Al Mohler and Tucker Carlson may be bosom buddies in promoting Donald Trump as God’s great hope for America, but Mohler wants you to know he will gladly defend the honor of Winston Churchill that was smeared on Carlson’s podcast Monday night.
Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., made a YouTube video, filmed in the basement library of his presidential home on the seminary campus, with the former British prime minister looking over his shoulder from a painting.
“I find myself today ready to speak, to defend the honor and the historical legacy of Winston Churchill,” Mohler says solemnly.
What necessitated his video treatise on Churchill was a Monday episode of Carlson’s podcast — who was fired from Fox News and had to go rogue — in which he gave airtime to self-proclaimed historian Darryl Cooper, who has been called a “Nazi apologist.”
Carlson called Cooper “the most important historian in the United States” and asked him how he would assess Churchill, who twice served as prime minister of the United Kingdom, from 1940 to 1945 during the World War II, and then again from 1951 to 1955.
Churchill is considered an essential and pivotal figure in ending the war and defeating Adolf Hitler and Naziism.
Cooper, however, called Churchill “the villain of the Second World War.” He explained: “He didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities. … I think when you get into it and tell the story right, you see he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
His comments drew swift and vicious rebuttals from conservatives and liberals alike. In response to all the criticism, Cooper posted more comments on X saying his intention was “not to defend the actions of the Third Reich or any of its leaders” but to argue “of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation.”
That didn’t help allay the fears of his critics — right and left — who accused him of glorifying actual Nazis and vilifying the man most esteemed for saving Great Britain through the war.
Mohler joined the chorus of Churchill defenders in his 10-minute video.
As a 10-year-old boy, Mohler said, he learned about Churchill by reading an issue of National Geographic. Ever since then, “Winston Churchill has loomed large in my imagination. And honestly, it’s been a factor that has very much been involved in my understanding of how ideas work in civilization, how civilizations are established, how they continue, how they survive, good and evil in a world in which we confront both good and evil. And even when it comes to government, constitutional republic versus totalitarian and autocratic dictatorial regime.”
And thus the Southern Baptist leader who once said he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton if he voted for Donald Trump — but later flipflopped to endorse Trump — gives a brief lecture on his British hero who saved the world from a deranged dictator.
Mohler recounts how the British people revered Churchill and how the prime minister taught him as a boy about “convictional leadership.”
“That is leadership that is based in convictions and the affirmation of certain essential truths, not just political leadership for expediency, not just administrative leadership, but leadership on a world stage driven by conviction,” he says.
Churchill made mistakes and did not live a perfect life, Mohler says, but he was a decisive leader in a key moment in world history.
“When you have someone now saying in terms of public discourse that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, I think you’re turning the world upside down,” Mohler declares. “I don’t think this is even historical revisionism. I think this is something far more dangerous than that. And I don’t think it’s just about Winston Churchill. I think it’s about far more than Winston Churchill. There are lessons to be learned here. The role of an individual in history can be massive.”
Churchill, he says, is “the only one who’d been telling the truth about the Nazi threat.”
Churchill, he says, is “the only one who’d been telling the truth about the Nazi threat.”
Likewise, in 2016 Mohler joined other conservatives in warning of the threat to democracy posed by Trump and then changed his tune after Trump got elected and appointed conservative Supreme Court justices.
Less than a month before the 2020 presidential election, Mohler explained his change of heart in a lengthy post.
“I am voting for Donald Trump in 2020 and I make no apology to Bill Clinton,” he wrote. “I do apologize, but my apology is for making a dumb statement that did not stand the test of time. I am not about to apologize to Bill Clinton, who stands guilty of having desecrated the presidency by his gross sexual immorality while in office. I still believe in the necessity of character for public office, but I have had to think more deeply about how character is evaluated in an historic context.”
Despite Trump’s subsequent efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, his instigation of January 6, his conviction on sexual assault charges and his conviction on 34 counts of fraudulent business activities, Mohler stands by his man.
Mohler has said the New York State Court felony convictions against Trump were politically motivated and wrong. Yet he praised the former president for opposing medical care for transgender children and teens: “Say what you will about Donald Trump and his sex scandals, he doesn’t confuse male and female.”
On a recent episode of his podcast, “The Briefing,” Mohler gave lengthy airtime to why he believes Christians must not vote for the Democratic ticket but must vote for Trump and the Republican Party. It is the Democrats, not Trump, who are the real threat, he warns.
“I believe that our vote will have consequences, and particularly in this kind of election, and we are electing policies and we are in effect electing a party,” he argued. “And there still is a dramatic difference when it comes down to the policies that will be enacted by these two different candidates for president as you look at the Democratic and the Republican tickets.”
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