Advocacy of Catholicism Chesterton's views, in contrast to Shaw and others, became increasingly focused towards the Church. In
Orthodoxy he writes: "The worship of will is the negation of will... If Mr Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, 'Will something', that is tantamount to saying, 'I do not mind what you will', and that is tantamount to saying, 'I have no will in the matter.' You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular." Chesterton's
The Everlasting Man contributed to
C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to
Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947) "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton's
The Everlasting Man". The book was cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life". Chesterton's hymn "O God of Earth and Altar" was printed in
The Commonwealth and was included in
The English Hymnal in 1906. Several lines of the hymn appear in the beginning of the song "Revelations" by the British heavy metal band
Iron Maiden on their 1983 album
Piece of Mind. Lead singer
Bruce Dickinson in an interview stated "I have a fondness for hymns. I love some of the ritual, the beautiful words,
Jerusalem and there was another one, with words by G. K. Chesterton
O God of Earth and Altar – very fire and brimstone: 'Bow down and hear our cry'. I used that for an Iron Maiden song, "Revelations". In my strange and clumsy way I was trying to say look it's all the same stuff." French philosopher
Étienne Gilson praised Chesterton's
book on Thomas Aquinas: "I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on Saint Thomas... the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame." Archbishop
Fulton J. Sheen, the author of 70 books, identified Chesterton as the stylist who had the greatest impact on his own writing, stating in his autobiography
Treasure in Clay, "the greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite." Chesterton wrote the introduction to Sheen's book
God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy; A Critical Study in the Light of the Philosophy of Saint Thomas.
Common sense Chesterton has been called "The Apostle of Common Sense". He was critical of the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, who though very clever, were saying things that he considered nonsensical. This is illustrated again in
Orthodoxy: "Thus when Mr H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), 'All chairs are quite different', he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them 'all chairs'."
Conservatism Although Chesterton was an early member of the
Fabian Society, he resigned at the time of the
Second Boer War. He is often identified as a
traditionalist conservative due to his staunch support of tradition, expressed in
Orthodoxy and other works with
Burkean quotes such as the following: Chesterton has been considered among the United Kingdom's anti-imperialist conservative wing, contrasted with his intellectual rivals in Shaw and Wells. Chesterton's association with conservatism has expanded beyond British politics; Japanese conservative intellectuals, such as , have often referred to Chesterton's appeal to tradition as the "democracy of the dead". However, Chesterton did not equate conservatism with complacency, arguing that cultural conservatives had to be politically radical.
Liberalism In spite of his association with tradition and conservatism, Chesterton called himself "the last liberal". He was a supporter of the
Liberal Party until he severed ties in 1928 following the death of former Liberal Prime Minister
H. H. Asquith, although his attachment had already gradually weakened over the decades. In addition the
Daily News, for which Chesterton had been a columnist between 1903 and 1913, was aligned with the Liberals. Chesterton's increasing coolness towards the Liberal Party was a response to the rise of
New Liberalism in the early 20th century, which differed from his own vision of liberalism in several respects: it was secular, rather than being rooted in Christianity like the party's previously predominant creed of
Gladstonian liberalism, and advocated a
collectivist approach to social reform at odds with Chesterton's concern about what he saw as an increasingly interventionist and
technocratic state challenging both the primacy of the family in social organisation and democracy as a political ideal. Chesterton saw the roots of the war in Prussian militarism. He was deeply disturbed by Prussia's unprovoked invasion and occupation of neutral Belgium and by
reports of shocking atrocities the
Imperial German Army was allegedly committing in Belgium. Over the course of the War, Chesterton wrote hundreds of essays defending it, attacking pacifism, and exhorting the public to persevere until victory. Some of these essays were collected in the 1916 work,
The Barbarism of Berlin. One of Chesterton's most successful works in support of the War was his 1915 tongue-in-cheek
The Crimes of England. The work is ironic, supposedly apologizing and trying to help a fictitious Prussian professor named Whirlwind make the case for Prussia in WWI, while actually attacking Prussia throughout. Part of the book's humorous impact is the conceit that Professor Whirlwind never realizes how his supposed benefactor is undermining Prussia at every turn. Chesterton "blames" England for historically building up Prussia against Austria, and for its pacifism, especially among wealthy British Quaker political donors, who prevented Britain from standing up to past Prussian aggression.
