Winston Churchill's relationship with the Almighty, if indeed he had one at all, has been puzzled over by many historians, perhaps because, as Gary Scott Smith points out in Duty and destiny, ‘in the final analysis, Churchill's faith is an enigma’ (p. 5). However, Churchill's faith may not be so mysterious. In My early life (1930) Churchill described his coming of age as soldier in India where he read voraciously including Winwood Read's The martyrdom of man (1872) and went through what he called a ‘violent and aggressive anti-religious phase’.Footnote ¹ Though Churchill admitted passing though this phase, he never fully embraced the Church but rather, as he famously said, chose to be ‘more in the nature of a buttress, for I support it from the outside’.Footnote ² Keeping to that view, he told Lord Moran in 1952, after a medical scare, that ‘He did not believe in another world; only in black velvet – eternal sleep.’Footnote ³ Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill's final private secretary and personal friend described him as ‘an optimistic agnostic’.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, Andrew Roberts has even said that ‘Historians and biographers of Churchill, who concur on little else about him, all agree that it was at the still impressionable age of his early-to-mid-twenties that Churchill rejected Christianity altogether.’Footnote ⁵ Churchill did however have a genius for attaching religious rhetoric to politics. He frequently wrote of historical progress and spoke of ‘Western’ or ‘Christian civilisation’, at the centre of which was the role of the British Empire, to Churchill's mind a civilising and enlightened power working toward ‘Providence’. This is where the author shines the most. He does very well to illustrate how the complexities of this belief created incongruent positions in Churchill's philosophy that were at odds, so that by ‘defending Christian civilisation’ Churchill affirmed values around race, class and gender which clashed with Christian values (p. 182). The author is also certainly good at shining a light on the role that the religious context of the age played in shaping Churchill's character and that while the religious life of many American presidents have been explored ‘the faith of British prime ministers has received much less attention’ (p. 3). In this way, Smith's second section ‘Setting the Scene’ is very useful, although the author might have included more on the role of religion in political issues contemporary with Churchill's life. For instance, nuances of Churchill's view on religion in his political life between 1901 and 1931, when he switched to the Liberals and then back to the Conservatives, might have more drawn out. In the end, the great enigma of Churchill's faith might be that he was simply an orator who knew how to invoke the spirit of God in the darkest of circumstances. In any case, Duty and destiny is a well written and valuable addition to scholarship on Churchill's relationship with religion.