Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Gary Scott Smith is the retired Chairman of the History Department at Grove City College where he taught for many decades. He is currently Research Fellow for the Institute for Faith and Freedom. Professor Smith did his undergraduate degree in psychology, he later earned a Master in Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a PhD in American history from Johns Hopkins University. He’s an award winning professor for his teaching and academic excellence in the classroom. He’s also the author of numerous books including, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush, and Heaven in the American Imagination, which was the topic of a previous Thinking In Public. I enjoyed that conversation with Professor Smith, but this conversation is about his most recent book, Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill. That book is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Gary Scott Smith, welcome to Thinking In Public.
Gary Scott Smith:
Thank you, Al, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Albert Mohler:
Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been inspired by the example of Winston Churchill as one of the figures who looms large in the background of my thinking much like Luther does in another way, and I say that as a Baptist and as an American. Those are two very important heroes to me. And one of the issues about Churchill that has been continuously controversial and about which there is a great confusion of opinion and judgment is Churchill and Christianity. Your most recent book, and I want to commend it, Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill, deals with these questions. And my favorite line in your book in describing Churchill’s faith is that you say, “It’s complicated and slippery his approach to religion.” How did you decide to write this book?
Gary Scott Smith:
Well, Erdmans has a series of library religious biography and they invited me to do someone for that series, and they said the only criterion was that the person had to be well known. And I had previously worked on the Faith of American Presidents writing two books and dealing with 22 different American presidents, so I thought it would be very interesting to do Winston Churchill because there seemed to be such confusion about his faith, with some scholars arguing that he was an agnostic or an atheist, whereas others had argued that he was a fairly conventional Christian. And so I was interested in exploring that issue, particularly in light of Churchill’s prominence and importance to Western civilization, world civilization in the course of the 20th century.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you begin and end with a recognition of Churchill’s stature. By the end of your book you describe him as the dominant statesman of the 20th century, and indeed he was. And that’s over against an enormous panoply of characters from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and so many others. But history has really not diminished that stature in terms of historical importance.
Gary Scott Smith:
No, it hasn’t. Although, recently, Churchill has come under attack with our cancel culture and there are some who argue that because of certain views that he held and certain things that he did, that he should not be esteemed as highly as we view him. And there even have been efforts to tear down some statues to him as there have been statues torn down of other world leaders or national leaders. But generally speaking, his reputation has remained strong because it’s hard to dispute the major contribution he made during World War II and during the Cold War.
Albert Mohler:
No doubt. But the other thing I would say as someone who from age 13 has been reading everything I could get my hands on by and about Winston Churchill, Churchill was, during most of the years of his public life, which is so long, he was considered one of the most controversial characters of his age, we shouldn’t expect that he would be uncontroversial as we look back.
Gary Scott Smith:
No, certainly he was often controversial because of positions that he took and things that went wrong in certain offices that he held in the British government, and just because of his personality.
He was a larger than life guy who liked to joke around, exhibited some aspects of immaturity, insensitivity, certainly had a large ego, and those kinds of things that led him to be controversial in his own time period. I talk in the book about how the 1930s were a decade of eclipse for Churchill when he didn’t hold a public office and he was still in parliament but he didn’t hold a cabinet position. Those were his years of decline and thought maybe his public career was essentially over until World War II came on the scene and the prophecies he’d been making about the Nazis came true, and Chamberlain’s leadership was so ineffective, so then he had a revival. And then of course, he had a second revival in the 50s.
Albert Mohler:
We’re going to get to the subject of your book in terms of Churchill’s faith or the structuring substance of that faith, but as Christians holding, as I know you do, to an Augustinian worldview, we don’t expect to find any perfect people. And the larger the role on the human stage, the more complicated we expect it to be. But still, there is a moral judgment that can only honestly be made that in so many ways, Winston Churchill rallied the defense of Western civilization, and that’s exactly what he saw himself doing.
But his father, who was the second son of the Duke of Marlborough, had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and expected to become Prime Minister until in a foolish political decision he ruined his career. Churchill began as a Tory. He crossed over to the Liberals and then crossed back. He twice himself was at the near pinnacle of British politics only to tumble. There is more to his story than to most lives we could ever imagine.
