“Never give in”

My intense interest in Winston Churchill began when I was a 10-year-old boy. I was an omnivorous reader, and my grandmother gave me a stack of National Geographic magazines. But I was enthralled with history, geography, and adventure, plus snakes and sharks. It was a windfall for a boy my age.

One of the magazines was the August 1965 issue, which featured a determined Winston Churchill on the cover and memorialized him soon after his death and state funeral. I was just a boy. I had no real conception of world affairs, but I was driven by an intense need to understand. Even now, more than 50 years later, I can remember the experience of reading that magazine cover story and seeing the images so abundantly displayed.

Two images struck me with strange power. One was of the massive cranes on the River Thames spontaneously bowing to the funeral barge of Sir Winston Churchill, his flag-draped coffin surrounded by naval officers. I had never imagined such a thing. The second was a photograph of the state funeral, with a special focus on a woman dressed in black, holding her purse, reflecting unspeakable respect for the dead man. I read that this woman was none other than Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, breaking precedent by attending the event as reigning monarch.

I had no categories for understanding what it all meant, but I was struck and deeply moved by the coverage of Churchill’s funeral. I also had the powerful feeling that came with realizing that our lifespans had overlapped, realizing that I was 5 years old when Churchill died. I devoured the article, including the assessment—from both sides of the Atlantic—that Winston Churchill had saved Britain, and arguably had saved Western civilization.

Since then, I have made Churchill something of a life project. You can call it an obsession or hero worship, but I will argue that 10-year-old boys (and 65-year-old men) need heroes. As a Christian theologian, I would argue further that the Bible contains the most important and eloquent passage on a proper Christian heroism in Hebrews Chapter 11, telling of men and women “of whom the world was not worthy.” A world without heroes is a dark world indeed.

You will not find Winston Churchill in the Letter to the Hebrews. In my view, he is not a hero of the Christian faith, though he did see himself as saving Christian civilization from the forces of Nazi evil. But I steadfastly argue that Churchill is a hero in the context of world history. His heroism is most evident in his ability to see, in both moral and strategic dimensions, the threat posed to civilization and human dignity by the Nazi regime headed by Adolf Hitler, and then to lead his beleaguered nation in the long but necessary fight against that tyranny.

Born the first son of the second son of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill was born with a sense of destiny, no doubt. The first duke had saved England by leading an army against the French and the Bavarians, winning the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace in 1874. The boy, dismissed as dull and neglected even by his parents, saw himself one day saving Britain yet again.

You cannot separate Churchill from the two horrifying wars that framed the 20th century. Churchill entered Parliament during the reign of Queen Victoria. He would retire as prime minister under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. His incredibly long career in public life certainly included failures of strategy, political setbacks, and lapses of judgment. He spent long years in the political wilderness, having been in high government offices until being cast out. He deserves blame for misjudgments and bad decisions, and even for what others saw as political inconsistency—perhaps most clearly seen in his decision to leave the Conservative Party and “rat” to the Liberal Party, only later to “re-rat” to the Conservatives once again. But Churchill saw his life as a long consistency in defense of Britain and Western civilization against its avowed enemies. When Britain needed him, and needed him desperately, Churchill was ready.

In recent days, Churchill has been directly criticized for being the “chief villain” of World War II. Darryl Cooper went on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued that Churchill was largely responsible for the horrifying death toll of the war. He also added at one point that Churchill “strikes me as a psychopath.”

The social media world blew up with indignation (mixed with curiosity) and speculation (mixed with nonsense). After listening to the conversation, I want to offer a few points of clarification that might be helpful.

First, we should never fear to ask historical questions, and even to question the dominant historical consensus, but serious historical arguments are not made with rhetorical glosses and off-hand suggestions. When it comes to responsibility for World War II in Europe and the mind-numbing scale of atrocities, the historical verdict is decidedly clear. For one thing, Hitler and his accomplices left a historical record, often by their own hand, that make this judgment clear. Just consider Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the proceedings of the Wannsee Conference.

Second, attention to a simple timeline and historical detail reminds us that, for example, Winston Churchill was not the prime minister of Great Britain when the British government declared, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, that a state of war then existed between Britain and Germany. Neville Chamberlain was then prime minister. And you cannot plausibly argue that Chamberlain was a warmonger. He is remembered in history for his failed attempt to placate and appease Hitler. Britain turned to Churchill when the nation had virtually no choice.

Third, the turn to Churchill was made by the Conservative Party leadership, largely because he was the only man the Conservatives could choose who the Labour Party in opposition would accept. Britain needed a united government in its moment of greatest peril and Churchill was the indispensable man. All this came after World War I and his “wilderness years.” The fact that Churchill was seen then—even then—as the singular uniting figure of national leadership must tell us something.

Fourth, Churchill had been watching and warning about Hitler for years but was dismissed by Britain’s political class. Churchill did not convince the political class that he was right—Adolf Hitler did. To call Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II is morally obscene and historically wretched. It is a claim so far-fetched that it staggers the imagination. It also raises the question of what moral perspective is revealed to be at work here. It cannot be healthy.

Fifth, the passage of time has filled in many gaps in our knowledge. We now have a mountain of historical documentation and evidence. Some of this evidence has certainly called into question some of the decisions and strategies for which Churchill and other Allied leaders are accountable. What has not changed, but has only been overwhelmingly affirmed, is that Churchill’s personal leadership in the war, right down to his spoken words, was remembered by his nation as the decisive force that saw them through England’s darkest days.

Finally, Churchill turned out to be right about the Soviet Union even as he was right about Nazi Germany. That the leadership of both major parties in Britain now recognize this fact speaks volumes. The Cold War was no more avoidable than World War II, and Josef Stalin made that clear even before the world war had ended.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of the most famous intellectuals of the 20th century and a leading member of an academic collective not generally inclined to champion conservative politicians, remembered after the war that Churchill was “an orator of prodigious powers, the savior of his country, a legendary hero who belongs to myth as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time.”

There have been efforts to recast Churchill. One of the most influential was Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, published in 2008. In that book, Buchanan makes several powerful and truthful assessments about imperial overreach and American temptations on the global scene. What he does not do, in my judgment, is come close to a plausible explanation of how Hitler could have been appeased short of the conquest of Europe and beyond.

In the verdict of history, one of the clues to observe is when opposing forces come to a common judgment. The judgment about Churchill’s greatness came not only from his political allies but also from his political enemies. How rare is that?

I go back to being a 10-year-old boy who read that issue of National Geographic. I saw that the queen and the dockworkers knew that Churchill had saved Western civilization. As an older man who still wants to see Western civilization preserved, I offer no apologies for my admiration of Winston Churchill. Those who know me, or visit my personal library, figured that out long ago. As Churchill famously told the boys of his alma mater, Harrow School: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

I stand by his advice.

Editor’s note: Here is Dr. Mohler’s video response to this controversy: