Never forget to check your references #2 (If God-bothers did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them)

Authoritarian duckspeak authors and bloggers are noted for bolstering their arguments by making up quotations and attributing them to prestigious daddy-figures. Perhaps this functions as an oath of fealty, 'any lingering sense of honesty' being an outside attachment that one must sacrifice as a gesture of dedication to the cause. Much as the members of academic and criminal hierarchies use incompetence to reassure their superiors as to their loyalty.

Roy Edroso and the Alicublog commentariat looked at one such quotation and the adverb abuse it attracts:

• as a character written by G. K. Chesterton said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,”
• As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."
• “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” G.K. Chesterton famously observed 
• “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” G. K. Chesterton memorably stated 
• G.K. Chesterton beautifully articulated this when he said: Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God *

The fabrication first appears in 1997, in "The Sacred Romance" by Curtis & Eldredge.

It was quickly shared around various Deep Mystical Catholic writers like a well-sucked lollipop, all hewing to the line that "We're not prudes; sex is a great divine invention if Done Right" school of thought. One more reason to consult a celibate brotherhood for advice on sexual relationships.

Curtis and Eldredge did not provide a specific source but they did include Dooley's Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (Volume 1)** in their bibliography, which is good enough for others to pass on that detail. It will come as a surprise to absolutely no-one that one of the links of the human centipede of mis-attribution was professional sanctimoaner Ross Douthat.

the truth of Chesterton's dictum: “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

It appears that secularism in the modern world leaves a void in the human heart... a void which, in an unexpected coincidence, turns out to be exactly the shape of the New Testament god. This is why consumption of pr0n goes up as church attendance goes down, no wait.

Then came the genre of Sex-addiction / P0rn-addiction self-help books who took Pseudo-Chesterton into their catechism of obligatory quotations, the verbal equivalent of anal rosary beads. The genre agrees on the fact that popular culture, for all its wealth of sexual imagery and literature, fails to quench a thirst for transcendent spirituality, as is proven every time a book or movie attains prominence in popular culture.

In fairness we note that the brethren and cistern include at least one who knows the correct, unimproved quotation, as was penned by Bruce Marshall.

“The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God”

Intrigued by this concept of a brothel bell-ringer, I found myself sketching out his biography... a kind of secular Quasimodo -- or even a real Modo -- ascending the suitably-shaped belfry five times a day to glorify Ishtar with tintinnabulation and to call the faithful to worship. Tragically, he is afflicted with early-onset arthritis, which cripples his hands to the point where he can no longer grasp the bell-ropes and is reduced to ringing out the peals by head-butting the clappers.

I don't know his name but his face rings a bell.

But then it turned out that Ledoux did not include a belfry in his design for a Oikema or Temple of Love! ***

This is not good enough. World, be more funny.



* This variation is also sometimes pulled from the rotting cakehole of Graham Greene.

** Accessible in searchable form through the wonders of the Interwebs. The word "brothel" only appears once.

*** Ledoux used up his lifetime allowance of belfries in his Memory Palace Temple of Memory.