Winston Churchill, Hero or Villain? A Response to Controversy Over The Tucker Carlson Show

It’s funny how life goes. You find yourself talking about things you didn’t expect to in the course of a day. And thus, I find myself today ready to speak, to defend the honor and the historical legacy of Winston Churchill. And in order to do that, I have to speak pretty personally. I was a 10-year-old boy when my grandmother gave me National Geographic Magazine, a subscription, but also just a stack of back issues. And as a 10-year-old boy, I started working through them. And I can still remember a 1965 issue of that magazine I saw when I was just a young boy, and it was a memorial issue and it honored Winston Churchill. Now, honestly, Winston Churchill died when I was five. I’m just 10, a 10-year-old boy. But I’ll tell you what, I was a 10-year-old boy trying to understand the great ideas of the age, honestly, trying to understand what history means. 

And so Winston Churchill has been a part of my life ever since I was 10 years old. I’ll just say that’s more than a half century ago. And as you can see, even as I’m speaking to you from my personal library, Winston Churchill has loomed large in my imagination. And honestly, it’s been a factor that has very much been involved in my understanding of how ideas work in civilization, how civilizations are established, how they continue, how they survive, good and evil in a world in which we confront both good and evil. And even when it comes to government, constitutional republic versus totalitarian and autocratic dictatorial regime. And so I was looking at all of this, and honestly, I was just a 10-year-old boy. I wasn’t thinking about the great ideas that would captivate me thereafter. What I was looking at are photographs. Photographs of, for instance, the cranes along the Thames River bowing as the funeral barge of Winston Churchill went by with this flag draped casket in the back, and it was simply said in National Geographic that this was done spontaneously and without any orchestration by those who controlled those cranes because those who were working on the docks and on the ships, they had such great affection for Winston Churchill. They believed that he had saved their nation. 

At the same time, there was a picture that just showed a little woman dressed in such dignified black holding her purse. I was just 10, and yet I came to understand that was Queen Elizabeth II. Only later would I come to understand that Winston Churchill had been first elected to parliament under Queen Victoria, and now he was being honored by–and breaking precedent by the way in doing so–by the reigning monarch who was there for his state funeral. He began as a member of Parliament under Victoria. He resigned and retired as Prime Minister under Queen Elizabeth II. Just think about that span of history. But the crucial thing to remember is that Winston Churchill was absolutely central to the story, not only in Great Britain and in the British Empire and beyond, throughout all that period, from Victoria to Elizabeth. 

And then I came to understand at a far deeper level what it means to affirm convictional leadership. That is leadership that is based in convictions, in the affirmation of certain essential truths, not just political leadership for expediency, not just administrative leadership, but leadership on a world stage driven by conviction. I came to understand that Winston Churchill saw himself that way. He was born the first son of the second son of the Duke of Marlborough. He was born into a family of titled aristocracy. And I’ve had the honor, by the way of standing in the very room there in Blenheim Palace where he was born, his ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, was remembered to have saved England at a time of its peril as he led England’s army into war. Churchill born right there in Blenheim Palace, eventually as a boy, came to believe that he would play such a role on the world stage and history records that he did. 

But I just want to say, when you look at Winston Churchill, I want us to understand that this was someone who even as a boy, understood that history was being made and it was being made by those who meant good, and it was being made by those who meant evil. And when you consider what Winston Churchill lived through, if you just take him out of office and just put him in a timeline of history, we’re talking about the end of the Victorian age. We’re talking about the great tragedies of the 20th century, in particular World War I and World War II. And of course in both the First World War and the second, Winston Churchill played a key role, but it’s in the Second World War that was absolutely decisive. 