Gary Scott Smith:
That’s certainly true in the fact that he lived to be 90 years old and experienced life from the last quarter of the 19th century through 1965, and saw epic changes in the world, and went through World War I World War II, and of course, had a lot of military experience even prior to World War I. He did so many things. He was in Parliament for 62 years, he was a government official for 31 years, he was Prime Minister for almost nine years, nine pivotal years in world history. So all of those things add up certainly.
Albert Mohler:
But it still begs the question, if you could choose someone who had merely to be famous about something of a religious biography, still I come back to the question, why Winston Churchill? I am anticipating your answer, I could imagine what it might be, but I want to hear it.
Gary Scott Smith:
Well, my basic answer is that I don’t think anyone had gotten it right yet. I think he’d either been presented as too Christian in a couple of cases, but insufficiently concerned about religion, and even an atheist and an agnostic or a deist in other cases. I make a case that I think he’s essentially unitarian even though he’s an Anglican officially and his whole life is spent in Anglican circles. But if you look at what Unitarians believe in terms of morality being the prominent attribute of faith and that Jesus is a great teacher but not ultimately God’s son, I think Churchill fits that description.
So anyway, I come out with a somewhat middle position, but I think I make the case that religion is much more important for Churchill than most of his, almost all of his, biographers have recognized in a wide variety of ways.
Albert Mohler:
As a young man, I was fascinated, I still am, but I was fascinated in a particular way with Churchill but also with Abraham Lincoln. And there’s so many parallels between their lives in terms of the difficulty of defining them theologically. Actually, I gave more attention to this trying to think through Lincoln before I actually turned to that aspect of Churchill. And I came to the conclusion that the best way I could understand Lincoln was as something of a stoic Calvinist, not a believer and not necessarily a theist, but certainly he had this very stoic personality, very stoic view of the world. But he not only believed in some general providence, he believed in an active providence that was making moral judgments in the midst of history.
And when I speak of Calvinists, I speak of just the fact that he took the dark side, the sinful side of humanity with full seriousness and yet there’s nothing we can point to in which there’s any set of beliefs or unbeliefs by Abraham Lincoln, you have to figure that out and put it together.
Gary Scott Smith:
I certainly would agree with that. I say in the book that no one’s faith has probably will be been more questioned in history than Abraham Lincoln. And it’s an enigma, people try to figure it out. I would agree with the description you just gave. I would point out, however, that he did spend the bulk of his life in Presbyterian churches in Springfield, Illinois and in Washington, D.C. and had a lot of relationships with Presbyterian ministers. And Churchill and Lincoln both knew the Bible very, very well and quoted it frequently.
And my subtitle involves the word “destiny”, and I think that’s certainly true for Churchill. He believed in God’s providence and particularly has affected his leadership roles. He felt that God had kept him alive over the course of years to be the Prime Minister in 1940. He talked about walking with destiny. And if you look at his life, which I detail in the book, he had so many times he could have died earlier.
Albert Mohler:
And, in one sense, he should have.
Gary Scott Smith:
Probably should have. I mean, potential airplane crashes, falls, childhood diseases, being hit by a car, Calvary charges, being hit by a car in New York City in 1931, bullets just basically barely missing him. So yes, they were escaping from prison, being hunted. Just so many ways and times he could have died, and almost drowned swimming in Switzerland as a teenager. So he definitely believed that God had preserved his life for a purpose.
Albert Mohler:
Without dwelling too long on Abraham Lincoln, I wrote my honors thesis on the Quaker theologian, Elton Trueblood. This would be 40 years ago plus. And I got to know Dr. Trueblood, and he’d written a book entitled, Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish. Dr. Trueblood helped me enormously. I was just a young college student, a senior. Dr. Trueblood helped me to separate, in that sense, a theological evaluation in trying to get into the mind of an historic individual. Even one who would have denied any theological identity, nonetheless, had a very important theological strain, so much so again that Trueblood would call him the Theologian of American anguish.
There’s always a danger though, isn’t there, that we’re reading on our theological hopes and fears onto these characters on the world stage. Which is why when it comes to Churchill, for whom there’s just so much more written record, and of course, we can still hear his voice unlike Lincoln. The fact is that there are people who do clearly read their own theological agendas onto Winston Churchill.
