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Christians need to be realists when it comes to this world.

I was once very much a man of the left, but since becoming a Christian, I have moved to the right. But neither one deserves my complete allegiance. While much of conservatism I readily embrace, there are some aspects of it that I want little to do with.

A small minority of those on the Christian right, for example, are increasingly and belligerently insisting on hyper-libertarianism, neo-isolationism, pacifism, and the belief that we should basically come to the aid of no one at any time. The extreme version of this is when some of these folks even suggest we all could have just stayed out of World War II.

‘It wasn’t our war’ they will intone. ‘It was none of our business.’ Yeah right, we would all be speaking German or Japanese now if that faulty advice was followed. But worse yet, there are now some voices actually suggesting that maybe Hitler was not all that bad after all; the war was not really his fault; he might have done a bit of good; that the real villain was Churchill; and so on.

I have no time for historical revisionist nonsense like that. I have no time for such moral myopia. And even if some big-name conservatives and Christians are erring in that direction, I still reject it. Here’s the scoop: just as some folks seem to think that Trump is almost God or the Messiah or infallible, there are some who feel this way about some conservative leaders like Tucker Carlson. Well, none of them are divine. I can agree with them on many matters, yet strongly disagree on others.

Related to this, many of these same folks seem to have nothing good to say about the modern state of Israel. They seem silent on the obvious atrocities of Hamas and other terrorist groups there. And they insist that we should do nothing to help the tiny, beleaguered nation stand against its host of enemies. Again, “it’s not our fight”, they recklessly claim.

Hypercritical

With this background in mind, let me refer you to a recent piece by Konstantin Kisin in which he discusses Carlson and this sort of thinking. Those not familiar with him can read these pieces: (1)(2)

Let me first share a paragraph from a book that I discussed recently, How Democracies Perish by Jean-François Revel:

Self-criticism is, of course, one of the vital springs of democratic civilization and one of the reasons for its superiority over all other systems. But constant self-condemnation, often with little or no foundation, is a source of weakness and inferiority in dealing with an imperial power that has dispensed with such scruples. Believing one is always right, even when the facts say otherwise, is as blinding and weakening to a society as to an individual. But assuming one is always wrong, whatever the truth may be, is discouraging and paralyzing.

Not only do the democracies today blame themselves for sins they have not committed, they have formed the habit of judging themselves by ideals so inaccessible that the defendants are automatically guilty. It follows that a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does and thinks will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself when its existence is threatened. Drilling into a civilization that it deserves defending only if it can incarnate absolute justice is tantamount to urging that it let itself die or be enslaved.

I concluded that article by saying that I would be writing up a current application of this – thus this piece. The Kisin post is titled “Why They Hate Churchill”. He looks at those who might be on the ‘woke right’ in terms of joining with the left in slamming the West and dwelling only on its faults, much like Revel warned about over 40 years ago.

Says Kisin:

Winston Churchill has been the subject of leftist attacks for decades for obvious reasons: since the entire project of the Woke Left is to undermine the West’s belief in itself, they must necessarily target the people we celebrate the most. Whoever we hold up as the best of us must be torn down.

But why would some on the right who are otherwise patriotic and pro-Western, increasingly attempt to denigrate his legacy as Tucker Carlson did over the weekend in a debate with Piers Morgan?

Even though the clip is only 40 seconds long, there is much to unpack. Before we do, however, it is important to recall that last year Carlson hosted a pseudohistorian on his show called Darryl Cooper. In that episode, Carlson famously endorsed Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States” before nodding along as the “historian” explained that “Churchill was the chief villain of WWII”. My point is, Carlson’s performance in the clip you just watched is the product of an extensive ideological evolution, rather than an off-the-cuff remark made in the heat of the moment.

Carlson explains that Churchill was no hero because he didn’t save Western civilisation – if he had, where is it? As we’ve discussed previously, much of the animus behind what I call the Woke Right is understandable frustration at the sense of decline in Western self-confidence, a growing feeling of disunity and a generalised moral decay that is palpable wherever you go. While the Woke Left hates the West for its ideals, the Woke Right hates the West for failing to live up to them.

This low resolution worldview is easy to take apart, as, to his credit, Piers Morgan immediately does when he explains that Churchill led the fight against Hitler and the Nazis whose expressly stated objective was subjugation of the entire Western world. Furthermore, how can Churchill be held responsible for today’s direction of the West when he died in 1965 and was last in office 75 years ago?

It is at this point that Carlson engages in what I call “sleight of mouth”- a linguistic judo trick designed to spring the trap into which he has placed himself. “I’m not defending the Nazis!” he exclaims. This is a weird thing to say since no one at any point suggested he was defending the Nazis – what Morgan pointed out is that in standing up to Hitler, Churchill did in fact save the West from Nazi domination.

