One Hundred Years ago, on July 11th 1924, Eric Liddell won the Gold medal at the Paris Olympic Games.
Eric, also known as the Flying Scotsman, was a prodigy who had recently risen to fame for his unrivaled speed in sprinting. He had trained and prepared to run in the 100m race, but that Olympic event was held on a Sunday which violated his Congregationalist religious principles. Pressure was put on him to renege on his convictions and run on the Sabath, but Eric refused. To accommodate this refusal, Eric was rescheduled for the 400m race which did not fall on the Lord’s Day. Liddell had not trained for this much longer event, and most people predicted he would not even finish in the top three racers. Eric’s reassignment caused a media frenzy, and many eyes, both judgmental and hopeful, were on Eric that July morning as he walked to the race line.
Amazingly, when the starter’s gun fired, Eric set a world record pace and won the Gold medal as easy as if it were an afternoon stroll. He had defended his nation’s honor at the games, demonstrated his globally unparalleled athleticism, and defended his faith.
That is the story of Eric Liddell that most people are familiar with. That is the story told, entertainingly although at times melodramatically, by the Oscar Winning 1981 film “Chariots of Fire.” It is a wonderful story. But is not the entire story.
What follows are my reflections on the life of Liddell after reading the unimaginably good biography “For The Glory: Eric Liddell's Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr” by Duncan Hamilton. (I can not recommend this book to you highly enough, it is an exemplar in popular history, sports journalism, and biographical narrative; all underpinned by meticulous research and in person interviews of eye witnesses.)
Following his Olympic triumph in Paris, Liddell could have easily lived the cushy life of a celebrity athlete. Hundreds of people wanted his name to be attached to advertisements, political platforms, and paid speaking tours. Eric also had a loving wife and family, plenty of reason to want to stay out of harms way. But in spite of all this, he chose to go to China to help the poor and the sick.
Liddell went to China to follow in his father’s footsteps, the Rev James Liddell, who had preached in China at the height of the Boxer Rebellion. During that war hundreds of missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians were put to death for their faith.
Because of his father’s experiences, Liddell knew the risks and the horrors of missionary work in dangerous places, but he walked into it unflinchingly all the same. When World War II broke out and Japan invaded China, Liddell didn’t flee the country. He would walk and cycle from town to town and house to house, guns often being shoved in his face by both lawless bandits and Japanese soldiers, nursing the sick and helping the hopeless.
Liddell’s face and name were often recognized by Chinese peasants as belonging to his father, and as a result of that legacy the people instinctively trusted him. I get chills seeing so clearly the hand of destiny on a man’s life. In turning his back on comfort and running towards danger, Liddell went exactly where he was supposed to be and did exactly what he needed to do.
Eventually the Japanese occupiers got tired of missionaries and other expatriates having freedom of movement, so they rounded them all up as prisoners. After being arrested, Eric Liddell and 2,000 other noncombatants, including 300 children, were all forced to live in a place called Weihsien Internment Camp. The trials that Liddell endured at Weihsien were the final leg to his race of life, and he ran it with courage to the very end.
Weihsien had originally been built by Presbyterian missionaries as a charitable and humanitarian institution, but it had been abandoned during the war and fallen into serious disrepair. Additionally, the facility was never meant to house 2,000 plus people. The resulting conditions were foul. People slept practically on top of one another, fights would break out due to lack of personal space. The toilets barley functioned and their mere smell could include nausea. Thousands of bugs and rats would invade night after night, torturing the prisoners. There was barely ever enough food, prisoners began loosing weight at a dramatic rate.
In the middle of this nightmare stood one man. He slept less and worked more than most anyone else. No job was above him, no person was beneath him. In the morning he would rise early to pray, and then for the rest of his waking hours chop wood, cary water, prepare food, wash clothes, visit invalids, and console the lonely. And of course, that man’s name was Eric Liddell.
Liddell was one of the missionaries that everyone in the camp unquestionably respected, because his faith was not mere words. He actually showed love at every moment of everyday. As a result of the people’s trust he was also called upon to be the ethical/spiritual guide of the camp. In addition to his back breaking labor, Liddell did the mental work of writing countless Bible studies and counseling people who had moral questions. He would also rush to mediate when fights broke out in order to restore peace.
There is one episode that runs the risk of being viewed as vulgar, but it is so demonstrative of Eric’s faith and authentic leadership that I must mention it. Weihsien required brutally difficult menial labor to survive, but it was also a horrifically boring, hopeless, and confined space, especially for young people. There were some diversions, like a library and occasional sports, but stifling entrapment was the rule. And when people are hopeless and trapped they begin to act recklessly.
Under these conditions, a group of young adults began to experiment with one another sexually, as a group. This development understandably shocked and upset the adults of the camp, but I believe there was a genuine question of whether or not anyone would be able to stop it. These young people were in the middle of a war during which millions of humans were being slaughtered senselessly, entrapped in a camp without hope, surrounded (as every generation is) by many hypocritical and cowardly religious examples, so why wouldn’t they abandon all moral moors and do whatever they pleased? Why not say consequences, like unplanned pregnancy, disease, and moral agony, be damned? Into that darkness ran Eric Liddell. The young people heard his voice, because they respected his example. They obeyed because he truly loved them. He defused that darkness. He set up meetings to help direct the young people’s attention towards healthier behavior with the opposite sex.