Gary Scott Smith:
Absolutely. And I think the classic case of that is Jonathan Sandy’s grandson who co-wrote this book called, God and Churchill. And there are people who want to present Churchill as more conventionally Christian than I believe that he was. So we have to be careful. That’s one of the reasons in the book that I present a wide array of different scholars and popularizers who’ve talked about Churchill’s faith in a wide variety of ways and characterized him from one end of the theological spectrum to the other. So I’ve laid his faith out there for people to be able to think about it. Based on what I see as evidence, I came to the conclusion that I shared earlier that I think essentially, he’s a Unitarian, but he believed in the value of Christian civilization, importance of defending it, he also yearned for there to be some type of transcendent truth. I quote one place where he talks, he sounds a lot like C.S. Lewis, his contemporary in the 1940s, making a very similar argument about the importance of there being some transcendent standards for judging human behavior.
Albert Mohler:
May I make an argument and I want to see how you respond to this. I would never claim to read every word written by Winston Churchill because I’m sure that is still impossible actually to document and to delimit given his public role. But I’ve read all his published works and I’ve read the majority of the at least known major secondary works, and had lots of conversation with people like Andrew Roberts and others. Trying to think about Churchill, it strikes me that I have to put him into the context of 19th and 20th century European life, Western society, and of course, British culture.
So I think in a way that most people hearing us have this conversation wouldn’t recognize; Churchill was born into a society that believed itself to be Christian. They saw Christianity as indispensable to morality and social order, and to the entire moral framework. And so even as in his 20s he became something of an agnostic and a rationalist, he never really had any intellectual equipment to doubt the necessity of Christianity to the civilization that he gave his life to defend. That to me, when I start talking to students or to people about Churchill, I say, “Look, you just have to understand the world into which he was born, it was the world in which the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer were the national discourse.” So we have to start with the fact that Churchill understood Christianity to be vital even if it’s hard to determine exactly what he believed about Christian doctrines.
Gary Scott Smith:
Well that’s absolutely true. That’s one of the reasons in the book that I talk somewhat about religious culture in England in the first half of the 20th century, and why I also talk about relationships he had with other religious leaders. I talk about some of the other religious figures in British political history from Wilberforce through Tony Blair, to try to set a context for these kinds of things.
So yes, you’re absolutely right. Of course, that’s one of the reasons though that some scholars say that Churchill’s faith was disingenuous or was very shallow and superficial. Was he was not expressing what he believed, he was expressing what the British people wanted to hear, especially in the midst of the crisis of World War II. But I think if you go a little deeper than that, which I’ve tried to do in the book, I think there’s plenty of evidence that in some ways he was expressing what he himself actually did believe.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, perhaps more so. And by the way, part of the reason why I look forward to this conversation is because I think your book is the definitive work thus far done. You’ve uncovered both in the primary and secondary literature; material that sets the table for this discussion. And I think your evaluation is very accurate. So, I want people to read your book and I think they’ll actually come to a greater appreciation of Winston Churchill, the man. As a Christian theologian, I want them to hunger for more than we find in Winston Churchill in terms of theological belief.
But I think it is very difficult for people to intellectually move back into an age. When I speak to audiences or to students, I’m often asked by these students who studied history—let’s just say because of my interest in the English-speaking peoples—we’re talking about a member of the British Royal House or some that ask, “Well, was he a Christian?” And I think, Well, he certainly thought he was but there are two different ways we use the word Christian. I’m not only an evangelical Protestant, I’m a Baptist, an ardent conversionist. And so when I’m going to talk about who’s a Christian, I mean that in terms of regeneration, and public profession of faith in Christ, and evidence of godliness and sanctification. But if you were to talk to someone in the British aristocracy, especially back in the time of Churchill they would have said, “Of course, we’re Christian because we’re British, look at the Church of England.”
Gary Scott Smith:
Sure, 60% of British people still belonged to the Church of England as late as the 1940s. One of the reasons that Churchill was perceived to be a Christian during his time was because he had a prodigious memory and he was able to quote the Bible so fully and freely, as well as The Book of Common Prayer, as well as hymns. And also because on public occasions he was seen going to cathedrals. So there was an assumption that probably he worshiped much more frequently than he did. But context is really important.
