From The Christian Post
By Wallace Henley
"Most people," opined Secretary of State John Kerry recently, prefer
to chunk the heritage of the past enshrined in 2,000-year old documents
(like the Bible).
In a speech to the American embassy staff in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Kerry seemed to be fretting about the "different
crosscurrents of modernity" stirring across Africa. In his defense,
there are many spiritual and cultural "crosscurrents" that do indeed
create a deadly tempest. But Kerry's remarks can too easily be
generalized to encompass the age-old legacies that make freedom possible
everywhere.
A characteristic of our age is disregard or even
disdain for history. Deconstructionist academics, infused with nihilism
at worst and existentialism at best have trained generations to see
history as either meaningless or unimportant. For others, it is a past
easily rewritten and squeezed into the profile of modern times.
"Life
must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards," said
Danish theologian-philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Thus we need leaders
with long-range focus who can link the future with the past and present.
These must be exceptional men and women who can distinguish the
historically trivial and harmful from the principles that are the very
foundations of civilization.
Winston Churchill was an exceptional
leader partly because he understood the link between the past and the
present for the sake of the future.
A century before Churchill's
generation, Voltaire, in France declared that "the history of the great
events of the world is little more than the history of crime." "Crimes,
follies, and misfortunes," is the way Oliver Goldsmith saw it. Carlyle
saw history as a mere "distillation of rumor. None, however, was as
blunt as Henry Ford, when he said, "History is bunk."
Churchill,
though, was a historian. He was not content with history as nothing
more than an assemblage of dates, places, and names. Churchill
understood history as a repository of treasures. In the Battle of
Britain, as he contemplated the defense of London, he termed it "this
strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress
and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization..."
More than perhaps anyone in his time, Churchill saw the searing difference between true civilization and the Reich Adolf
Hitler wanted to impose globally. Several times, Churchill said that
the Second World War was about the survival of "Christian civilization."1
Churchill's
insight was formed through the knowing and appreciating of the roots of
the best in society. He knew and wrote honestly about the flaws and
injustices of his own nation's history, and he knew the evils carried
out in the name of a pseudo-Christianity, but he did not lump all that
legacy into a mass that should be thrown in the dustbin.
Churchill
quoted approvingly Gladstone's view that "we rest with assurance upon
'The impregnable rock of Holy Scripture.'" On another occasion Churchill
said, "We can find nothing better than Christian Ethics on which to
build, and the more closely we follow the Sermon on the Mount, the more
likely we are to succeed in our endeavours." In our times the loss of
the vision for "Christian civilization" so central to Churchill's mind,
has also resulted in the devaluation of history. Theodore Dalrymple, a
British physician and cultural critic almost three-quarters of a century
removed from Churchill, writes about the tragedy of a nation that has
lost its awareness of history and of society itself. Civilization, he
says, "needs conservation at least as much as it needs change."
Winning
the contemporary battle for civilization mandates leadership that knows
and respects the best of his or her nation's historical heritage, and
thinks it is worth saving. We do not need in high position leaders who
are hedonists, seeing their privileges as a lark, or nihilists,
believing there is no lofty purpose or destiny for an entire
civilization, or existentialists who act in the impulse of the moment at
the sacrifice of the future.
Roger Parrot, in his book, The Longview, describes the leadership we need now when he writes,
"The
short view doesn't work, but it will continue to permeate our society,
direct our actions, and be the gold standard for 'success' until
purposeful, visionary, and determined leaders pull us back to a longview
outlook that seeks lasting value."
If one traces the logical
outcome of Kerry's view that "most" of us don't want to live by
"something that was written down a thousand plus, two thousand years
ago," then all we have left is the "short view." And, as Parrot notes,
we lose "lasting value."
Edmund Burke and others taught us to
learn from the bad in our history, and commit afresh to the good. And,
whatever the case, don't throw out the ancient wisdom that transmitted
to us the best of what we are, have been, and can be.
Wallace Henley is a pastor, author, academic, and former White House and Congressional aide.
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