In Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (2020), Crystal Downing shows how the Oxford-educated novelist, playwright, and essayist was radical and subversive for not just her generation (1893-1957) but ours. The book was inspired by an article she wrote for Christianity Today on the relevance of Sayers for today’s culture, as Downing claims that “Sayers is even more relevant today than when [C.S.] Lewis wept over her death” and “her searing insight and cheeky wit can enlighten not only hesitant seekers but also long-time Christians in the twenty-first century.”1 2 3 Downing’s guide to the plays of Sayers (Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers, 2004) won the Dorothy L. Sayers Society’s 2009 prize for best Sayers scholarship, and, as both Professor of Film Studies and English Literature and co-director of Wheaton College’s Wade Center, Downing has published books on faith and culture (How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith 2006, Changing Signs of Truth 2012) as well as cinema (Salvation from Cinema: The Medium Is the Message 2016).
Sayers’s appeal to today’s disenchanted “nones” (who claim no religious belief or affiliation) should be particularly strong: Downing claims that “she would perfectly understand” them.4 Parallels can be easily drawn Sayers’s own youthful attitudes and today’s youth: she found church services “dreary” and Psalm 23 “rather smarmy,” most Christians to be “over-bearing, judgmental, and narrow-minded” (Downing’s words), and asked for cigarettes in her college care packages.5 As to mistrust of established religion, in her mid-twenties she composed the poem “The Mocking of Christ,” an exposé of hypocrisy in which opposing politicians claiming divine sanction engage in physical fights such that the observing Jesus ends up getting punched and, mimicking those who mocked him at the cross, spat on. Sayers then sought to promote the volume in which her poem was printed by asking a friend to denounce the book in Church Times so as to boost its notoriety.6
The key to Sayers’s appeal today lies however not in her youthful attitudes and antics, but in her persistent subversion of status quo Christianity. She opposed the popular, sanitized version of Jesus as meek and mild, and the subduing of “the Lion of Judah [into a] household pet” for tea parties, convenient religion, and comfortable politics.7 Thus in 1936 she delivered a lecture, “The Importance of Being Vulgar,” citing the lowbrow company often kept by Jesus, who himself “insulted respectable clergymen,” defied “sacrosanct and hoary regulations,” and asked “disagreeably searching questions.”8 When she added that Christians could be “tiresome, stupid, selfish, quarrelsome, pig-headed, and infuriating,” she did include herself, highlighting why the redemption offered by Christ was so needed.9 Admitting that since intellectuals tend to be atheists and agnostics, she rued the appearance that “it is impossible for any person with brains to be a Christian.”10 Sayers thus emphasized how man had made God into his own image so that God appeared pale and weak; but by more fully engaging our reason as well as our sense of beauty and the arts we can find a God who transforms culture, however subversively, into his own true image.
Throughout her career Sayers battled against outmoded tradition, and Christianity itself when she found it so tethered. Despite, or perhaps because of, Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century declaring women’s rights to be “dangerous & unchristian & unnatural” and women under thirty being unable to vote until 1928, Sayers delivered such essays as “Are Women Human?” (1941) and “The Human-Not-Quite-Human” (1946), before printing them in her collection, Unpopular Opinions (1946).11 She likened traditionalists to a grandmother protecting a frail, elderly God from difficult questions, though she also condemned progressives who saw God only as angry, arbitrary, and “always ready to pounce on anybody who . . . is having a bit of fun.”12 Sayers was an equal-opportunity shock artist, admitting that “I have a way of upsetting people by what I do say.”13 Her most shocking claim regarded Christianity’s most fundamental premise: instead of the death of Christ, we should speak of “the murder of God,” and a murder which needs to be not denounced but celebrated, a “shocking [story] even by human standards . . . its brutality disguised for the common man by stereotyped expressions which have lost their power to shock.”14 Downing compares Sayers to a boxer striking “blows at Christian complacency,” often receiving black eyes from “Christians who prefer stereotypical religious vocabulary to horrifying truths,” taking shots from both the left and right, as she pleads,
Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious.15
Downing wonders aloud whether Sayers would have been shocked by such twenty-first century problems as shooting sprees by adolescents at schools and internet pornography in the home, given that she witnessed how Hitler led German Christians to support the holocaust. But the greatest shock of all, she claims, is an ancient story: “God’s offer of forgiveness, even for the most despicable of sins, through the death and resurrection of Christ.”16 Christians are implored to tell such a story in all its ugliness and glory, as Sayers explains,
To make of His story something that could neither startle,
nor shock, nor terrify, nor excite, nor inspire a living soul
is to crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to open shame.17
The Shock of Dorothy Sayers
Downing pegs Sayers’s place in British culture with the phrase “The Shock of the New.” Sayers had a shockingly good education for a young woman of the time: an only child of Rev. Henry Sayers and Helen Mary née Leigh (whom Dorothy honored by using as her middle name) Sayers, young Dorothy read by the age of four, “like many future authors . . . lived largely a life of books and stories” (which she shared with her close friend and cousin Ivy Shrimpton, eight years her senior), learned from governesses before attending boarding school. At the all-women College of Somerville at Oxford University, dedicated to the arts and public life, she joined a female literary society (the “Mutual Admiration Society”), forerunner to the male “Inklings” literary group of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien fame. Sayers graduated in 1915, but did not receive a degree from Oxford until 1920 when women were so allowed. Sayers published two slim volumes of poetry in 1916 and 1918 (she had written verse from her youth), and took jobs at publishers, schools, and an advertising agency before she published her first detective novel, Whose Body? in 1923.
Sayers’s manner of writing detective fiction was shocking as well. Whose Body? shocked the genre of detective stories, standing it “on its head” as “the book manages to mock the conventions of the form and become a new kind of detective story” according to one critic.18 Specifically, Lord Peter Wimsey, her amateur aristocratic detective, could be not just satirical but romantic as well; in contrast to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, whom his author came to consider as “insufferable” and “tiresome,” Sayers rid herself, in a way, of Wimsey, by marrying him off to the character of Harriet Vane, a detective novelist. Sayers developed Wimsey “in order to make him worthy of a creative, independent woman whose intelligence was considerably more impressive than her beauty.”19 Vane’s character eventually relents to Wimsey’s proposals and agrees to marry six novels later, in Gaudy Night (1935), a mystery novel with no murder, the problem to be solved instead being one of Vane balancing her career with her marriage. Wimsey, otherwise, remained non religious, respecting Christianity but valuing its beauty (especially its liturgy and architecture) more than its spiritual claims; Wimsey thus serves as a prelude to Sayers’s later thoughts on the arts and divine creativity. Wimsey is also intermediate between G.K. Chesterton’s Jesus-loving detective Father Brown and Christie’s refined albeit secular Poirot; Sayers herself was intermediate between Chesterton and Christie as President of the London’s prestigious Detection Club, serving as its third President from 1949 until her death in 1957, Chesterton being the first and Christie the fourth.
It was the theology of Sayers, however, which most earned her the accolade of being considered “shocking.” Downing draws a parallel between the BBC series titled The Shock of the New regarding modern art and how Sayers’s plays likewise often revulsed its prim and proper Christian audiences accustomed to King James version Jesus replete with “thees” and “thous.” The Man Born to Be King, a twelve-part radio series broadcast beginning Dec. 21, 1941, created its own war zone with heavy criticism of her use of slang by the disciples; yet Sayers received thousands of letters from grateful listeners with whom the gospel in their terms resonated. Similar scandal was skirted in her 1946 play Just Vengeance in which a World War II airman who is shot down converses directly with Jesus; the play was so popular it was extended several nights and viewed by ten-thousand, including the Archbishop of York and the mother of Queen Elizabeth.
