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.

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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 My Early Life, 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.¹ While he relished the prose of the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, he was indifferent towards the Church of England’s formularies. Nor was he interested in the doctrinal distinctions (rather than the social and political differences) between Anglican, Presbyterian, free, and Catholic churches. He would say (repeating a quip by a nineteenth-century prime minister) that he was not a pillar but a buttress of the church, supporting it from outside.² 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.

This did not mean that Churchill lacked faith in a God or in providence. For him these signified the unintended outcomes or “unfolding purpose” that mysteriously shaped the lives of individuals, societies, nations, empires and the world, especially when they brought success and power. Chance, fortune, fate, and deliverance were his other terms for these effects, but he also retained a vestigial belief in a supreme power or being, best described as deism.³ This faith gave him a commanding self-assurance, evident in his famous recollection of his appointment as prime minister during the war crisis of May 1940: he felt —without Christian connotation—that he was “walking with destiny.” It was also a belief and a language that helped him to communicate to vast audiences an authentic conviction of ultimate victory.

The number of Churchill’s religious allusions should not be overstated. They were always sparse and brief, and it cannot be assumed that he himself remembered or found all his biblical and liturgical phrases. As Richard Toye has observed, his use of religious language was pragmatic, and drew on material gathered by officials: this included, in his first broadcast as prime minister, the “men of valour” quotation with the phrase “as the Will of God is in Heaven.”⁴ Nevertheless, the pattern of his use of religious language is significant, indicating his changing sense of the most persuasive types of appeal. A scattering of religious phrases appeared in his speeches before the 1930s, but at first his opposition to Nazi Germany was expressed as a matter of British security and the continental balance of power. As the threat grew from 1935 he spoke in more ideological terms, of upholding parliamentary government, democracy and freedom; but it was only after the Czechoslovakian crisis in 1938 and the outbreak of war in 1939 that he reached deeper, to a conflict of spiritual and moral ideas, of “Christian ethics” against “barbarous paganism.” In the summer of 1940, with military defeats, loss of allies, aerial attacks on Britain, and the fear of imminent invasion, the issue became yet more elemental: “the survival of Christian civilisation.” Aiming to stiffen defiance and preserve hope, Churchill now sometimes spoke of the British cause as sustained by God. Through the rest of 1940 and into 1942, as assistance from the USA was sought and won, his broadcasts and his dealings with President Roosevelt widened the defence of civilization and the protection of God to embrace an Atlantic alliance. Then, as the balance of military success shifted in favour of the allies, religious phrases gradually faded from his speeches.

The pressure of events, maintenance of public morale, and appeal for allies only partly explain Churchill’s more frequent resort to religious language from 1938 to 1942. He was also sensitive to the possibilities revealed by the statements of other public figures and by the evidence of popular opinion. From 1933, the speeches of Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader and prime minister from 1935 to 1937, and Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary from 1938 to 1940, had provided widely admired examples of a Christian Conservative resistance to Nazi, fascist, and communist “totalitarian” ideas.⁵ During 1940, defence of Christian civilization became a prominent theme in general public discussions about war aims and post-war reconstruction, as well as among the churches.⁶ From 1938 there had also been a marked increase in popular participation and media interest in appeals for special prayers.

Special Prayers

National occasions of special worship at times of crisis and war had a long history, although their character had changed greatly since the 1850s, as the state accepted the reality of religious pluralism. Fast and thanksgiving days were no longer ordered by the sovereign for a population assumed to belong to the established Church of England and Church of Scotland; instead, organisation of special services and prayers had been left to the various churches themselves. During the First World War all the main British churches joined together to organise a new, ecumenical, type of special worship, “national days of prayer,” with the king now simply providing public approval, as symbolic head of the nation and empire. Further days of prayer were held during the Czechoslovakian crisis, and after the outbreak of war in 1939. Within a week of Churchill becoming prime minister in May 1940, he gave his approval to another national day of prayer.⁷

These days of prayer from 1938 were marked by extensive newspaper reports, special BBC broadcasts, and crowded attendance in the churches. Churchill had every reason to encourage such clear public feelings, especially given the military collapse in the Low Countries and France. Asked to advise on whether King George VI himself should lead the call for a national day of prayer on 26 May, he went further by instructing leading ministers, civil servants, and military chiefs to join the king and queen at a special service in Westminster Abbey. As would become routine for these days of prayer, the king’s announcement was notified to the colonies, dominions, and India, creating an “empire day of prayer,” and the occasion attracted enormous popular interest: The Daily Mirror observed that “more people took part in communal prayers in Britain and the Empire…than ever before.” Some of the most devout, then and now, would regard the British army’s evacuation from Dunkirk later that month as God’s answer to these prayers.

