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Knights cast a vision of victory or existential stakes to provide meaning to their struggles. For example, British prime minister Winston Churchill, on the eve of the Battle of Britain, roused the British to great valor for the nation’s Great Showdown in World War II, in this, the archetypal Knight message:

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization… Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

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