Jews Chesterton faced accusations of
antisemitism during his lifetime, saying in his 1920 book
The New Jerusalem that it was something "for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled". Despite his protestations to the contrary, the accusation continues to be repeated. An early supporter of
Captain Dreyfus, by 1906 he had turned into an
anti-Dreyfusard. From the early 20th century, his fictional work included caricatures of Jews, stereotyping them as greedy, cowardly, disloyal and communists. The
Marconi scandal of 1912–1913 brought issues of antisemitism into the political mainstream. Senior ministers in the Liberal government had secretly profited from advance knowledge of deals regarding wireless telegraphy, and critics regarded it as relevant that some of the key players were Jewish. According to historian Todd Endelman, who identified Chesterton as among the most vocal critics, "The Jew-baiting at the time of the Boer War and the Marconi scandal was linked to a broader protest, mounted in the main by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, against the growing visibility of successful businessmen in national life and their challenge to what were seen as traditional English values." In a 1917 work, titled
A Short History of England, Chesterton considers the royal decree of 1290 by which Edward I
expelled Jews from England, a policy that remained in place until 1655. Chesterton writes that popular perception of Jewish moneylenders could well have led Edward I's subjects to regard him as a "tender father of his people" for "breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth". He felt that Jews, "a sensitive and highly civilized people" who "were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use", might legitimately complain that "Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor". In
The New Jerusalem, Chesterton dedicated a chapter to his views on the
Jewish question: the sense that Jews were a distinct people without a homeland of their own, living as foreigners in countries where they were always a minority. He wrote that in the past, his position: In the same place he proposed the thought experiment (describing it as "a parable" and "a flippant fancy") that Jews should be admitted to any role in English public life on condition that they must wear distinctively Middle Eastern garb, explaining that "The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land." Chesterton, like Belloc, openly expressed his abhorrence of
Adolf Hitler's rule almost as soon as it started. As Rabbi
Stephen Samuel Wise wrote in a posthumous tribute to Chesterton in 1937: In
The Truth About the Tribes, Chesterton attacked
Nazi racial theories, writing: "the essence of Nazi Nationalism is to preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races are impure". The historian Simon Mayers points out that Chesterton wrote in works such as
The Crank,
The Heresy of Race, and
The Barbarian as Bore against the concept of racial superiority and critiqued pseudo-scientific race theories, saying they were akin to a new religion. Mayers records that despite "his hostility towards Nazi antisemitism … [it is unfortunate that he made] claims that 'Hitlerism' was a form of Judaism, and that the Jews were partly responsible for race theory". Likewise, Ann Farmer, author of
Chesterton and the Jews: Friend, Critic, Defender, writes, "Public figures from
Winston Churchill to
Wells proposed remedies for the '
Jewish problem' – the seemingly endless cycle of anti-Jewish persecution – all shaped by their worldviews. As patriots, Churchill and Chesterton embraced Zionism; both were among the first to defend the Jews from Nazism", concluding that "A defender of Jews in his youth – a conciliator as well as a defender – GKC returned to the defence when the Jewish people needed it most."
Opposition to eugenics In
Eugenics and Other Evils, Chesterton attacked
eugenics as Parliament was moving towards passage of the
Mental Deficiency Act 1913. Some backing the ideas of eugenics called for the government to sterilise people deemed "mentally defective"; this view did not gain popularity but the idea of segregating them from the rest of society and thereby preventing them from reproducing did gain traction. These ideas disgusted Chesterton who wrote, "It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children." He derided such ideas as founded on nonsense, "as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment".
Chesterton's fence "Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton's 1929 book,
The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, in the chapter, "The Drift from Domesticity":
Distributism slogan "
Three acres and a cow" Inspired by
Leo XIII's encyclical
Rerum novarum, Chesterton's brother
Cecil and his friend,
Hilaire Belloc were instrumental in developing the economic philosophy of
distributism, a word Belloc coined. Gilbert embraced their views and, particularly after Cecil's death in World War I, became one of the foremost distributists and the newspaper whose care he inherited from Cecil, which ultimately came to be named ''
G. K.'s Weekly'', became its most consistent advocate. Distributism stands as a third way, against both unrestrained capitalism, and socialism, advocating a wide distribution of both property and political power.
Scottish and Irish nationalism Chesterton was not an opponent of nationalism in general and gave a degree of support to
Scottish nationalism and
Irish nationalism. He endorsed
Cunninghame Graham and
Compton Mackenzie for the post of
Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1928 and 1931 respectively and praised Scottish Catholics as "patriots" in contrast to Anglophile Protestants such as
John Knox. Chesterton was also a supporter of the
Irish Home Rule movement and maintained friendships with members of the
Irish Parliamentary Party. This was in part due to his belief that
Irish Catholics had a naturally distributist outlook on property ownership. ==Legacy==