Sayers’s plays shocked not just in the language and settings she used, but in their very message. Her inaugural play, The Zeal of Thy House, for which Sayers was asked to compose to be performed in Canterbury Cathedral (as a follow up to T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral performed there years before) features William of Sens, the architect who rebuilt the cathedral after it was destroyed by fire in 1174 A.D. Sens is hewn from the same stone as Sayers’s detective Wimsey — confident, capable, discreet, and respectful of but not engaged in faith; and like Wimsey, learns deeper truths by humbling himself. Wimsey was humbled in learning to be worthy of his wife, but Sens’s pride leads to proclaiming himself a better architect than not just the entire population of Canterbury but than God Himself. But just as Sens is lifted by rope to place the keystone at the summit of an arch, his glory is laid low as the rope breaks and he is permanently crippled; Sens’s pride literally came before his fall, though he comes in time to admit “God hath changed my mind.”20 Promoting the play in London’s Sunday Times with the article “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged is the Official Creed of Christendom,” Sayers argued not just the historicity of Christ’s death and resurrection, but that he shocked those in power with his “shattering personality,” a trait which she claimed the church has overlooked.21 Such a Jesus is easily overlooked if not rejected, though Sayers declared his crucifixion the greatest murder of all time, that of God Himself. Such an event, deceptively garbed as an “orthodox creed,” can be considered nothing if not shocking, for believer and nonbeliever alike. As Sayers observes, “The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore; on the contrary, they thought Him too dynamic to be safe.”22
In The Emperor Constantine Sayers illustrates the same humility required of The Zeal of Thy House’s architect Sens, but this time with the theologian Arius who argued that as (mere) Son of God, Jesus was somehow a lesser being than God the Father. Sayers’s Arius is depicted as anything but humble, though the Council of Nicea (called by Constantine in 325 to unify doctrine) affirms Jesus to be “God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father” so that his murder on the cross retains its full shock value. By depicting and affirming such doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith (Downing extends the case to all four early ecumenical councils ending with the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which affirmed both the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus), Sayers models how such time-worn and hackneyed notions of dogma are revolutionary not only in their but in ours. Arius’s overblown confidence in his own opinions and doctrines are a lesson to a generation in which individual spirituality is often set at odds with traditional doctrine.
With perhaps a nod to A Zeal for Thy House, Downing equates such fundamental truths of the faith to the foundation of a house, declaring that
Dogma is the unchanging foundation — the orthodoxy —
upon which the architecture of Christianity is solidly built,
enabling it to accommodate renovations as culture changes.23
The centuries old truths, dogmas, are just as dynamic and shocking in our day as they were in theirs. Downing might as well here have also cited C.S. Lewis, who described the struggle to find faith as a battle between expressing our own unique voice and accepting as true that which voices before us have affirmed. Thus, Lewis concluded his Mere Christianity lectures (and book) with the following claim:
At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up yourself to Him you will not have a real self . . . In social life . . . even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever bother to be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth . . . you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever noticing it . . . Give yourself up, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it . . . Sameness is to be found among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are all the saints.24
By adhering to such fundamental (though anything but simple) yet powerful Christian doctrines, such as sin, salvation, and the like, we are set on a subversive clash with our culture. Downing develops Sayers’s claims to this in further chapters explaining how we underestimate the radical nature and work of God (“Religious Shopping and Exchange”), how we bury such volatile truths in inadequate terminology (“The Betrayal of Tradition, the Tradition of Betrayal”), how the arts can powerfully portray the very mind of God (“The Subversive Mind of the Maker”), and how Jesus’s own subversive words can challenge political parties of all stripes (“The Politics of Religion, the Religion of Politics”) before offering her own “Brief Subversive Conclusion.”
