It would emphasise the importance of forgiveness and celebrate true courage rather than empty celebrity. In short, Churchill was driven by a moral vision for society.
Only short-term pragmatism seems to satisfy today’s postmodern secular electorate and cynical media. But there is wisdom in calling both our nation and politicians back to the richness of Churchill’s understanding of life and the world.
JEB
God and Churchill by Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley. SPCK. 268 pages £9.99 ISBN 978 0 281 075 393