Just as an aside, but I think an interesting one, I just finished another book on the faith of Mark Twain. And the same thing can be said for Twain, it’s hard to pinpoint what he believed, he had a period when he seemed to espouse Christian faith when he was dating his wife Livi, a woman named Livi that he eventually married. And also he was very fearful of offending the American public and they wouldn’t buy his books if they perceived him as holding some of the views that he actually did. So, he withheld a lot of his deepest, most innermost thoughts until the last decade of his life or after his wife died. Then he had things published after he died so that he wouldn’t offend people. So it’s a complicated situation but cultural context plays a huge role.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. So Winston Churchill was born in the high Victorian age, and is born to the second son of the Duke of Marlborough, it doesn’t get more aristocratic than that. He marries an American heiress. A complicated background theologically and morally for that matter, but Churchill, nonetheless, is born into that society very traditional, if regrettable in some sense, British education for the aristocracy, ends up at Harrow. I did a project years ago on the British—as they would say, public school structure, we’d say the most elite private schools— and the theology that was taught in them. Mostly, it was an interesting pattern of high Anglican leadership with some influence from low church Anglicanism. From men who had contact with the boys and often led Bible studies or encouraged them.
But Churchill was armed with this massive knowledge of Scripture, the King James Bible as you point out, massive knowledge of The Book of Common Prayer. In school he had morning and evening offices with The Book of Common Prayer. Also, as you point out, three services on the Lord’s Day, and so that’s ingrained in him. So in that sense, Churchill is going to sound like a Christian.
Gary Scott Smith:
I also point out in the book that like many other Aristocratic children of his time, he was raised by a nanny and neglected by his parents, and sent to these private boarding schools. But the nanny who was with him whenever he was at home, Elizabeth Everest, was a devout Christian. She was very concerned about his spiritual welfare, teaching him to pray, encourage him to read the Bible, taking him to church on Sundays when he was home on vacations and summers and so on, and having theological dialogue with him. So he did have that strong Christian influence in his life as he was growing up.
I think prior to going off to India, in the army, as about a 20-year-old, he really didn’t question much the religious socialization he had received. He had been confirmed in the Church of England, he would have considered himself a Christian. Of course, he doesn’t go to university and so he gets his education through a lot of reading that he does when he’s in the army in England, and he reads a lot of skeptics and then he begins to question everything.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. So you point to this particular period in India and Churchill was in his 20s, and I think again, Americans don’t understand the context, shouldn’t understand the context, is different than our own until they they learn it. So he goes to Sandhurst, the British equivalent to West Point, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you get a job in the army. And so he actually has to use his political connections over and over again, even his mother’s connections to get him the posts he wants, but he wants battle, and he wants to be on the front lines.
He ends up in India, but during this time in the British Empire there’s some fascinating things going on, what the sociologists and the the critical theorists would now call the contact with the other. And of course he was also there in what we now know is Afghanistan and the Sudan, so he knew Muslims, he knew the Hindus, he knew all this. That led to some huge intellectual questions. And in the officer class, it was entirely men of course, and mostly younger men with some older leaders, there was an attraction to aberrant religious thought and rationalism, and they were passing those books around. And so Churchill actually pretty much declared himself in the 20s an agnostic or an atheist, certainly a rational skeptic.
Gary Scott Smith:
He did. And he wrote to his mother to that effect. Even when he was on the verge of going out to battle he would tell her, “Look, if I die, I have to tell you, I do not believe in the Christian faith, but I have confidence that my destiny is not now to die.” But nevertheless, within the next year and a half he ends up praying when he’s in the midst of these heated battles and thanks God for preserving him. And he looks back on that period and acknowledges that it happens but says essentially, that I no longer affirm what I did when I was in my early 20s.
So it’s an interesting time in his life, you’re right, he encounters Hinduism and he encounters Islam and he seems to think that these religions are … people choose their religion based on where they’re born and what they been exposed to rather than rational reasons. And he has a point certainly, but he has this dialogue with the former headmaster of Harrow, Weldon, about the importance of missions and basically says Christian missions are not valuable because they’re trying to convert people that have their own religion and you’re going to make matters worse. Well by 1908 he’s the first speaker at the London missionary conference totally repudiating what he says and saying that Christianity missions are great and they’ve introduced not only Christian teaching to the world, but they’ve brought all kinds of humanitarian benefits.
Albert Mohler:
Churchill had this weird theory of religion in his 20s, in our 20s we have lots of weird ideas, but one of his weird ideas is that religion and geography are tied. So you have mountainous and coastal areas, and he seemed to have this idea that religions adapt to the geography of their space, again, he doesn’t appear to have held that for his lifetime.
Gary Scott Smith:
No. And of course, he’d be turning over in his grave today looking at what’s happening in Southeast Asia with the number of Christians and various cultures there, and the spread of Islam to other places in the world, other than where it began.
