Introduction
The issue for me is not that questions have been raised about Churchill and the Second World War. Anybody who has read anything at all about the tangled issues involved in that War knows that our side, comparatively righteous as I believe it was, was nevertheless guilty of atrocities. For a balanced (and conservative) treatment of such things, I would refer you to Paul Johnson’s Modern Times.
The issue for me is how and why conservatives have gotten suckered into the popular pastime of pulling down of statues. This is not at all the same issue.
“Wait. Look around for a second. How’d we wind up in this mob? How is it that we are marching in this particular direction, shouting these slogans?”
This will take some unpacking, so bear with me.
Fair Disclosure
To anticipate and answer a likely non sequitur, right at the front end, I acknowledge that I was born just eight years after that war ended. I grew up in an atmosphere that smelled and tasted like that post-war liberal consensus that everybody likes to talk about these days. My father-in-law fought in that war, and was wounded at Guadalcanal. My father enlisted as soon as he could, which happened to be two weeks before Germany surrendered. I remember him joking once that “they saw me coming.” After the war, Churchill famously said that an “iron curtain” had descended upon Europe, and the geopolitical movements and jockeying for position throughout the following Cold War were all ramifications and consequences of the way that earlier war had been fought and concluded. This included the Korean War, which my father spent three years fighting, earning nine battle stars there, and then the Vietnam War came. I joined the Navy in 1971, just 26 years after the close of WW2, doing my part to resist the commies from within the submarine service. Like Sarah Palin’s avatar, meaning Tina Fey, I could see Russia from my house. It was through a periscope, but I saw it.
Why do I bring this up? It is quite true that I share certain things in common with other boomers, even those on the other end of the worldview spectrum (whether politics, culture, or theology). In certain respects, the Yippies and the Jesus people the Young Americans for Freedom had more in common with each other than any of them would have had with Gen Xers. Generations do have distinct personalities and certain shared characteristics—just like different eras do.
It is one part of wisdom to be able to see and recognize this, but folly is never far away. Folly intrudes and problems arise when a critic from outside makes just such an observation, but doing so in a way that (conveniently) excludes himself from being affected by similar forces—in just the same ways and for the same reasons. Like the postmodernist who argues that all arguments are a power move, but then forgets to include his own argument in the . . . argument, the assertion that every generation (but this one) is blinkered by its own perspective is a tad self-serving. The post-war liberal consensus affected everybody, even its own dissidents. I see. And the iconoclastic and anarchistic individualism of the current era doesn’t?
“Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.”
C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books
I really like Lewis’s proposed antidote—the reading of old books. I commend this to all others. I am currently teaching an elective for sophomores (born around 2005) on Jonathan Edwards at NSA. I do this remembering very clearly what it was like to live in a stable America, and none of my students have ever had any sense of that. At the same time, we can all come together in a place that is strikingly different from where any of us grew up. Edwards had his blind spots, for sure, but they are very different than ours. And they are quite refreshing, actually.
When I consider the various online flame wars that erupt, the smell that wafts off of them is not the smell you encounter in old libraries, or used bookshops dedicated to keeping the life of the mind alive. And that, I fear, is a big part of our problem.
Chesterton’s Fence and Chesterton’s Statue
Chesterton once famously said that no one should be allowed to tear down a fence unless they could explain why it was put up in the first place. Here is how he put it.
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
G.K. Chesterton
Fences do something, like keep the deer out of the garden. If you did not know that the hills behind your house contained that many deer, then you should have found out about it before you tore down the fence. You may have only known that the fence would no longer obstruct your view of the hills—where all the deer live—but you did not know that fresh lettuce for your salads was going to be a thing of the past.
I think we should realize that Chesterton’s fence has a corollary, which we may call Chesterton’s statue. Societies put up statues and memorials for a reason, and that reason is largely for the sake of culture cohesion. A people put up markers to indicate the places and heroes and events that unify us. And no one should be allowed to pull down a statue until they can explain to us why the statue was erected in the first place, and what role it places in the current stability that we all enjoy.
In addition to this, I would also offer a most necessary addendum. I also don’t want anyone to come near any of our society’s statues and memorials with arms full of ropes, tackle and pulleys unless they are prepared to explain to us what statues are going to replace the ones that are to be torn down. As much as I believe that Abraham Lincoln was a destructive president, and I do, if the proposal is to replace his position on the pedestal with the figure of Ho Chi Minh, you can deal me out.
Blowing Up the Lincoln Memorial
And speaking of Lincoln, I would like to make a point about the three biggest memorials in Washington, D.C. There is the Washington monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. Those three men represent three distinct political factions, with three distinct worldviews. Washington was a Federalist, Jefferson was a Republican, and Lincoln was a (different kind of) Republican (the new party that replaced the Whigs when the Whigs imploded). These men were all striving for very different things, and in Lincoln’s case, a radically different thing. And yet, it has come to pass that their three respective memorials in DC are all doing the very same thing.
