Duty and Destiny

The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill

Gary Scott Smith

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461931
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A nuanced portrait of a great historical figure considered everything from a "God-haunted man" to a "stalwart nonbeliever"

What did faith mean to Winston Churchill?

Churchill was far from transparent about his religious beliefs and never regularly attended church services as an adult, even considering himself "not a pillar of the church but a buttress, " in the sense that he supported it "from the outside." But Gary Scott Smith assembles pieces of Churchill's life and words to convey the profound sense of duty and destiny, partly inspired by his religious convictions, that undergirded his outlook. Reflecting on becoming prime minister in 1940, he wrote, "It felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." In a similarly grand fashion, he described opposing the Nazis—and later the Soviets—as a struggle between light and darkness, driven by the duty to preserve "humane, enlightened, Christian society."

Though Churchill harbored intellectual doubts about Christianity throughout his life, he nevertheless valued it greatly and drew on its resources, especially in the crucible of war. In Duty and Destiny, Smith unpacks Churchill's paradoxical religious views and carefully analyzes the complexities of his legacy. This thorough examination of Churchill's religious life provides a new narrative structure to make sense of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century.

1

COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF CHURCHILL’S FAITH

Shortly before a battle against the Sudanese army near Omdurman in Sudan on September 2, 1898, Churchill, serving in the British cavalry, wrote to his mother, “I have faith in my luck.”¹ If he died, Churchill added, she should look to the “consolations of philosophy and reflect on the utter insignificance of human beings…. I assure you I do not flinch, though I do not accept the Christian or another form of religious belief.” He declared, “I have plenty of faith—in what I do not know—that I shall not be hurt.”² A mere fourteen months later, while working as a correspondent in South Africa covering the Anglo-Boer War, Churchill escaped from a Boer prison and was hidden by the one English family within twenty miles on his route to safety. This experience, he later explained, led him to think that philosophical ideas provided no comfort. “I realized,” he wrote, “that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects … 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.”³

Churchill rarely attended church as an adult or engaged in private spiritual activities, but he helped plan a worship service on the Prince of Wales, which was anchored off the coast of Newfoundland, on Sunday, August 10, 1941, when he and Franklin Roosevelt met to devise the Atlantic Charter. Churchill chose the hymns and prayers and told the British people how meaningful the service was to him. “We sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’” he declared, “and indeed I felt that … we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded from on high.”⁴

Churchill often professed uncertainty about whether an afterlife existed, but he seemed very concerned that he would someday have to justify before God his role in the dropping of two atom bombs on Japan in August 1945. For example, in a May 1946 conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Churchill said he “expected that he would have to account to God … for the decision” to drop the atomic bombs, which killed “women and children in such numbers…. God would ask him why he had done this and he would reply he had seen the terrors of war.” Regardless of what the personal consequences might be, Churchill believed that “he had done what was right,” and he welcomed “a chance to be judged in the light of [God’s] omnipotent knowledge.”⁵

These and many other episodes in Churchill’s life indicate that his religious views can be interpreted in a variety of ways. By selectively appropriating his own statements about religion and the comments friends, acquaintances, and colleagues made about what he believed, scholars have indeed assessed Churchill’s faith very differently. My meticulous examination of Churchill’s articles, books, and letters and the testimony of those who knew him best lead me to conclude that Churchill was not a deist, an agnostic, an atheist, or a Christian. Too much evidence contradicts both of the extreme claims—that he was an unbeliever or an orthodox Christian. Churchill believed that God created and controlled the universe and cared about humanity. Churchill valued the church as an institution, although whether he did so for personal or political reasons is unclear. He also insisted that Christian civilization must be preserved against fascist, Communist, and secular assaults, and he praised biblical morality. No evidence suggests, however, that Churchill believed that Jesus was God or accepted Christ as his personal savior, an important affirmation for Christians. Chapter 9 provides more detailed analysis of Churchill’s views of major Christian doctrines.