Albert Mohler:
With that experience in the 20s, Churchill is then, what is that, to fast forward to almost immediately thrust into national prominence, elected to Parliament and then as a very young man becomes First Lord of the Admiralty during what was called the Great War. And it’s hard again, I think, for Americans to recognize what that means, that meant he was a newly elected member of Congress and then you turn around and he is both Secretary of the Navy and basically a commander of the largest naval force the world had ever seen.
Gary Scott Smith:
And of course, as we all know, things don’t go well. There is an invasion of the Dardanelles that’s a huge failure, and he is largely blamed for it, loses his position and ends up as a battalion commander on the front lines in France, and once again is almost killed. A shack that he’s in while he’s summoned to meet with a higher officer, he goes to meet with him, he gets back and 15 minutes after he left a bomb had landed on the shack where he was, and he undoubtedly would have been killed if he hadn’t been summoned to this meeting.
So yes, I mean, he certainly had some ups and downs in his career. And you’re right, he was a young man, he had already been Home Secretary, had a lot of responsibilities over things like the prison system and public welfare and things of that sort. But he looked like, at that point, he was headed toward being a prime minister much earlier than he was, than he became one.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, Churchill is one of those figures in which you see, I mean, again, with Abraham Lincoln, here’s someone who served one term in Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, the next elected office is President of the United States and the moment to the nation’s greatest crisis. Providence, I don’t know how you have a purely secular explanation of that. I’m a Christian, so I can’t think and can’t pretend to think in purely secular terms, but Lincoln could not think in purely secular terms about his own times and his own role, and Churchill certainly could not.
Gary Scott Smith:
No, neither of them could because of what they experienced in life and the cauldrons that they were placed in of battle. In some ways, Lincoln’s was every bit as difficult as Churchill’s when you consider it’s a intramural struggle to preserve the essence of your country. So yes, I fully agree with what you’re saying.
Albert Mohler:
With Lincoln, by the way, and again, I go back to Trueblood’s title, Theologian of American Anguish, Lincoln was filled with doubt, filled with this, and again, a deeply Augustinian sense of the power of evil far more pervasively, and so even though he was absolutely determined as to preserve the union, and absolutely determined by the end of his tenure to eliminate slavery, and absolutely determined in his moral judgments, even in his second inaugural address, he makes very clear there is no absolute … not a Manichaean understanding of one side being absolutely right and the other side being absolutely wrong. But as William Manchester said, “Churchill was a Manichaean.” And of course, you look at the 20th century in this times facing Hitler, I find that an interesting comparison.
Gary Scott Smith:
I would think given where Churchill was coming from and the experiences he was having, it would have been hard not to be a Manichaean, darkness versus light, good versus evil, God versus Satan. And to him, Hitler personified all the attributes that you would associate with the devil. So yes, he did use that language in describing Hitler and describing World War II, but he actually used some of that same language describing World War I. So he was prone to see the world in that context.
But I do point out in the book that one of his best traits is his forgiving nature, and he was willing to forgive the Boers in South Africa as soon as that war ended, he was one of the first people to extend sympathy to the German people after World War I ended. And even after World War II, he did not want to be punitive toward Germany. And he said some harsh things about the Soviets obviously, most famously in his Iron Curtain speech, but he worked in his second term as Prime Minister to try to bring about dialogue, and conciliation, and reduction of arms because he thought that was a possibility and it was essential to the world to do that. So he was a Manichaean but he could see the good in his enemies, let’s say that.
Albert Mohler:
Or would eventually as you point out.
Gary Scott Smith:
Would eventually, right.
Albert Mohler:
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work on the history of the English speaking peoples. And that’s the first of his multi-volume works that I read largely because I was a teenager and they were cheap in a used bookstore, so I was very proud to have it. But that’s where I started out. And in that work, Churchill clearly believes in the central role played by the English speaking peoples, the Anglosphere as it’s often called, and I share that judgment. But it’s clear Churchill sees Europe as a civilization. And so it’s a huge question to him as to whether the events of the 20th century are an aberration in the German character or a revelation. So by the time the Cold War is on, he clearly wants to be able to count the German people, at least what we would now, or then called West Germany, the Federal Republic, he wants to count them on the team and as defenders of civilization, so he has to change his judgment.
