Given that, shouldn’t I be more tolerant of their 21 st-century equivalents? Alongside the egregious racist tropes that were so commonplace in the fiction of his time, he deployed caricatures of evangelicals that were every bit as blatant (and yet also every bit as true, alas) as the stock anti-Catholic slurs. The astonishing Chesterton had his blindspots, as we all do.
I find this oddly comforting, at a moment when rubbish about “evangelicals” appears on every hand. They are associated in the book with folly and even villainy, much as “Catholic” or “popish” might be in other fiction of the era. What has struck me on this encounter with The Innocence of Father Brown is how often in these stories “evangelical” and allied labels (“Calvinist” and “Puritan,” too) are terms of scorn.
To better prepare myself for this series (the lectures will later be published as a book), I’ve been reading GKC somewhat indiscriminately. His series will include three talks under the general title “Turtle Island Renaissance,” illuminating “the broad sweep of Native American art, especially in the Midwest,” and drawing on insights from Chesterton-a wonderfully improbable but, as it turns out, fruitful conjunction. This academic year, at Wheaton’s Wade Center, Milliner is giving the Hansen Lectures. There are always good reasons to pick up something by GKC, but I’ve been reading a lot of him just now in connection with a project of Wheaton College scholar Matthew Milliner, familiar to readers of First Things. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown(1911). Lately I’ve been rereading and (with Wendy) listening to the stories collected in G.