In my mind, that story exemplifies what it truly means to fight for human dignity. I can think of few recorded episodes in recent memory that have moved me as much as this one does. There, in the filth of excrement, in the depths of cruelty, in the place closest to Hell, a man fought to help his fellow men and woman be human, not mindless beasts. I am ashamed at the excuses I have made in my own life regarding the sin of lust when I consider the extraordinary example of Liddell’s courage in confronting the demons of nihilism at Weihsien.
One more anecdote on Liddell and lust as long as we’re on the topic. A prostitute was imprisoned in Weihsien and Liddell volunteered to help her organize her living space. Later the woman revealed that Eric was one of the only men in that camp to have freely helped her, without ever making a demand for sex.
Liddell died of a brain tumor, but that tumor wasn’t discovered until his death. In the lead-up to his final day on Earth all anyone had noticed was that Eric was speaking slower, moving slower, was more forgetful, and looked even more emaciated than usual. Cruelly and foolishly, Doctors misdiagnosed Eric with a nervous breakdown; an accusation that deeply hurt Eric’s feelings and faith. In his final letters to his wife, who was thankful safe at home away from the war, Liddell painfully wonders if his faith wasn’t strong after all if it hadn’t protected him from losing his nerve.
But far from calling into question his mental strength, the knowledge that Eric lived out his final months with a brain tumor allows us to see how iron willed the Scotsman truly was.
The people in the camp, and the Japanese soldiers, knew about Liddel’s famous Olympic past. He would sometimes run races just to entertain them and raise the camp’s moral. Often in these races he would allow everyone else to get a significant head start in order to keep it competitive.
Astonishingly, on death’s door with the tumor having well advanced in his body, Liddell ran one of these races and almost won it. He ended up faltering in the final stretch, but the fact he ran so strong for so long with his health being as bad as it was is honestly in contention with his Olympic medal for the greatest act of sportsmanship in his life.
Eventually Liddell’s health worsened to the point where he collapsed and was laid, as we all must one day be laid, in the room where he would die. Mercifully, in these final hours Liddell seemed to overcome his false guilt for the alleged nervous breakdown. His final words were extolling the “surrender” of his soul to God. To his last breath, Eric never compromised on his principles.
The camp, both prisoners and guards, mourned him and buried him as a hero. In China, there is a memorial built on Eric’s little grave as a token of gratitude for his selfless service to the Chinese people during one of the most bleak chapters in their history.
Eric Liddell was a good man in an evil time. He stood for human dignity in the middle of a war that brought about mass death. He brought love, cheer, and laughter to places of feces, blood, and agony. His life is an eternal rebuke to those who have faith without works, to those whose religion is something intellectual and not practical. His life is, even now, one of the best examples in the modern world of how Christian faith is a manly, courageous, and otherworldly thing; or at least ought to be.
Dear reader, I know what you’re thinking and trust me, I’ve been around the block enough times to be thinking it as well. Is any of this even true? Doesn’t it sound a little too good to be authentic? Shouldn’t there be at least one person in this camp who can remember Eric being a brute? One person who can remember him being selfish? Duncan Hamilton, the author of the Liddell biography, answers that very objection on page 8 of “For The Glory.”
“Skeptical questions are always going to be asked when someone is portrayed without apparent faults and also as the possessor of standards that appear so idealized and far-fetched to the rest of us. Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honorable to be true, as if those who knew him were either misremembering or consciously mythologizing. Not so. The evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed as easily as that. Amid the myriad moral dilemmas in Weihsein [a prison camp], Liddell’s forbearance was remarkable. No one could ever recall a single act of envy, pettiness, hubris, or self-aggrandizement from him. He bad-mouthed nobody. He didn’t bicker. He lived daily by the most unselfish credo, which was to help others practically and emotionally.” - For The Glory, pg 8.
If you don’t believe that, read the book for yourself.
I will say one more thing in passing before I close. Part of what first drew me to do research into the life of Liddell was the habit of some on the internet to mock Christianity as a source of weakness.
The reader is probably and mercifully unaware of this, but in the present day there are small online movements of people into something called “Neo paganism,” the definition of which defers radically from person to person and group to group. Never mind that this escape from Christianity has already been tried before (Chesterton was mocking the “new paganism” back in the 1900s) these people are convinced that they will be the ones to escape the bondage of Christianity and return to master morality. The German Philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche influences these people as well, if the phrase master morality hadn’t already given that away. I will confess that I have not fully read Nietzsche’s works themselves (he died drinking his own piss after having gone mad, which makes me second guess following his philosophy) but I am familiar enough with his popular criticisms of Christianity. Those criticisms the online pagans happily make their own.
So, in the online pagan’s mind, Christians are docile practitioners of Slave Morality, weak willed slugs without a will to power, repressed and resentful hypocrites who wish they could have the very things that they prohibit, and so on and so forth.
Well I say, let them have their little jokes and their oversimplifications in their Twitter echo chamber. For you see, the advantage of an actual Religion over a multi level marketing scheme designed to sell e-celebrities’ books is that it has Saints and Martys: people whose impact on the real world extends beyond empty words, into their fellow human’s very lives and souls, whose good deeds are a sweet aroma which wafts up to the very Throne of Heaven. So again I say, let these terminally online pseudo pagans laugh in their echo chamber.
But if ever one of these dunderheads should wander into the world of real men, if ever they should open their mouths and dare to say in front of an audience of educated people that Christianity is a creed devoid of vitality, courage, and honor, let them be reminded of the legacy of the Flying Scotsman.
I’m deeply moved. Thanks Silas!