I don't think there is much doubt that Winston Churchill, born on November 30, 1874, was one of the most important political leaders of the early and mid-20th century. He was the son of Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill and Jennie Jerome, an American heiress. He was a soldier, war correspondent, member of Parliament, Prime Minister (twice: 1940-1945 and 1951-1955), author and artist; he led England through the Second World War, and with FDR and Joseph Stalin, helped create a new Europe after that war. He famously made the term "Iron Curtain" a powerful image to describe the post-war aggression of the Soviet Union at a speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946. He received many honors, including honorary citizenship in the USA.
As an author--his main source of income after his public service--Churchill wrote and published biographies, histories, collections of his speeches, etc. and won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."
One human value I thought we could focus on, especially in view of the anniversaries of his death and funeral, is his views on religion, particularly Christianity, including his views on Catholicism. He was baptized in the Church of England and his funeral was celebrated in St. Paul's Cathedral according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer.
Sources indicate that he while he believed in a Providential Higher Power that guided his destiny, he rejected the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Our Savior. After years of attending Anglican church services at Harrow he decided as an adult that he'd gone to church often enough. It was his reading while in India in the late nineteenth century that formed his views on religion. According to Anthony Roberts:
In between polo chukkas, Churchill became a voracious reader, and three authors in particular plunged him into the disbelief in Christ’s divinity that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.Although William Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of Rationalism and his History of European Morals, as well as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, established in Churchill’s mind what he later called “a predominantly secular view,” it was William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man that convinced Churchill that Jesus was an inspired prophet but not the Son of God.Reade was a Victorian explorer, novelist and war correspondent whose two-volume book went into eight editions over the twelve years after its publication in 1872. It employed quasi-Darwinian terms to explain the rise and fall of empires such as those of the Persians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Macedonians and of course the Romans. Reade was particularly scathing about all forms of religion, which he dismissed as worthless superstition. . . .
Roberts quotes Paul Addison's Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) in summary of Churchill's religious views, "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."
Regarding Catholicism, Churchill shared rather common English anti-Catholic views. As John Charmley noted in the Catholic Herald ten years ago, commenting on Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples:
Churchill imbibed, and later served up, the classic Victorian Anglican version of our island story. The medieval popes were foreign tyrants who always backed absolutism and opposed liberty. The Reformation was portrayed as Henry VIII’s declaration of independence from Rome, with the additional virtue of putting Bibles into the hands of the ordinary Englishman. This was contrasted with the obscurantism of papists like the bigoted Duke of Norfolk, who said he “never read the Scripture nor never will read it. It was merry in England afore the new learning came up.”
In a discussion of Churchill's religious views in Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill by Dr. Gary Scott Smith in Catholic World Report, Dr. Paul Kengor notes:
As for Churchill’s negative appraisal of Catholicism, Smith says that Churchill in his youth “developed a strongly anti-Catholic view, which continued into his mid-twenties.” In 1898 he wrote to his brother that Oxford University “has long been the home of bigotry and intolerance and has defended more damnable errors and wicked notions than any other institution, with the exception of the Catholic Church.” In a letter the next year, Churchill declared that “as a rationalist I deprecate all Romish practices and prefer those of Protestantism, because I believe that the Reformed Church is less deeply sunk in the mire of dogma. We are … a step nearer Reason.” Churchill declared, however, that he was reluctant to rob the lives of people who worked in ugly factories devoid of beauty of the “ennobling aspiration” that Catholicism provided, even though it was expressed “in the burning of incense, the wearing of certain robes and other superstitious practices.”At Churchill's State Funeral 60 years ago, there was plenty of beauty, "the wearing of certain robes", and other "superstitious practices", including a Byzantine Kontakion of the Departed, "Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy Saints". His favorite hymns were included: , including "Fight the Good Fight", "He Who Would Valiant Be" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic", and "I Vow to Thee My Country".
His widow, Clementine, who had attended church regularly before their marriage and began to again after his death, commented to one of their daughters afterwards, "It wasn't a funeral, Mary – it was a triumph".
When he turned 75, Churchill had commented, “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” He also had some concerns about the afterlife: "Heaven, he feared, might be an egalitarian place rather like the Welfare State, “and therefore no place for me,” although he relished the opportunity of meeting the great men of the past such as Julius Cæsar and Napoleon," according to Anthony Roberts.None of this is to comment on whether Churchill is in any "egalitarian place" where at least every soul is a holy saint enjoying the beatific vision, of course. But it is always good to learn the truth and to pray for mercy and salvation for the dead.
May Winston Churchill rest in peace.
Image Credit (Public Domain): 1941 photograph by Karsh.
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