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The Religious Affiliation of
G. K. Chesterton
influential author and theologian


G.K. Chesterton's devotion to Christianity is well-known, and most of his non-fiction writing deals with Christian theology. Some of his best known works of fiction are detective novels featuring a Catholic priest.

From "G.K. Chesterton's Conversion Story," by Dave Armstrong, 1991:

As early as 1911 Chesterton had said, "I think I have known intimately by now all the best kinds of Anglicanism, and I find them only a pale imitation" (Michael Ffinch, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986, 201). He told a priest and friend that: "...he had made up his mind to be received into the Catholic Church, and that he was only waiting for Frances [his wife] to come with him, as she had led him into the Anglican Church out of Unitarianism" (Ibid., 201).

Chesterton wrote... in his book on Catholic conversion: "I accepted for a time the borderland of Anglicanism; but only on the assumption that it could really be Anglo-Catholicism... I did not start out with the idea of saving the English Church, but of finding the Catholic Church" (The Catholic Church and Conversion, New York: Macmillan, 1926, 27, 30-31).

Webpage created 26 July 2005. Last modified 28 July 2005.
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