Another year, another chance for a Churchill retrospective. Last weekend saw the 50th anniversary of the wartime leader’s funeral, and with considerable gusto, the media marked the occasion with a flurry of documentaries and op-eds exploring every aspect of the former PM’s life. Although in many ways this was to be expected, it was hard to ignore how one-sided a lot, if not all, of the coverage seemed.

This is not to suggest that Churchill’s most famous moment – the 1940 diplomatic tussle with Lord Halifax – was not an example of great leadership in a troubled time, and his actions throughout the Second World War should certainly be honoured.  His oratorical gifts also undoubtedly inspired countless other political legends, including Aung Sang Suu Kyi and Kwame Nkrumah, who built on his defence of democracy and liberty to inform their own struggles.

Yet the level of Winston-worship in Britain has become excessive to the point where healthy criticism of him is seen as akin to heresy.

This is troubling, as his legacy was certainly a chequered one. It involved a litany of political catastrophes that included Gallipoli, the Bengal famine, his support for the gassing of both the Kurds and the Bolsheviks, and the landslide loss of his position in the 1945 election. This is not to mention the open contempt he held for vast swathes of his own countrymen; indeed, my grandfather always maintained that Churchill’s unabashed elitism was enough to alienate someone like himself who had left the slums to fight in the war, and there were many who had a similar view. Churchill was clearly a far more divisive figure in life than he has become in death, a fact that the constant production-line of hagiographies often conveniently skip over.

This gestures towards a wider problem that goes beyond Churchill. Idolising public figures of any kind robs them of their complexity and encourages a public perception that skates over their failings. We should be wary of placing any human on a pedestal – although I will admit that trying to say that to a culture obsessed with celebrities is similar to fiddling beside a smouldering Rome.

It’s particularly problematic from a Christian perspective.  The national pressure to canonise Churchill, or indeed any political figure – similar comments pertain to Margaret Thatcher’s recent all-but state funeral, should make anyone coming from a place of faith uneasy. The image that gets promoted is not only inevitably partial and incomplete, but it can encourage a level of devotion that needs to be countered by the reminder that “only God is good”.  For the religious (and indeed the non-religious), such hero-worship can make us forget that all people are flawed, and that in the scales of the kingdom of God, the lives of the famous and influential carry no more weight than those of the ordinary.

There is certainly reason to celebrate the former PM’s wartime successes – but Churchill was not God. It is important that we remember that.

Maddy Fry

Image from wikimedia.org available in the public domain.