Gary Scott Smith:
Yes, absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
Now, you use some really good scholarship in dissecting language and looking very carefully. You also do just a tremendous review of the secondary literature, what other people have said in judgment. But you look at him in terms of the context, not only of Britain, say in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also of British political leadership. To quote one of Tony Blair’s most important advisors, “We don’t do God.” So you compare British politics and American politics in general, American politicians talk theologically in a way that British Prime Ministers generally do not. Why don’t you explain that because you’ve done so much research on both.
Gary Scott Smith:
Well what you say is true but I would say that Tony Blair in some ways is the exception to the rule because the other folks that I talk about in the book are pretty upfront about what they believe and the importance of Christianity to British society and British politics. They don’t seem to be afraid to do God, I think it’s again the shift in culture and British understanding. And Britain obviously has become a much less Christian place by the 21st century than it was in the first half of the 20th century.
Margaret Thatcher though as whom I talk about, she’s pretty upfront with what she believes in giving speeches in a variety of context and linking her political ideology to Biblical faith and to biblical teaching. But I talk about various figures, William Wilberforce and then Lord Shaftesbury, two folks that are in Parliament but don’t rise to be Prime Minister in their roles, and how their faith informs their battle against the slave trade and slavery in Wilberforce’s case, and then white slavery, that is children working in mines and factories and just horrible working conditions for men and women in the case of Shaftesbury. But then I deal with Gladstone, and Salisbury, Baldwin, who are men of strong faith and I think it comes across in what they say and do.
But I will say that I do in the book have quite a few comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And that’s big for two reasons, one, because they were close friends. They exchanged about 2,000 letters during the course of a six-year period. They were together on numerous occasions. They respected each other. And of course, Franklin Roosevelt is an Episcopalian, which is the American version of Anglicanism. But I also point out that FDR spoke a lot more about religious matters in much more detail and much more specificity than Churchill did. And again, I think that’s part of the American political context.
Albert Mohler:
I do have to say about my observation. And by the way, you point out, and I had not seen this pointed out before, the contrast between FDR and Churchill in terms of mentioning the name Jesus Christ was Churchill virtually never did, I say virtually because I can’t say absolutely never did, in his public speeches, whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred not only to Jesus Christ, but to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Gary Scott Smith:
Yes, I hope that what’s happened in the last 15 or 16 years has led the American public at least to have the opportunity to know that Roosevelt, despite his many flaws and particularly his extramarital affair, was a man who had a strong faith and a commitment to the church and was a vestryman at St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park for a long, long time, including the entire time he was president united states. And he did speak frequently about the importance of religion, public prayers, particularly during the D day invasion, and he did speak often about who Jesus was, and he did affirm the deity of Christ in a way that Churchill never did.
Albert Mohler:
You mentioned Margaret Thatcher, and I want to return to her for a moment because my wife and I had the opportunity years ago obviously to have some private time with Lady Thatcher. And I knew if I had the opportunity to have such a conversation, and it was at length, I’m grateful to say, I knew the one thing I wanted to ask her about was her 1988 address to the General Assembly at the Church of Scotland, because I did not know of any American President or British Prime Minister who in the 20th century would have spoken the way she did. And I just want to contrast that just in terms with the fact that it appears that Churchill did not ever affirm the deity of Christ, and not to mention the necessity of a saving work.
In that address in 1988, Margaret Thatcher spoke of her faith in creation and the divine creation of humanity. And then she went on to say, “We are expected to use all our own power of thought and judgment in exercising that choice,” it was between good and evil. “And further, that if we open our hearts to God, he has promised to work within us. And third, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, when faced with his terrible choice and lonely vigil chose to lay down his life that our sins may be forgiven.” She goes on to expand upon that. That’s pretty astounding, that clearly charismatic orthodox Christology there.
Gary Scott Smith:
Yes, it is, as you say, astounding in light of what politicians generally say and how they are reluctant to reveal their innermost beliefs particularly pertaining to Jesus because of the potential turnoff to non-Christian elements in their societies. So it’s a remarkable speech and it’s almost unparalleled in political history either side of the Atlantic.
Albert Mohler:
And by the way, one of the questions I asked her was, why she gave that speech as she did? And she got a smile on her face and she said, “My responsibility was not to tell them what they didn’t know, it was to remind them of what they are to preach.” And I thought, well, there you go, there’s Lady Thatcher in a little capsule right there.
