In the long line of Churchill biographies, this is one to be reckoned with. Weighing in at 3.6 pounds, I could only sample sections of the book before returning it to the readers’-in-waiting line at the Vancouver Public Library.  The “Destiny” in the title makes one wonder if Andrew Roberts is using it as a proxy for Providence, even if he only admits to using it in a deistic sense of fate.  In the introduction, the author quotes a one-time minister in Churchill’s war cabinet as saying after the war that the one instance in which he thought that he could “see the finger of God in contemporary history” was Churchill’s arrival as Prime Minister at a “precise moment in 1940.” Hmm. Roberts is guarded on this and emphasizes that Churchill was skeptical of Christianity although he allows that on at least one occasion, his wife Clementine recalled that when he became Prime Minister, Churchill said “God had created him for that purpose.” 

For the Christian reader Churchill can be an enigma. The pacifist would be quick to condemn the area bombing of German cities during World War II while others would never forgive his part in the Gallipoli fiasco.  Some Christians will be open to seeing God at work in Churchill’s life in the way that it was preserved, the leadership training that he received in both the triumphs and failures of his younger years, and then in that great moment when he came to power at a time when Hitler needed to be stopped. On this side of the demise of the British Empire, Churchill is out-of-step in his advocacy of it. But one could ask counterfactually whether Hitler could have been stopped apart from that empire? Certainly America would have been a barrier to world domination but the question begs to be asked. Roberts coyly points out the span and complexity of Churchill’s life: “In the year that Churchill was born a British general forced King Koffee of the Ashanti to end human sacrifice; in 1965, the year he died, the Beatles released “Ticket to Ride.” Yes, “Interesting Times” writ large. For a different take on Churchill’s faith by his grandson see: God & Churchill: How the Great Leader’s Sense of Divine Destiny Changed His Troubled World and Offers Hope for Ours by Jonathan Sandys & Wallace Henley, Tyndale, 2015.