Churchill and the Churches
Winston Churchill’s speeches and broadcasts during the Second World War contained references to God and to Christian values, and used biblical and liturgical phrases. So much is well known; there is even a genre of writings about Churchill’s religion. Much less familiar is his encouragement of special acts of worship in churches throughout the United Kingdom and the British Empire, an encouragement that was copied by other government ministers. From 1940 to 1945 appointment of special services and special prayers became acts of state, with the churches responding to ministerial requests or cabinet decisions.
The extent of religious references in Churchill’s speeches during the war was new; so too, in modern times, was the degree of government involvement in special acts of worship. These developments were related. Both were reactions to the spiritual challenges of Nazi totalitarianism and the demands and terrors of total war, while Churchill’s religious evocations were stimulated by an enormous popular participation in the appeals for prayer. Such was the admiration of the churches for Churchill’s wartime leadership that he was even included in some of the special prayers. In these senses, Churchill’s state funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1965 was especially appropriate; yet the tribute was not without irony, given his personal beliefs.
Churchill and Religion
By baptism, upbringing, social position, and cultural convention, Churchill was a member of the Church of England. But he attended church services for family, social and ceremonial reasons, not for worship. As he explained in Churchill lost his Christian faith in his twenties. He had no belief in the divinity of Christ or in Christ as a saviour, and his speeches rarely referred to Jesus or Christ. While he relished the prose of the King James Bible and , he was indifferent towards Christianity was for Churchill a matter of moral and social utility, part of the fabric that held together free, tolerant, law-abiding, progressive, and prosperous communities and nations. He used the word “Christian” in a cultural rather than substantive religious sense, as a descriptor or accentuator for such terms as “ethics” or “civilization” as these related to the English-speaking peoples and European societies.