Churchill had no belief in the efficacy of prayer, but he certainly understood the importance of prayers for sustaining public resolve. He supported Archbishop Lang’s plans for an annual national day of prayer to mark the anniversaries of the outbreak of war, with the first held on 8 September 1940. On several occasions, he took a more active part. At a low point of the war in February 1941, during the Blitz and after defeats in the Mediterranean, he encouraged Lang to arrange an additional day of prayer, held on 23 March. He even wanted to revive the old term a “day of humiliation,” in the sense of accepting the need for great sacrifices. Lang had to explain that the term had the further, unfortunate, meaning of an admission of guilt.

Churchill also used special prayers to promote allied unity. After Pearl Harbour and the American government’s entry into the war, Churchill travelled to Washington to conclude a military and economic alliance, and happened to arrive on the day that Roosevelt proclaimed a national day of prayer in the USA for New Year’s Day 1942. A few days later, Churchill suggested to the cabinet in London that the British churches should also organise a day of prayer on the same date, in order to associate the United Kingdom with the United States. Given very short notice, there was no time to arrange special church services, but with the king’s public support Lang and other church leaders issued an appeal for special prayers, which was repeated across the empire. Churchill observed the American day of prayer by joining Roosevelt at the service held in George Washington’s church in Alexandria, Virginia.⁸

When Lang proposed another British national day of prayer two months later, after defeats in North Africa, Japanese attacks in Burma, and the fall of Singapore, Churchill urged him to arrange it as soon as possible, with the effect that it was held, awkwardly for the churches, on 29 March, the day of the religious festival of Palm Sunday. Churchill was rumoured to have commented that “if we can’t bloody well fight, we’d better pray.”⁹ Prayers could also be in celebration. Following the victory at El Alamein that autumn, Churchill announced, without notice to church leaders, that church bells (silent for civil defence reasons since June 1940) should be rung on 15 November “as a call to thanksgiving and to renewed prayer,” causing Lang to publish hurriedly a public appeal on behalf of all the churches. When German resistance in North Africa finally collapsed, Churchill again telegraphed from Washington to the cabinet suggesting special prayers: church bells were rung and thanksgiving prayers were said on 16 May 1943, and a national thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral three days later was attended by the king, other national leaders, MPs, and representatives of the allied nations.

The government in general was now involved in organization of special prayers. At first national days of prayer were held on Sundays. But in 1942 Archbishop William Temple, Lang’s successor, proposed that the anniversary of the outbreak of war should be observed on the actual date, a Thursday, and include a short interruption of all war production and other activities so that the whole nation could participate in a special religious service broadcast by the BBC. Churchill referred his request to a ministerial committee, which made it an issue for cabinet decision and then action for officials. A precedent and new procedures were created: special worship became a matter for department ministers and civil servants. Not only did the appointment of national days of prayer each September now require home office and cabinet consent, but government departments started asking church leaders for special prayers to assist various war purposes: a civil defence day in November 1942, solidarity with the Russian people and church in February 1943, a “Farm Sunday” each July from 1943, the surrender of Italy in September 1943, “Battle of Britain Sunday” annually from the same month, and a “United Nations day” in June 1944.

So frequent did these government requests become that they drew criticisms from the clergy. Archbishop Temple complained that the departments “have not yet asked me to ear-mark Easter Sunday for the anniversary of the founding of the NAAFI, but no doubt they will,”¹⁰ and on behalf of other church leaders he sent government departments a reminder that there was already a detailed calendar of church festivals and prayers for charitable purposes. The departmental demands for prayers indicate the extent to which religion and the churches had been incorporated into the government war effort, with the state reclaiming some of its historic responsibility for ordering occasions of special worship. Church leaders did still determine the actual forms of worship, and continued to arrange their own special prayers. Nevertheless, as a matter of course, government departments undertook much of the organisation of the thanksgiving days and services after the defeats of Germany and then Japan in 1945.

