Where is Churchill when we need him?

The coming election has most Christians I know in despair.  Two terrible candidates.  The Democrat cannot bring herself to acknowledge our war with radical Islam, and the Republican refuses to stand up to Putin’s depredations in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Where is Churchill when we need him?  I am reminded both of his soaring oratory (so miserably absent from these two candidates) and his unblinking defiance of radical evil.

First, his oratory.  His eloquence was natural and exalted. According to one contemporary writing about his speeches, “There was nothing false, inflated, artificial in his eloquence.  It was his natural idiom.  His world was built and fashioned in heroic lines.  He spoke its language.”  And his informal oratory over (usually) long dinners, while unpracticed, was no less impressive.  Harold MacMillan, a later British Prime Minister, recalled the dinner meetings with Churchill, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and young Conservative backbenchers in the late 1920s:

“All the rest of us would sit around, sometimes late into the night, smoking, drinking, and arguing and of course listening. The flow of Churchill’s rhetoric once it got under way was irresistible.  Nevertheless, he quite naturally allowed rival themes to be put forward.”

Second, his bold defiance. One of his best-remembered speeches was the one he gave before Parliament on June 4, 1940, as France was collapsing before the Nazi juggernaut.  It provides a taste of the way his combination of bluntness and gracefulness could be inspiring.

“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.  We shall go on to the end.  We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.  We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the liberation of the old.”

Several opposition party (Labour) members wept, and one Labour leader wrote, “That was worth 1000 [guns] & [was] the speech of 1000 years.”

Just two weeks later Churchill rallied the nation again.  In a speech which the New York Times  recently called “one of the greatest ever delivered by an Englishman” because of its soaring oratory—and because it is believed to have sealed the British determination to fight Hitler after the fall of France—Churchill called his countrymen to “their finest hour.”

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”