As you talk about Churchill and you come to the conclusion by just taking doctrine by doctrine what he believed, it still leaves us with this incredible paradox of a man who was so steeped in Christianity that he couldn’t rally the British nation without scripture. But at the same time, I have no idea what he believed the Bible actually was other than this historic book.
Gary Scott Smith:
Yes, I argue that to him whether the Bible was truly the Word of God, inspired by God, infallible, was not the key question. The key question was, are its truths valuable to current society and current conditions? And he was much more interested in taking biblical principles and trying to apply them to the situation that the British found themselves in, and the world found itself in, in the first 50-60 years of the 20th century than he was arguing about even whether miracles were true. I point out that he had this long essay on Moses he wrote 1931 and he seems to assume that miracles pertaining to Moses and the leaving of Egypt were true, but he doesn’t dwell on that, but that was not something he focused on. He focused much more on, what do these texts mean to us right now?
Albert Mohler:
He clearly understood the Exodus to be an historical event and considered the historicity of Exodus to be of utmost importance for Western civilization in the 20th century.
Gary Scott Smith:
He did.
Albert Mohler:
And a model of God vindicating, which is what he hoped the Lord would do in the midst of the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century in the Second World War. Going back to good and evil, those are theological categories. Churchill had to have some equipment to talk about good and evil. He didn’t even just mean it in comparative terms better and worse, he clearly believed in an objective right and objective wrong. I don’t know that he ever thought about where that comes from.
Gary Scott Smith:
He wasn’t explicit about where he thought that came from, but I think that logically he seemed to think it came from the Judeo-Christian tradition. I tell the one story about he’s crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a ship and he tells a friend that there has to be a heaven and hell because there’s got to be someplace for Lenin and Trotsky to go based on what they’ve done. This is in the late 1920s. So he had a sense that there had to be a system of judgment, there has to be justice in the universe.
And he seemed to think that … well, I think this most evident, I spend quite a bit of time talking about the atomic bomb and how it’s unclear whether Churchill believed in an afterlife, but he seemed to be preoccupied with the fact that he was going to be judged by God someday for the use of the atomic bomb. Which was remarkable because, of course, it was Truman’s decision, it was in American hands, but the British were a part, along with Canada and US in developing the bomb. And he felt like he was every bit as responsible for its use as had Truman had been.
And so I tell some episodes in the book about that, particularly this mock trial that they had at a dinner at the British Embassy in 1953 in January, right before Truman leaves office, and they hold this trial about whether Churchill is indeed responsible for the use of the bomb. But he seemed to think that God had the power of judgment and that he had his ducks in order, his reasons for why the bomb had to be used, and they’re typically the ones that were put forth, to save lives, and it was the Germans had used other kinds of explosive devices during the war, the British had retaliated. And he felt badly about that but it was necessary to win the war and it was necessary to use the bomb to end the war quickly. And he often said he rejoiced that God had given Americans superiority in the use of atomic weapons at least up through the end of his life.
Albert Mohler:
That Manichaean worldview, and just to remind those listening to this conversation, that goes back to ancient Persia, the belief that there are two different deities, a good deity and an evil deity, and a division throughout the world that extends to the material world, and so it’s black and white in the language of actually the mannequins themselves and even their symbolism. And so he wasn’t metaphysically a Manichaean, he was morally Manichaean, there’s right and wrong. It’s interesting to me that Churchill was a Manichaean at several points in his life, and I want to test a theory with you, at the end of World War II, I think he wants to lay that down. He is exhausted, Western civilization is exhausted, it has fought Hitler, and it has fought Hitler to a decisive end unlike what happened in World War I. But then when he discovers even more about Joseph Stalin and the horrors of the Soviets, by the time he gets to Fulton, Missouri, he’s ready to be a Manichaean again.
Gary Scott Smith:
Well, Churchill had a real up and down experience at the end of World War II or as World War II was ending in Asia.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Gary Scott Smith:
So he gets defeated in an election in July of 1945 for the Prime Ministership by Attlee, and he’s absolutely shocked. And what outside observer wouldn’t be shocked? Here’s the man that saved Britain then loses an election. And he’s very disappointed that he doesn’t really let on in public how disappointed he is, but he says privately, “I really wanted to do the peace too.” And not too long thereafter he is happy that he wasn’t elected Prime Minister, although six years later he returns to the post. But yes, so he quickly realizes, hey, this isn’t over yet. He gives that Iron Curtain speech, he realizes that our former allies during World War II, the Soviets, are … Of course, he’s always been a very strident anticommunist and he had already had black and white, good and evil denunciations of communism as late as the 1919s when communism took over, the Bolsheviks took over in Russia.
