A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

A Day For G.K.

Thursday's are "G.K. Chesterton Day" here at AVITW, where we share an excerpt from a beloved Chesterton book, essay, or article. It is our hope that a new generation of Americans will re-discover the wit, wisdom, and insights of a great man, thinker, and writer.

In the opening to The Everlasting Man (1925), Chesterton takes aim at the type of journalist or social commentator whose fall-back position on social issues is to blame the religious population of a nation:

The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist concelas even his name so that nobody can kick him...[Anti-religious writers] will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented World War I, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan skeptics who are the chief enemies of the Church.  It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by World War I - they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood.  When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right.  The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

But that marks this type of modern anti-religious writer's mood about the whole religious tradition: they are in a state of reaction against it.  It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and it is well with him again when he is off on his own and far enough from it to look back and see it as a whole.  But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind.  They cannot get out from under the shadow of Christianity.  They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians.

Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism.  They live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith...

The worst judge of all is the man who these days is now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

If you are up for an intellectual challenge (with a huge pay-off), get The Everlasting Man.

Happy Reading!

-RJM