Tag: King James Bible

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Christian Civilization: Churchill inspecting the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, November 1941.
Churchill’s Term “Christian Civilization”

Churchill’s Term “Christian Civilization”

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An ear­li­er post here on Churchill and Reli­gion has been picked up (in con­text albeit some­what abbre­vi­at­ed) by Wal­lace Hen­ley in “The Glob­al Tsuna­mi on ‘Good'” in CP News. “I am not argu­ing for a Chris­t­ian theoc­ra­cy,” Mr. Hen­ley writes,

but for adher­ence to the basic doc­trines of life, love and care described in Scrip­ture. Win­ston Churchill argued that the great goal of the Sec­ond World War was the sur­vival of what he called repeat­ed­ly “Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion.” Richard Lang­worth, a Churchill schol­ar, says that by “Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion” Churchill thought that Christianity’s “prin­ci­ples applied broad­ly to all of mankind regard­less of reli­gion.” Just as, to Churchill, the word “man” meant humankind, his allu­sions to Chris­tian­i­ty embod­ied prin­ci­ples he con­sid­ered “uni­ver­sal” and that “applied broad­ly to all mankind regard­less of reli­gion.”

This is all right as far as it goes, but it leaves out some of the essence.…

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Churchill’s Religion: “Optimistic Agnostic”

Churchill’s Religion: “Optimistic Agnostic”

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Although he had some very reli­gious friends, like Lord Hugh Cecil, Win­ston Churchill was not a reli­gious man. Intro­duced to reli­gious diver­si­ty ear­ly, he was brought up “High Church,” but had a nan­ny “who enjoyed a very Low Church form of piety.” When in rebel­lious mood he would tell Nan­ny Ever­est “the worst thing that he could think of…that he would go out and ‘wor­ship idols.’”

After his self-edu­ca­tion as a young offi­cer in India, when he read all the pop­u­lar chal­lenges to ortho­dox reli­gion, like Charles Darwin’s The Ori­gin of Species and William Win­wood Reade’s The Mar­tyr­dom of Man, Churchill evolved into what we might term an “opti­mistic agnos­tic.” He spoke joc­u­lar­ly of the Almighty, sug­gest­ing that as a boy,

I accumulated…so fine a sur­plus in the Bank of Obser­vance that I have been draw­ing con­fi­dent­ly upon it ever since.…

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The Biblical Churchill, Part 3

The Biblical Churchill, Part 3

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“Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour…”

Con­tin­ued from Part 2…

On 19 June 1940, Churchill made his first broad­cast as Prime Min­is­ter, a speech which lift­ed the hearts even of his for­mer and cur­rent crit­ics. “A tremen­dous bat­tle is rag­ing in France and Flan­ders,” he said, adding forth­right­ly that the Ger­mans, “by a remark­able com­bi­na­tion of air bomb­ing and heav­i­ly armoured tanks, have bro­ken through the French defences.”

In assur­ing his lis­ten­ers that Britain would fight on, Churchill chose a majes­tic coda, an obscure Bib­li­cal allu­sion, for the first and only time in all his writ­ings and speech­es.…

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