So yes, he quickly comes to this decision that we’ve got to be on our guard, that things are still up in the air and another issue, another confrontation has emerged. And in fact, I talk about in the book that he goes into a severe depression a couple of times in relationship to this particular issue feeling like, despite saving Britain during World War II, what have I really done? Because we’re out of the frying pan into the fire and now we’ve got another situation with the Soviets and atomic weapons that is perhaps more dire than it was with Hitler and the Nazis.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Part of what Churchill was able to do, and this is put in so many different ways, he’s often called the lion, and he said, “I wasn’t the lion, I just got to give its roar”, he was able to rally people. Isn’t it fascinating that someone who was able to inspire millions also struggled with his own black dog of depression? And I think that has to be interpreted theologically as well.
Gary Scott Smith:
I do too. And that goes all the way back to his first recording of that seems to be when he was 20 years old. So it was something he struggled with. It was worst in his 80s, the last decade of his life. But there were times after the Dardanelles, after he was executor, put Britain on the gold standard and that went poorly, and he lost that particular post, Chancellor of the executor. In the wilderness years, the 1930s, there were just lots of times when he wasn’t being respected, he wasn’t being heard. He’s strictly frustrated because he turned out to be absolutely right about Hitler but no one wanted to listen to him. And the British didn’t want to prepare and then things ended up as they did with Britain being, well, unprepared for the World War II.
So yes, I mean, I think there was probably some temperamental issues there, but it was life experiences. And I think perhaps the lack of grounding and a personal relationship with God played a major role in that depression that he experienced.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, I think if I had to face the evils that Churchill faced with the responsibility that Churchill bore without belief in a personal God who will in the end bring about the Kingdom of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in such a way that for the redeemed every is dry and every tear is wiped away, and when Christ shall rule the nations with a rod of iron, I don’t know that I could have demonstrated any similar courage to Churchill but I’m still inspired by it.
Gary Scott Smith:
Well, it is inspiring. Again, he had times that he admitted that he prayed very specifically for God to save him when he was in battle, particularly when he was in his 20s. And that he thanked God for sparing him from other times when he could have died. And the man was fearless. I mean, I don’t think people realize he traveled 115,000 miles on airplanes during World War II. He went to various dangerous places because he felt that he needed to figure out what was going on. He went over to France a couple of times when it was dangerous to do that. He went out during the Blitz, he watched from the rooftops. I mean, he was man of incredible courage. But I think he thought that God was sparing him, God was protecting him and God ultimately would triumph, but he did not have that personal relationship that you and I and lots of other Christians would argue is central to our well being and central to our view of the world, our understanding of the world and our operation in the world, he certainly did not apparently have that.
Albert Mohler:
Professor Smith, you’ve taught generations of students at Grove City College and in your long teaching career, you’re in a position to answer a question that I want to bring the conversation to a conclusion. What would you say, as an historian, is the rightful conception of the verdict of history?
Gary Scott Smith:
Wow, that’s a whopper. Ultimately, from our perspective, we believe that God is building a kingdom and that while we may lose some battles along the way, the ultimate outcome is secure. I can’t, as a Christian, evaluate history from any other perspective. That doesn’t fly necessarily in historical Academy in terms of viewing history in that particular way. And it is certainly true that without an inspired scripture to tell us what God is doing, it’s much more difficult to know which are specific acts of God and which are not in a way that we can when we look at the Old Testament battles that God leads his people into or the founding of the church in the New Testament. So the verdict of history is ultimately beyond history, it’s something that I think we’ll know when we’re on the other side, when God illuminates everything for us. But from a this worldly perspective, I try to do my homework as best I can and be as fair as I can and sympathetic as I can, and that’s what I try to do in all my writing.
Albert Mohler:
Well, [inaudible 00:50:55] in your book, Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill, I commend it, I enjoyed it greatly, other readers will as well. And one of your former students told me today you are a wonderful Christian gentlemen, and there’s just about nothing better that could be said. And so Professor Gary Scott Smith, thank you for joining me for Thinking In Public.
Gary Scott Smith:
Thanks for having me Al, it’s been a real pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Gary Scott Smith, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking In Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce college, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking In Public. And until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.