An Ambiguous Relationship

Churchill himself became the subject of thanksgiving in the churches. It was not only the religious tone of some of his speeches that impressed church leaders. They also admired the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, agreed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941 at a meeting which was followed by a religious service complete with the singing of some of Churchill’s favourite hymns. In the past, sovereigns had been the only individuals mentioned in official wartime prayers. For the national days of prayer in 1942 and 1943, however, services in the Church of England contained a petition for “all the Ministers of State, especially the Prime Minister.” The Church of Scotland went further, both in 1942 and in its thanksgiving service at the end of the war: “We pray for Winston Churchill our Prime Minister, that as Thou hast raised him up to be a tower of strength unto our peoples in their direst need.”¹¹

Yet Churchill’s attitude towards the churches was expressed at a distance, and his use of religion remained pragmatic. He took little interest in the prime ministerial responsibility for nomination of bishops and other senior posts in the Church of England.¹² Unlike his recent predecessors—even the atheistic Neville Chamberlain—he did not address church assemblies. Once eventual victory seemed evident and the pressures to maintain morale and alliances diminished, it was not just the religious references in his speeches that declined. In contrast to his support for special prayers from 1940 to 1943, he gave no assistance to religious preparations for the allied invasion of occupied Europe. To Archbishop Temple’s annoyance, the cabinet refused approval for a national day of prayer for this vast military campaign; nor would Churchill support General Montgomery’s proposed “hallowing of the armed forces” in a special service in Westminster Abbey. In his opinion, such publicity for what was certain to be a costly attack would alert the German forces and damage the morale of the armed forces leading the assault. It was left to the king, in a broadcast on D–Day, to speak of the liberation of Europe as a great religious crusade.

When VE Day came on 8 May 1945, Churchill did lead the House of Commons to a thanksgiving service in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, but this was following parliamentary precedent, set by the Speaker and Lloyd George on Armistice Day in 1918. He at first declined to attend the national thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral five days later, relenting only after the king offered him and his wife an honorific precedence in the seating arrangements. Churchill’s public invocations of religion and encouragement of special worship in the churches were transient responses to a particular set of pressures; but for three critical years they were a striking and resonant feature of his wartime leadership.

Endnotes

1. See Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 284–312; Paul Addison, “Destiny, History and Providence: the Religion of Winston Churchill,” in Michael Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 236–50; David Reagles and Timothy Larsen, “Winston Churchill and Almighty God,” Historically Speaking, 14/5 (2013), pp. 8–10; Andrew Roberts, “Winston Churchill and Religion,” Finest Hour, 163 (2014), pp. 52–59. Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley, God and Churchill (London: SPCK, 2015) is a work of piety, not history.

2. Church Times, 29 January 1965. The saying was commonly attributed to Lord Melbourne, prime minister 1835–41, though it was also applied to Lord Eldon, lord chancellor 1806–27.

3. See William Purcell, Fisher of Lambeth (London; Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), p. 110 for Archbishop Fisher’s assessment: a belief in providence and God, but not at all linked to Christian belief.

4. Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 46, 49–50.

5. Philip Williamson, “Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–40,” English Historical Review, 115 (2000),
pp. 607–42.

6. Keith Robbins, “Britain, 1940 and ‘Christian Civilization,’” in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best, eds., History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
pp. 279–99.

7. See Philip Williamson, “National Days of Prayer: The Churches, the State and Public Worship in Britain 1899–1957,” English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 323–66, with documentation in National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation, vol. 3, Worship for National and Royal Occasions in the United Kingdom, 1871–2016, ed. Philip Williamson, Stephen Taylor, Alastair Raffe, and Natalie Mears (Woodbridge: Church of England Record and Boydell, 2020).

8. New York Times, 2 January 1942.

9. Sarah Bradford, George VI (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 453.

10. Duff Hart–Davies, ed., King’s Counsellor, Abdication and War: The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), p. 164.

11. Texts in National Prayers… 1871–2016, pp. 473, 477, 524, 548.

12. Bernard Palmer, High and Mitred: Prime Ministers as Bishop-Makers, 1837–1977 (London: SPCK, 1992), ch. 19.