Religious Shopping and Exchange
“Exchangism” or “economy of exchange” is Downing’s description of how we often short-change the riches and grace of God by our commonplace understanding. The phrase comes from philosopher Jacques Derrida in describing how in language words are used (“exchanged”) to evoke concepts; the same idea applies to our understanding of the universe and even God Himself. For instance, words like “goodness” or “cruelty” invoke a view of the entire cosmos: how then could we judge things to be one or the other if we had no prior idea of such qualities or states? Downing reminds readers that Sayers repeatedly explained that her Christian faith was due to being convinced of the reality of sin. Without such notions, how could we then further understand God’s sacrificial love to defeat “evil” and offer “goodness,” all through an act of “grace,” our “salvation” the result of our murder of God: all words that get cheapened without the full Christian story. Other religions lack such power and so suffer their own form of “exchangism,” with rituals or good deeds being traded for a salvation that can thus be “bought.” By contrast, the Christian God ignores such trades, instead “preferring to be in relationship with all of creation, such that each and every human can be a ‘sharer’ and ‘fellow worker’ in that creation.”25 Sayers countered such “exchangisms” in such works as her novel Murder Must Advertise, the play The Heirs [not “The Buyers,” as Downing notes] of the Kingdom, The Man Born To Be King, in Whose Body? when Wimsey states that in reading the Bible, people often “find what they are looking for,” and in The Just Vengeance, when Jesus contrasts the law based on “bare merit” with God’s gifts which are “beyond desert, beyond desire.”26
The Betrayal of Tradition, the Tradition of Betrayal
“Tradition” and “Betrayal” are nearly synonymous terms for Sayers, as our ignorance of fundamental doctrine can make faith itself impossible, betraying the truth, so that we rely on mere tradition instead. Sayers herself admitted an intellectual path to faith, cautioning that
It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling;
it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation
of the universe . . . a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism.27
While stating truth effectively and compellingly are admittedly important, Sayers clarifies that “the craze for the ‘personal angle’ and the ‘human touch’ is rapidly eating away the brains of the common reader . . . nobody cares for what is said, but only for the antics of the person who said it.”28 Sayers illustrates the power of simple truth in The Light and the Life when she depicts the disciples who question Jesus about his healing the blind man as asking that perhaps he had sinned in a previous existence, a clear reference to Hindu (“exchangist”) traditional belief in salvation by reincarnation and good deeds Instead, Jesus points to the power and glory of God as the only reason for the blindness, so that people could see God’s power in healing it. Sayers even recasts Jesus’s betrayer, Judas, as “the most intelligent and committed of all the disciples,” though Sayers’s Judas sells Jesus out when he trusts his own truth rather than Jesus and construes the triumphal entry into Jerusalem as a political rather than spiritual move by Jesus.29 Sayers’s Judas thus values and trusts traditions (social expectations, and his own interpretation) over God Himself. In Sayers’s play The Bread of Heaven, Judas protests the potential cost of feeding the five thousand, but Jesus reminds him to rely on the bounty of God, not that of man. That gospel truth poses a subversive threat to tradition was further depicted when Sayers pointed out that tradition comes from the Latin root for handing over, so that (Downing reminds) reformers such as John Wycliffe who countered unscriptural doctrines and made the scriptures accessible were burned at the stake for threatening tradition. Tying faith exclusively to outmoded forms of both worship music and even scientific understanding likewise binds God’s power to inadequate human practices, Downing shows that Sayers argues.
The Subversive Mind of the Maker
The art of subversion is the focus of Downing’s chapter on Sayers’s well-known theory of creativity, titled “The Subversive Mind of the Maker.” Just as Sayers declared the “how” of mysteries as “offer[ing] the most scope for surprise and ingenuity,” so does the artist, man made in the Creator’s “own image, a maker and craftsman like Himself”, relay glorious and subversive truths into the tangible world.30 31 The angel at the end of Zeal declares “every work of creation is threefold, and earthly trinity to match the heavenly.”32 The triad consists of Creative Idea (God the Father), Creative Energy (God the Son), and Creative Power (Holy Ghost), with origination of idea at the highest level, its incarnation into the physical world likened to the work of Jesus, and the influence it has over subjects due to its work on their hearts and minds akin to a work of the Spirit.
