The other evening I watched one of the debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a public setting. It impressed me with all that is at stake for our society in this election. As a result, I’m more motivated to be informed and involved in the process. Nevertheless, while listening to the intense concern, even fear, of those around me, I started thinking about how the elections function in relationship to God. The following quote from G. K. Chesterton provides some helpful perspective.
Englishman Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) was an accomplished “novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, biographer, journalist, and apologist” and has been called “the ultimate Edwardian man of letters.”1 As such, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Having attended the international Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932, he wrote the following in his report, Christendom in Dublin.2 His claim: Dethrone God, and the state becomes God.
“[I]t is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God. . . Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.”3
Footnotes:
1 The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, s.v. “Chesterton, Gilbert Keith” (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 304.
2 G. K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1932).
3 Quoted in Mary Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: How the Irish Lost the Civilization They Created (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 2000), 140.
