I commend to you this remembrance by Robert Morrison of the Churchill-Roosevelt summit of 1941.
What I wish to leave with you are these closing lines:
This 70th anniversary of the first summit comes just as the U.S. Air Force has backed down ignominiously when challenged by a small, militant group of atheizers. For 20 years, Air Force chaplains have been offering training to those who might be called upon to launch nuclear missiles in the event of a Doomsday scenario. In the course, the Air Force chaplains dared to invoke biblical imagery and offer quotes from Scripture.
Britain’s normally conservative Daily Telegraph hooted at the now-banned course, dubbing it “Jesus Loves Nukes.” Banned as well is anything taught by Augustine of Hippo. His philosophy served for 1,600 years as the basis for just-war doctrine. It is to Augustine we looked to know why the Holocaust was wrong, why the builders of the Gulag were an evil empire. In place of Augustine, we will be directed to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, where slaughterers of innocents outvote the craven representatives of once-civilized states.
They were the kind of nations whose chosen leaders met at the first summit. Would Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill recognize the world their successors are making? Have we forsaken them and all they did for our freedom? Are we yet men of strength and courage?
How can that world seem so much farther than seventy years away? Oh, the false gods we have built for ourselves...
And they seem to be demanding their reckoning.