Sayers found the sails of human creativity to be inspired by imaginative winds which retold divine truths in refreshing ways; she thus applauded the imaginative works of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Chesterton novels such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and Manalive (1912) subvert culture pieties so that not only those but the characters “turn themselves upside down quite literally” Downing explains.33 Observations from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, such as how the poet “only asks to get his head into the heavens” while the logician “seeks to get the heavens into his head” and “it splits,” obviously fuel such claims by Sayers that science, far from being “almost infallible,” is out of touch “with the whole field of poetic truth.”34 35 Sayers thus admitted to his widow that his books became “more a part of my mental makeup” than those of any other writer; she also admitted that Chesterton saved her from a possible career as a philosopher of logical positivism, clarifying if not debunking claims of faith and imagination.36 37 Of C.S. Lewis, Sayers felt his Chronicles of Narnia more powerful than his apologetic works, as they conveyed his “very strong sense of the reality of good and evil,” its imaginary worlds surpassing such “dreary” creations as those of H.G. Wells among others.38 She thus appreciated the tales of Tolkien, noting in a letter to Lewis how tempting it was for readers to find overt messages in The Fellowship of the Ring instead of enjoying its more subtle, artistic, rather than doctrinaire, themes — a criticism that Tolkien would levy on Lewis’s Chronicles.39
But while Sayers valued artistic creativity and expression, Downing reminds the reader that she warned against an “art for art’s sake” mentality, declaring that “aesthetic appreciation and emotional excitement are not substitutes for faith and works.”40 Yet the aesthetics of the Incarnation she found compelling, as God returned the favor of making man imago Dei (in the image of God) by assuming human form Himself: “He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine . . . He has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself.”41 Downing sums up Sayers’s insights on the artistry of faith by claiming that she “tend[s] to shock people by the way she maintains ancient truth by handing it over to new expressions.”42
The Politics of Religion, the Religion of Politics
Just as Chesterton declared the volatile topics of religion and politics to be the only topics really worth discussing, so did Sayers not shy away from confronting politics with religion at least, the radical Jesus at most.43 Thus she claimed that “leading authorities in Church and State considered that [Jesus] talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths.”44 The parallel between Rome and the British colonial empire was uncomfortable in her day, as she declared
God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own — in over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, He was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.45
Downing reminds that the same charges can be made of today’s empires and their politics. In Man Born to be King, the zealot Baruch exemplifies the excesses of nationalistic politics, as both Romans and the Jews he intended to help became targets; politicians like Caiaphas (a high priest with power) likewise are cast as disingenuous in the play. Patriotism, however, Sayers did not condemn, considering responsibility to one’s country honorable, such as when defending Britain against Hitler’s nationalism. Keeping Jesus above and beyond the fray is essential however, as Sayers warns that
Christianity shouldn’t make the mistake of identifying itself with any political
or economic panacea. That is fatal — and incidentally, a thing that Christ was far too
shrewd to do.46
A Brief Subversive Conclusion
Downing concludes subversively, since her conclusion, “like Sayers . . . refuses to conclude.”47 While Sayers found conclusions to often be sterile though perhaps natural, she instead advocated that to live the Christian life is to partake in “a living tradition whose essence persists unchanged while its expressions continually develop.”48 Thus one’s life takes on the aura of a work of art, as “created in God’s image we create new things” just as his “very nature is to create the new,” so that we find “new expressions that uphold ancient truth, thus shocking people with the old and the new simultaneously,” Downing explains.49 Just as Jesus was shockingly both man and God simultaneously, we should not overlook those who might surprise us, those for whom we have less natural empathy, opening ourselves in empathy and love in ways that traditional politics and religion can often overlook.
Notes:
1 Crystal Downing, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2020), Introduction, Kindle.
2 Crystal Downing, “Dorothy L. Sayers: Reluctant Prophet,” Christianity Today, June 2018, 64-68.
3 Wade Center is a research collection of works by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, and Lewis’s wife, the poet Joy Davidman; https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/academic-centers/wadecenter/.
4 Sayers, Subversive, Introduction.
5 Ibid., Introduction; vaping had not yet been invented.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., Introduction, referencing Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” in Creed or Chaos? (Manchester: Sophia Institute, 1974), 6.
