Pop quiz: which of these characters is real?
- Mickey Mouse
- The Pillsbury Doughboy
- The Cloverfield monster
- Winston Churchill
- None of the above
If you answered number #5, you get a smiley sticker. All of the characters above are fictional, at least according to a recent British survey. ABC reports: Nearly a quarter of Brits think that Winston Churchill was a myth. Forget the archival film footage, photos, or family tree. Like the Holocaust, it’s all part of an elaborate scheme.
Chalk it up to idiocy and bad education. But the truth is there’s deeper ideologies at work in the world. American universities have long abandoned objective truth for relativism. In turn, this postmodern paradigm has given rise to radical forms of historical revisionism. So you don’t believe 9/11 happened? No problem. Just reinvent it.
Which is what many Americans have done.
According to this Zogby Poll: 42% of Democrats think Bush either caused 9/11 or let it happen. That’s right — almost half of Democrats believe in a vast Rightwing conspiracy to. . . gee, I’m not exactly sure. 
Hey, if you wanna believe that GWB commissioned the slaughter of 3,000 Americans, and that the Twin Towers were felled, not by burning jet fuel, but carefully planted explosive charges (or mutant termites), don’t let the truth stop you. Forget books like Popular Mechanics’ Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. THEY’RE PROBABLY PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!
It’s more than just lack of education or political hatred — it is a willingness to detach ourselves from reality, to reconstruct truth — and history — to our own making. And it may be one of the most dangerous ideologies at work in the world.
The next several weeks, Americans will commemorate Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday, or what 
we’ve renamed Presidents’ Day. This used to be a big deal. Now it’s not. For instance, our local university no longer recognizes this holiday. Instead, Lincoln and Washington have been replaced by Caesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Two of our most important presidents are now has-beens, historical throwaways. Am I suggesting that Chavez and King are unimportant to American history? Nope. What I’m suggesting is that we’re witnessing postmodernism at work, an ideological trend to reinvent history, and reinvest it with our own values and importance. Thus, I’m predicting that by the next generation, not only will most young Americans believe that 9/11 was staged, but that Lincoln and Washington NEVER EXISTED.
To the House of Commons, Winston Churchill once said, “The truth is incontrovertible.” It’s a statement that anyone with common sense should agree with. That is, if Winston Churchill really existed. . .
Perhaps at the root of postmodernism is the me-culture. What’s important to me as an individual is really all that matters in my life. What I choose to believe is the way I will live my life. If it isn’t happening for me in my life, I choose to erase it. If it isn’t relative to me, then it doesn’t really matter in my life.
Scary stuff, Mike. If the world can’t even believe in what can be seen, how will they ever believe in the unseen? Which is why WE must take seriously the responisibility to pass the truth on to the next generation. God made an awfully big point of telling the newly freed Jews, after they crossed the Red Sea, to commemorate, to celebrate, to REMEMBER for generations to come what God did for them. At the time, don’t you think they thought, “how on earth could we ever forget miracles, plagues, a split apart ocean and a drowned army?” But God knew. And here we are all these years later, the Jews still holding Passover, but many considering the Moses story a myth…
But isn’t Churchill a myth? And Washington and Lincoln and Chavez and King? In the sense that they are a piece of history that provides identity to a people.
As far as reinventing history–this is not new with postmodernism. All cultures write history from their own perspective. They define the good guys and the bad guys, the wins and the losses.
Heather, the issue isn’t how history is interpreted by subsequent generations, but whether historical events and personages can be validated. All “interpretation” should arise from, and be tethered to, fact. None of us witnessed the Civil War first hand. This, however, does not give me license to “interpret” it any way I want. Try as I might, I cannot place George Clooney, George Soros, or Boy George at the Civil War. Alas, logic and evidence prevent me.
While Churchill’s actions and personage may be “mythologized” — overblown or diminished — the fact of his existence is beyond dispute. The moment we begin to question objective evidence for historical facts / events / figures, we begin a slide into un-reason. As a Christian, this slippery slope is all the more dangerous because our faith is founded upon historical evidence. For sure, Jesus has been mythologized. But to then assert that He is a myth, is to strip Him of the very essence of His relevance and message. The fact that on a specific morning, in a specific place, after three days in a specific tomb, the God-Man was raised to life, is far more than just an “interpretation” of history. Likewise, we can interpret and re-interpret Churchill’s words and his place in world history, but to doubt his very existence is, how shall I say it, Mickey Mouse.
Thanks for the comment, Heather. Grace to you!