And I just want to come back and say, I think even as statements are being made, recent interview in which Darryl Cooper was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson on the Tucker Carlson Show, there’s a lot of cultural conversation about this. We should not be afraid to ask questions of history. We should not be afraid to ask questions about our heroes. I want to say without embarrassment that Winston Churchill has been a hero to me. Now, I’m a Christian theologian, so I want to be very clear I think the Bible affirms the need for heroes. I think Hebrews chapter 11 makes that very clear. But you know, the Bible’s very honest in that we understand our heroes, warts and all so to speak. 

And Winston Churchill was a man who just lived a large life on this enormous canvas of history. And you know what? He made a lot of mistakes. Winston Churchill is remembered for Misjudgments. Winston Churchill is remembered for a disaster in military terms at Gallipoli, all that’s true. Patrick Buchanan wrote a book a few years ago about this, and I bought it the moment it came out. And he’s asking very, very serious questions about the legacy of Churchill. But it’s a long way from Patrick Buchanan. And I think many of his points, especially in terms of how that relates to America’s role in the world, many of those points were very valid. I don’t think his criticism of Churchill will stand, not in that sense. 

And when you have someone now saying in terms of public discourse that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, I think you’re turning the world upside down. I don’t think this is even historical revisionism. I think this is something far more dangerous than that. And I don’t think it’s just about Winston Churchill. I think it’s about far more than Winston Churchill. There are lessons to be learned here. The role of an individual in history can be massive. You take Winston Churchill out of the picture of the 20th century in Great Britain, you have a hard time explaining how Britain actually gets to victory in the Second World War because it was Winston Churchill in the years he described as his wilderness years who was observing Adolf Hitler and his threat. And he was the one who was warning Britain. 

And then when the catastrophe took place, and by the way, Winston Churchill was not Prime Minister when Britain declared war, or that a state of war existed with Nazi Germany, with the German Nazi invasion of Poland. Neville Chamberlain, who had tried to appease Hitler, had tried to appease Hitler to great cost to his historical reputation, deservedly so, he was the Prime Minister. It was when Britain, after the war, when Chamberlain’s leadership was basically evacuated, that the conservative party had to turn to Winston Churchill, who by the way, had ratted to the liberal party decades before and then re-ratted coming back to the conservatives. The conservatives were not inclined to turn to Winston Churchill, they turned to Winston Churchill because they had to. He’s the only one who’d been telling the truth about the Nazi threat. And then it’s not just that Winston Churchill was necessary for that reason, he was necessary because the Labor Party, the leftist party in opposition wouldn’t be satisfied with any conservative leader at the head of government other than Winston Churchill. It tells you something. Again, the Queen and the dock workers, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party coming to a consensus that Winston Churchill was necessary–history proved that that was true. 

And so you look at the Second World War and you come to understand Churchill’s personal leadership was absolutely indispensable. And of course, he made mistakes. All the allied leaders made mistakes. Many of the decisions made by the Allies deserved to be reconsidered, but not the great observation about the thread of Nazi evil. You want to know the truth? Well just read Meine Kampf Adolf Hitler. Just look at the Wannsee Conference proceedings about the Holocaust. The fact is, there’s just overwhelming evidence that if anything, even Winston Churchill had underestimated the evil of the Nazi regime, and furthermore, the imperialist ambitions of Adolf Hitler.

I think as we look back to the second World War, we recognize it could have turned out very differently. It could have turned out with the evil of Nazism becoming the great political fact throughout much of Europe threatening the rest of the world, don’t take the United States out of that picture. I’m very thankful that didn’t happen. And when I ask the question, “Why didn’t it happen?,” I’m left with the same answer as Britain’s late queen, and those crane operators on the Thames. 

Human beings are indispensable to history. Winston Churchill is one of those indispensable men. In the verdict of history, I do not think he looms smaller, I think he looms even larger. You had people at the time who said, Winston Churchill is a political necessity, a political necessity to defeat Nazi Germany. I think in retrospect, that was not only true, it was massively true. I still remain that 10-year-old boy. I still have a fascination with Winston Churchill, and yet I stand not so much to defend his honor as the moral importance of historical truth.