Should history's greats be held to today's standards of offense?

The trouble with reassessing history's heroes

Protesters and historical figures.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Yana Paskova/Getty Images, AP Photo, Wikimedia Commons)

Twitter's teapot held a new tempest Sunday, this one brewing over astronaut Scott Kelly's approving quote of Winston Churchill. Within half a day, buffeted by digital waves of outrage, Kelly retracted his words, tweeting that he did "not mean to offend by quoting Churchill" and pledging to educate himself "further on his atrocities."

Was Churchill a "grotesque racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history" — or a stalwart defender of freedom against the evil of Nazism, a man prone to the errors of his age but admirable nevertheless? The same historical record undergirds both assessments, and their divergence raises questions larger than Churchill's legacy alone: Should history's greats be held to today's standards of offense? Is the past to be interpreted via the present's ethical lens? If we know something to be wrong now, can we blame our ancestors for failing to know it then?

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.