LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
The Dual Alliance against Secularism
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
9/2022
The Dual Alliance against Secularism
Chesterton’s defence of the common man and woman was very unusual for an intellectual
in his time. As John Carey revealed, in The Intellectuals and the Masses, George Bernard Shaw,
Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B.
Yeats, and other leading thinkers among Chesterton’s contemporaries took a completely
different, and very dismissive, view of the working classes.42 Chesterton saw this as, at least in
part, the result of their philosophies of life, arguing that ‘It is this profound scepticism about the
common man that is the common point in the most contradictory elements of modem
thought,’43 and criticising what he viewed as the ‘tendency of all fine naturalistic thought
towards oligarchy, which can be seen from Aristotle to Hume and from Hobbes to Nietzsche’;
he contrasted this with ‘the divine vulgarity of the Christian religion’, which takes the side of
the poor.44 He satirized the views of his fellow intellectuals, writing: ‘The poor in London are not
left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice. They are not
like sheep without a shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds
are shouting at’ (Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World, p. 212). His criticisms of ‘fine
naturalistic thought’ set up a contrast in which Christianity appears as the friend of democracy,
of equality, of ‘the common man’ and woman; secular, ‘naturalistic’ philosophies are portrayed
as tending towards ‘oligarchy’ and being inherently liable to ‘profound scepticism about the
common man’.
Chesterton claimed: ‘I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the
acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for
Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly
controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion.’45 His use of
‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’ here epitomises his alignment of Christianity with ‘the common man’
and woman, with the ordinary person against the secular elite. Importantly, as the examples
above demonstrate, he stood up, not just for the value of the poor and marginalised, but for
the value and importance of their ideas, at a time when many of his peers had no idea that the
poor and uneducated might have any sort of place in intellectual debates. He was keen to make
this contrast a part of his apologetics, because it demonstrated the practical consequences of
Christian theology, as opposed to its rivals.46 Thus he made full use of the opportunity provided
by the condescending attitudes of contemporary secular intellectuals. Their disdain created a
distance between themselves and ‘the common man’ which enabled Chesterton to present his
religion as, in contrast, very clearly on the side of the poor and of ordinary people, while still
claiming that it was allied with great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, and thus in possession of
both the moral and the intellectual high ground at the same time.
By positioning Christianity in this way, Chesterton combined two age-old apologetics
strategies in an innovative and timely manner, to construct a rhetorical pincer movement
against the secular elites of his day. He argued, on the one hand, that ordinary people are in
sympathy with the Christian cause, and, on the other hand, that the finest thinkers and mystics
outside the Christian camp are on its side in the battle against secular scepticism and
materialism. This strategy dovetailed perfectly with his positioning of Christianity as a
subversive force in rebellion against the domination of secularism; the alliance with the
‘common people’ implied that Christianity represented the people against the elites of the
time, while the alliance with great thinkers and mystics suggested that true wisdom was on the
side of the Christian revolution.
A century later, Chesterton’s approach still inspires reflection. He was a pioneer in the
depiction of Christianity as a rebel against secular empire. The situation today is more
complicated with post-modern thought attacking Modernist thinking, and both critiquing
Christianity, while global cross-currents place Western intellectual debates in culturally broader
perspectives. Chesterton’s vision of Christianity as a courageous insurgent against an unjust
secular hegemony remains relevant, however; Christianity seems to be in several ways on the
margins of Western intellectual life. Apologists today might ponder how to find contemporary
analogues for his strategy of subversion and for the rhetorical pincer movement he
constructed, in relation to the largely secular elites of the early twenty-first century. His
creative use of his cultural context might assist contemporary apologists in their reflection on
the use they make of contingent cultural factors in their own work.
One particularly significant cultural analogy between his time and the present concerns the
gulf between (largely secular) elites and ordinary people. Might Chesterton’s apologetics
strategies stimulate significant lines of enquiry for contemporary Christian thinkers in relation
to this aspect of the current situation? Consider one possible issue apologists could explore:
populism. The chasm between perceived elites and many who feel marginalised and
disenfranchised has influenced the rise of populist political movements in a number of
countries. As Margaret Canovan noted, while populism ‘as an ideology is incoherent … populist
traditions enshrine human values that other ideologies have tended to neglect’ (Canovan,
Chesterton, p. 153). Could an apologetics informed by Chesterton’s insights find ways to enter
into dialogue with those ‘human values’ and thus address the alienation and anger which often
fuel populist politics? Might Chesterton’s style of theological populism help his successors to
relate apologetics to such political issues and build bridges to constituencies normally
uninterested in religious concerns?
More generally, Chesterton’s prolific output included much social, political, and cultural
criticism which engaged innovatively with the crises of his time. He skilfully wove an indirect
Christian apologetic through this seemingly heterogeneous body of work and was a more
effective apologist because he was not only an apologist. This breadth might also inspire fruitful
explorations for the current generation of apologists, especially in relation to his ability to
integrate his theological insights into his journalism and his writing in other genres, as he
addressed the cultural and political issues of his day. Chesterton’s creative cultural interactions
still provide resources for today’s apologetics as it engages with contemporary challenges.
Notes
1 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920-2000 (London: SCM Press, 2001), pp.
30-48 (pp. 36-38, 41).
2 Charles Masterman, The Condition of England, quoted in Hastings, English Christianity, p.
41.
3 Cecil Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton, a Criticism [by C.E. Chesterton], ed. Michael W. Perry
(Seattle: Inkling Books, 2007), pp. 29-30. Cecil Chesterton’s book was originally published in
1908.
4 Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), p. 20. See also Cecil
Chesterton, A Criticism, 8-9. Stopford Brooke was originally an Anglican minister but left the
Church of England in 1880, when G.K. Chesterton was six, to pursue a career as an independent
preacher and writer.
5 G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (London: Hutchinson, 1936), p. 171.
6 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in Max Weber, Max Weber: essays in sociology (Milton
Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 129-57 (p. 139) (Ebook). The words
come from the lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, first delivered in 1917 or 1918.
7 Orthodoxy, in G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1986), I, pp. 307-45, 343, 305.
8 ‘A Defence of Humility,’ in G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London: J. M. Dent, 1914;
original publication 1901), pp. 130-39 (p. 131).
9 ‘On the Negative Spirit,’ in Heretics, in Chesterton, CW, I, pp. 47-53 (pp. 48-51).
10 G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 157.
11 ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, in Chesterton, Defendant, pp. 155-62 (p. 162).
12 G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World (London; New York: Cassell, 1910), p. 121.
13 See, for example, ‘The Mercy of Mr Arnold Bennett,’ in G.K. Chesterton, Fancies versus
Fads (London: Methuen, 1923), pp. 86-92.
14 Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, Bampton lectures 2003, (Grand Rapids, Mich.;
Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), p. xv.