8 Ibid., Introduction, referencing Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” 7.
9 Ibid., referencing Sayers, “The Church’s Responsibility,” in The Life of the Church and the Order of Society, Being the Proceedings of the Archbishop of York’s Conference: Malvern, 1941 (London: Longman’s, 1942), 58.
10 Ibid., Introduction, Sayers to F.H. Jaeger, July 23, 1941, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 2, 1937-1943, From Novelist to Playwright, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1997), 281.
11 Sayers, Subversive, 154.
12 Ibid., Introduction, Sayers, “The Dogma is the Drama” in Creed or Chaos? (Manchester: Sophia Institute, 1974), 21.
13 Ibid., Introduction, Sayers to Mrs. Stevenson, April 6, 1938, Letters, 2:71.
14 Ibid., Sayers to the Bishop of Winchester, March 17, 1942, Letters, 2:356.
15 Ibid., Introduction, Sayers, “Dogma is the Drama,” 24.
16 Downing, Subversive, Ch.1.
17 Dorothy L. Sayers, Introduction to The Man Born to Be King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 21.
18 Downing, Subversive, Ch.1, Leroy Lad Panek, Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain 1914-1940 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), 72.
19 Ibid., Ch.1.
20 Ibid., Ch.1, Dorothy Sayers, The Zeal of Thy House in Four Sacred Plays (London: Gollancz, 1948), 101.
21 Ibid., Ch.1, Dorothy Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” London Times, April 3, 1938, 6.
22 Ibid., Ch.1, Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” 3,6.
23 Ibid.
24 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 226.
25 Downing, Subversive, Ch.3.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., Sayers “Creed or Chaos?” in Creed or Chaos?, 31.
28 Ibid., Sayers to Eric Whelpton, Feb. 22, 1954, Letters The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 4:132.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., Ch. 4, Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime (1928),” in The Art of The Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Buffalo: Biblo & Tannen, 1976), 108.
31 Ibid., Sayers, The Zeal of Thy House, 103.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Digireads, 2018), Ch.II “The Maniac,”11.
35 Ibid., Sayers to Rev. C. Lattey, September 21, 1945, Letters, 3:158.
36 Ibid., Sayers to Mrs. G.K. Chesterton, June 15, 1936, Letters, 1:394.
37 Ibid., Sayers to John Wren-Lewis, Good Friday, March 1954, Letters, 4:139.
38 Ibid., Sayers to Barbara Reynolds, Dec. 21, 1955, Letters, 4:264.
39 Ibid., Sayers to C.S. Lewis, December 12, 1955, Letters, 4:261.
40 Ibid., Sayers to the editor of The BBC Quarterly, Jan. 27, 1947, Letters, 3:291.
41 Ibid., Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” 4.
42 Ibid.
43 The well-known but elusive Chesterton quote is found in Matthew Brower, “Politics — It’s Good for the Soul,” Montana Catholic Conference, Feb. 18, 2023, https://montanacc.org/politics-its-good-for-the-soul/. Chesterton adds that “Nothing of importance can be separated entirely from its social effect, which is politics, or from its ultimate value, which is religion.” Other notable quotes of Chesterton on politics include “Once you abolish God, the government becomes the God” (“Very Christian Democracy,” Christendom in Dublin), “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged” (The Cleveland Press, March 1, 1921) and “What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them,” all accessed at https://www.chesterton.org/quotations/government-and-politics/, October 1, 2024.
44 Downing, Subversive, Ch. 5, Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” 5.
45 Ibid., Sayers, Introduction to The Man Born to Be King, 7.
46 Ibid., Sayers to Dr. J.H. Oldham, Sept. 10, 1939, Letters, 2:133.
47 Downing, Subversive, Ch.6
48 Ibid., Sayers, “The Church’s Responsibility” in The Life of the Church and the Order of Society, Being the Proceedings of the Archbishop of York’s Conference: Malvern, 1941 (London: Longmans, 1942), 57-58. Italics added.
49 Downing, Subversive, Ch.6.