The difficulty of explaining Churchill’s religion can be seen by the many contradictory opinions expressed on the subject by the army of Churchill biographers. Perhaps only the faith of Abraham Lincoln has produced such a wide range of competing interpretations. Most scholars have paid scant attention to Churchill’s religious convictions or practices, assuming that they had little impact on his life. Many political scientists and historians contend that religious beliefs, even when deeply held, have only a minor influence on the lives of political leaders, who are driven primarily by personal ambition, party platforms, campaign promises, and pragmatic considerations. Faith may help shape politicians’ character, but it has little effect on their policies and programs. Even most scholars who consider religious views and values important in the lives of politicians downplay the role of faith in Churchill’s life because of his explicitly expressed skepticism during his early twenties, his obvious lack of piety, and the dearth of testimony from him, family, friends, or associates that Christianity was meaningful to him. When Churchill did comment on his own faith, his statements were often ambiguous. He frequently quoted approvingly nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s statement that “all sensible men are of the same religion” and his retort, when pressed to explain its nature, that “sensible men never say.”⁶

“Not a Religious Man”

Most pundits and popularizers agree that Churchill was not a deeply committed Christian or religiously devout. Churchill’s leading biographers argue that he was “not a religious man.”⁷ Some go further, asserting that he was not a Christian;⁸ they classify him as a deist,⁹ an “optimistic agnostic,”¹⁰ or an atheist.¹¹ Paul Johnson contends that Churchill was “a lifelong freethinker and a critic of organized religion (though he always conformed outwardly enough to avoid the label ‘atheist,’ which might have been politically damaging).”¹² Churchill was a “nominal member of the Church of England,” Roy Jenkins asserts, who was “very detached” in both belief and practice. He possessed only “a vague faith in a supreme being.”¹³ According to Piers Brendon, “Churchill had misty notions about providence, especially where his own destiny was concerned,” but “he had no real belief in the Christian dispensation, no faith in God, no hope of heaven. Death was the end and he did not fear it.”¹⁴

Although Churchill emphasized that his antireligious phase in his twenties was short, Richard Toye maintains, “his belief in conventional Christianity never recovered.”¹⁵ Norman Rose agrees that Churchill “never fully retreated from the agnostic-atheistic state” he passed through as a young man. Like many other intellectuals of his generation, Churchill wanted to reconcile religion with secular rationalism. Jonathan Rose argues that Churchill opportunistically adopted various “religious or irreligious beliefs that maximized human happiness, however inconsistent they might be.” His flippancy when he discussed religion irritated South African Prime Minister and military leader Jan Christian Smuts, a committed Christian, who protested that Churchill “never appealed to ‘religious motives’ for his actions.”¹⁶

Not a Conventional Christian

Some friends and associates insisted that Churchill was not a conventional Christian. His private secretary Phyllis Moir wrote that Churchill has “no natural faith, no instinctive piety. Rather his own successes induce in him a feeling of awe, of reverence and gratitude toward the Providence that has treated him so kindly and guarded him so well.”¹⁷ Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 to 1961, contended that Churchill “had a real belief in Providence,” but he believed in a God who had “a special care for the values of the British people.” His conviction “was utterly sincere, but not really at all linked” with “the Christian faith and the life which rests on it.”¹⁸

“On any strict reckoning,” writes Paul Addison, “Churchill was no Christian.” He always spoke respectfully about the Church of England, “but Churchill paid tribute to Christianity as an outsider…. He made no attempt to conceal his lack of personal conviction.” Guided by reason, “Churchill was a humanist of sombre outlook.”¹⁹ Addison further argues that “For orthodox religion, Churchill substituted a secular belief in historical progress, with a strong emphasis on the civilising mission of the British and the British Empire. This was accompanied by a mystical faith, alternating with cynicism and depression, in the workings of Providence.”²⁰ “Churchill’s lack of Christian conviction,” Addison asserts, “divorced him from the Anglican tone of the governing class between the wars. But possibly his God was closer … to the God of the English people. The Christian gospel taught that Jesus was the saviour of all mankind, but it was only common sense to suppose that God was an Englishman.” This faith may have “brought Churchill and the [British] people together in 1940.” “Churchill’s leadership,” Addison avows, “was indeed barely and nominally Christian. But he belonged to an era of secularised religion in which the doctrines of liberalism, socialism and imperialism were all bathed in the afterglow of a Christian sunset.”²¹