And this means that if someone undertook to blow up the Lincoln Memorial, he would be doing a very different thing than Robert E. Lee was doing, or even what John Wilkes Booth did. Not only would it be a different thing, it would be occurring in a different world. If someone actually blew it up, and I took to this space to explain how I thought Lincoln was out of line to send reinforcements to Fort Sumter, it would be like playing checkers on a backgammon board. Our situations are not the same, and only a blind ideologue would ever assume them to be identical.
If a band of radical Muslims in Wantage over in Oxfordshire rioted and pulled down the statue of King Alfred there, what would we make of a scholar who wrote a long think piece about how he thought Alfred’s forced conversion of Guthrum was ill-advised? The only real thing on display would be that scholar’s stupefying ignorance of what was going on right that very minute. “Um,” we might say, sidling up to him. “This isn’t really about Guthrum.”
When Princeton decided to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from one of their buildings, I confess that a conservative would have some excuse for feeling torn. There would be that impulse to chortle. Wilson was one of the worst presidents ever, if not the worst, and removing his name might seem like long-overdue justice. But that is not what it was at all. It was just part of the frenzied desire of the revolutionaries to start everything over at Year Zero.
When you belong to a generation that is busily engaged in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is not helpful to argue that some of the bathwater did need to be thrown out. Sure. I would be happy to get along without Woodrow Wilson . . . but that is not what is happening.
It started with statues of Confederate generals, but only a downy-cheeked naif could possibly think that it was going to stay limited to the Confederacy. Of course it was not going to be contained to that because it was not about that. There are times, and this is one of them, where I tend to think that the progressives are three steps ahead of everybody. As the saying goes, visit the Washington Monument while you still can. After all, someone will argue, Washington was a slave owner. Yeah, well, so were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And who was Abraham? Father of all the faithful, and earlier when I was urging the reading of old books, it appears I must also commend to Christians the apparent novelty of reading the Old Book.
If any naive Christians think that this is actually about Churchill, then I can only say to them that it won’t be long before they are wondering when a new Churchill might rise up to defend us all. Shoot, by that point, some might even be wishing for someone like Vlad the Impaler.
History in Free Fall
At a certain point in any iconoclastic frenzy, people don’t need reasons anymore. They just go with the mob. But in the early stages, people need reasons, especially conservatives, and there will always be someone there to supply those talking points. Sometimes those talking points are supplied by cranks, and sometimes they are supplied by historians who emphasize things that all of us knew all along but which we did not emphasize in the same way. The results can be destructive either way.
In such a moment, one of the things we must do is distinguish the difference between crank historians, who do all their work in free fall, and normal people who are sometimes disposed to listen to them . . . because they also are in free fall. But there is a difference between a crank in free fall because he insists on being a law unto himself, and no matter what era he lived in, he would be churning out voluminous material on bimetalism, or geocentricity, or the Jews, and a regular person who is in free fall because he was pitched out the airplane by all the respectable scholars who, as it turns out, have been lying to us about everything.
The people who have been throwing ordinary people out of airplanes, having taught them to distrust everything they hear, have no business being critical when they turn to alternatives. Those alternatives might be really bad, but the people who chased them there should really shut up about it.
Tombs of the Prophets
One or two more things should be said. Jesus had a few things to say about the fact that the memorials that unite a people can certainly be erected and maintained by hypocrites and liars.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.”Matthew 23:29–31 (KJV)
But notice here that Christ was not criticizing the martyred prophets, but rather the current and living custodians of the tombs of the prophets. We live in a fallen world, and so we must be careful. Great figures from history were not always what they are cracked up to be. But the Lord warns us that the wary eye should really be reserved for the curators, those who polish the marble floors and maintain the velvet ropes. They are frequently the ones who praise all the dead prophets while making it a point to persecute the living ones. That fact should be kept before us in all these conversations—even if it makes some of our arguments inconvenient.
Last Thing, Honest
We live in unstable times. Everything is up for grabs. The role that Christian leaders should be playing in this moment is that of building real community. The old points of cohesion have largely given way, and the people fomenting all of that are waiting in the wings with their statue of Ho Chi Minh. In such a moment, our task should be two-fold. First, don’t help them tear down anything else. I don’t care if it is a statue of Cecil Rhodes, or Winston Churchill, or Nathan Bedford Forrest—nothing else comes down. The coming anarchy doesn’t need our help, and we need to be using all of our resources to be preparing the kind of communities that would be willing to put up a statue of King Alfred instead. In celebration of the common law.