Chesterton and the evangelizing of the culture

ZENIT interviews Fr. Ian Boyd, the president of the Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture of Seton Hall University, about Chesterton's book, What's Wrong With the World, which was published a hundred years ago this year:

ZENIT: One hundred years after Chesterton published this book whose centenary you are marking, does this book still contain some of the author's trademark wisdom that can speak to us today?

Father Boyd: In all of Chesterton's writings there is a prophetic quality, so you sometimes feel the people Chesterton was writing for were not the people of his day, but rather the people who read him many years later. He was a person who was a very important figure in his own time, particularly the young Chesterton in the period before the First World War. He was simply one of the best-known figures in the English letters. He became a classic writer in the sense that people quoted him who had never read him; his sayings became part of the treasury of English wisdom literature.

Chesterton saw that people in the modern age were like sheep without a shepherd, who were being misled by false shepherds. I think Chesterton saw his mission as being apostolic really, because people didn't realize the treasure that they held in their Christian faith. The notable writers of the day like the Shaws, H.G. Wells, and so on were teaching them to despise the Christian faith. Chesterton became a voice for the faithful.

Charles Williams wrote an essay about Chesterton's poetry in which he said that in the modern age there was no one to speak for God or for the ordinary human being, that God was defenseless, unarmed, and without a voice. One way of understanding Chesterton is that he stood forward to say "I will be your voice, I will be your weapon." He articulated the deepest feelings that the ordinary, mute man or woman was unable to express. He defended them from a host of modern enemies who would deprive them of that treasure [of the Christian faith]. ...

ZENIT: What is there about "What's Wrong with the World" that still speaks to us today?

Father Boyd: For one thing, what you find in it is a social theology. Chesterton and his Anglican friends, long before he became a Roman Catholic, were concerned with evangelizing the culture itself. They recognized that most ordinary people absorb the thought and the behavior of the culture in which they are immersed, so that a toxic culture wounds the people who are part of it. One good example a priest friend of mine pointed out to me is that of abortion. Fifty years ago or even closer to our time, even unbelievers and agnostic doctors looked upon abortion as something shameful. Now it is accepted by so many people; I don't think people have become worse but it means that a healthy culture has become somewhat toxic.

We must be concerned, as Chesterton was, with the cleansing of the collective mind and imagination. This is what we mean by evangelizing the culture that Chesterton and a number of other writers speak of. One thinks of Newman, about to be beatified, who began his work in the 1830s, and Chesterton, who died in the 1930s -- there were 100 years of two remarkable writers, national figures, who led that work of renewal through writing, the power of the word.

Read the entire essay. Here is an excerpt from What's Wrong With the World:



And here is much more about Chesterton and his books:



G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) Author Page | Ignatius Insight

• Articles By and About G. K. Chesterton
• Ignatius Press Books about G. K. Chesterton
• Books by G. K. Chesterton