Andrew Roberts concurs that “Churchill had no belief in any revealed religion,” but he stresses that he regularly referred to God in his World War II speeches. “Central to many key decisions in his life” was “the belief that Britain and her Empire were not just political entities but also spiritual ones; imperialism was in effect a substitute for religion…. In the absence of Christian faith, therefore, the British Empire became in a sense Churchill’s creed.”²² David Jay Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig contend similarly that “Churchill had no real religious faith in the traditional meaning of the word. His worldview was shaped not by the revelations of a supreme being but by his belief in the prevailing and everlasting civilizing mission of the British Empire.”²³

Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, Lady Soames, agreed that her father “was not religious in a conventional sense—and certainly no regular churchgoer.” However, “he had a strong underlying belief in a providential God.” Because of the many hazards and dangers he experienced—“the illnesses and accidents he suffered in his youth, the numerous close encounters with death in his soldier-of-fortune days—it is hard not to see a guiding and a guarding hand, and he himself felt this element increasingly.”²⁴ Numerous scholars highlight the incongruity between Churchill’s lack of orthodoxy and his belief that he was divinely selected and protected to carry out a great mission. Every time he “survived a bullet or a bomb,” John Pearson contends, Churchill’s faith that he was “chosen” was strengthened. Churchill “was a firm agnostic” who nevertheless “believed in destiny,” which gave him a purpose, allegedly saved him from death numerous times, and supplied a sense of hope.²⁵

“Historians and biographers of Churchill, who concur on little else about him,” Roberts states, all agree that in his early to midtwenties “Churchill rejected Christianity altogether…. When Chaim Weizmann, the founder of the state of Israel, said that ‘Men like [Arthur] Balfour, Churchill, and [David] Lloyd George, were deeply religious, and believed in the Bible,’ he could not have been more wrong as far as Churchill was concerned.” Lord Moran, Churchill’s private physician, declared, “King and country, in that order, that’s about the only religion Winston has.”²⁶

Churchill, Maurice Cowling asserts, “was a pessimist with roots in Darwinism, Science, and the rationalistic enlightenment” of English historian Edward Gibbon, Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, and Scottish philosopher William Winwood Reade. “There is no reason to doubt,” he adds, that Churchill “had lost all Christian faith, if he had any, by the time he was twenty-three,” for which he substituted “a Gibbonian deism.” Churchill recognized, in Cowling’s interpretation, that it “would have been troublesome politically” if he had publicized his views when he joined the Conservative Party early in his career.²⁷ Although Churchill was “a conforming Anglican,” Cowling contends, little in his life suggests that Christianity had “any special significance” for him. Churchill espoused a “low-keyed Anglicanism” that stressed the service Christianity provided to the community rather than any specific Christian content or theologically defined beliefs. He viewed the primary role of the Church of England as leading charitable efforts and promoting education. Churchill did not discuss the nature of religious truth or suggest that “the Church of England was its guardian.”²⁸

Major Desmond Morton, a devout Roman Catholic, a close friend for many years, and an adviser to Churchill during World War II, claims that “no one really knows” what Churchill’s “spiritual beliefs and outlooks” were. Morton nevertheless concludes that Churchill “firmly believed in the existence of God,” but the statesman was not a Christian because “he could not believe that Christ was God, though he recognised him as being the finest character that ever lived.” Churchill’s theological perspective, Morton maintains, could be described as either Unitarian or deist. Churchill believed in a God who created the world but “is so detached therefrom that no access is possible.” Churchill’s deity was distant, omnipotent, and involved onl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Competing Conceptions of Churchill’s Faith
• 2. Setting the Scene
• 3. Seeds of Spirituality: 1874–1894
• 4. Soldier and War Correspondent: 1893–1901 & 1914–1918
• 5. Political Roles: 1901–1931
• 6. The Wilderness Years: 1931–1939
• 7. Statesman and Wartime Prime Minister: 1940–1945
• 8. Cold War Warrior and Peace-Promoting Prime Minister: 1945–1955
• 9. Retirement Years: 1955–1965
• Conclusion
• A Note on Sources
• Notes