But defeating Nazism and Japanese imperialism isn’t enough for Carlson. “Everyone wants to yell at you for not loving Churchill,” Carlson continues “but where is the victory?… Where is your freedom? You can’t defend yourself, you can’t control who comes into your country, and you can’t criticise government policies or you get arrested… so how are you free? You’re a slave!”

In doing so, Carlson commits at least two logical errors. First, the idea that a man who led Britain into WWII a full eighty-five years ago should be held responsible for the state of the country today is insanity. FDR, America’s President during WWII, is widely regarded as one of America’s top three Presidents, alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. “But where is the victory?” I can just as easily screech. “What about the southern border which has been wide open for decades? Did Washington fight the War of Independence so that half-naked drug addicts could litter the streets of America’s major cities? Did Lincoln win the Civil War just to have mentally ill children mutilated by doctors?”. This approach is patently absurd.

Second, the reason we celebrate Churchill is that the choice we had was either WWII or Hitler being in charge of Europe and possibly the world. The victory is that by 1945, Western Europe was free of the tyranny and ethnic hatred the Nazis had imposed on it. In failing to understand this, Tucker does exactly what the Woke Left do to our history – they imagine an infinite array of utopian possibilities and then deride our former leaders for failing to deliver said utopia. Churchill didn’t have a choice between the land of milk and honey or fighting Hitler. He could either fight Hitler or let him take all of Europe. This is so obvious that an intelligent person like Tucker cannot possibly have missed it by accident.

My experience both in public debates and in personal relationships is that whenever someone refuses to see something that is in plain sight, it is because underneath their stated arguments lies a different agenda. As the Navajo proverb goes, “It is impossible to wake a man who is pretending to be asleep”. So, why does the Woke Right have to destroy Churchill?

I may share more of this piece in future articles, but for now, I have to say I am with Kisin on all this. As mentioned, I quite like Carlson and usually approve of what he says. But he does not offer us an inerrant word – no one does. Carlson sometimes gets it wrong. I sometimes get it wrong. You sometimes get it wrong.

Pendulum Swing

What I find here is a real problem that I have discussed before: If until recently far too many people were much too gullible, unquestioning and undiscerning about what is going on, now too many folks have gone full tilt in the other direction: they doubt everyone, and are hyper-sceptical about everything.

Several years ago, as the Covid craziness was coming to an end, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was beginning, I wrote about this very thing. As I said back then:

One quite good thing that has developed over the past two years is that so many folks have woken up to the fact that the mainstream media is not always reliable, and that our politicians are not always telling us the truth. Some of us had known this all along of course, but the way the media and most governments ran with the Covid issue made this even more clear.

But if one extreme was rightly to be avoided (fully trusting the state and the media about things like Covid), the other extreme is also to be avoided (trusting no one, questioning everything to the nth degree, and throwing away our critical faculties).

Sadly I see the latter now happening big time concerning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just because the Rona alarmists tried to claim that everything we believe is just a big conspiracy theory does NOT mean there are no actual conspiracy theories out there, especially in regard to Ukraine. I have seen far too many folks pushing what is just plain foolishness in this area.

I have lost count of those telling me with a straight face that the West, NATO, the EU and Ukraine are all part of the deep state, the NWO, a Satanist cabal, and are all fully evil, while somehow a murderous thug and KGB officer is a great Christian warrior and our knight in shining armour, saving us all while he drains the swamp.

Long story short: I am not yet ready to go down the unhelpful path of moral equivalence, claiming that the West is somehow just as bad and evil as everyone else. Yes, there are no perfect nations or cultures. They all have issues. But clearly, some things, such as the rule of law, a commitment to freedom, a proper sort of pluralism and the like, are far superior to many of the alternatives that are on offer.

Thus I fully agree with Revel and Kisin that the claim that unless the West somehow becomes perfect in every respect, it must be rejected entirely, is so much foolishness. No, Churchill did not get everything right. Nor did Reagan. Nor did or will Trump.

In a fallen world made up only of sinners (some still lost and some now redeemed), we will get a perfect nothing. We will have to make do with some compromises, some trade-offs, and some less-than-ideal solutions to a host of problems.

But because America is not now perfect does not mean that I will completely turn on it. It, of course, is in a really bad way, and folks like Trump are trying to fix much of what ails it. At the very least I will pray for America and the West, pray for its leaders, and seek to see Gospel truth come to all these lands.

I will not, in other words, be a blind-eyed optimist, nor a deep-seated pessimist. Instead, I will seek to be realistic: America and the West have plenty of faults, but things like democracy and freedom are not to be recklessly scorned and dismissed.

God alone knows when a nation – like an individual – might be beyond hope. So I will keep working to preserve what is good while resisting what is bad. That is about all any of us can do this side of heaven.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Adobe.