Elmer Gantry

Critique • Quotes

Selling the good book for fun and profit

When they got around to making the movie of Elmer Gantry—more than three decades after the novel came out—they still felt compelled to preface it with a warning:

We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear examination—that the conduct of some revivalists makes a mockery of the traditional beliefs and practices of organized Christianity!

We believe that everyone has a right to worship according to his conscience, but—Freedom of Religion is not license to abuse the faith of the people!

However, due to the highly controversial nature of this film, we strongly urge you to prevent impressionistic children from seeing it!

It shows the sensitivities that still attached to criticism of religion, especially its evangelist brand, in 1960. Which gives you an idea of the furor aroused by Sinclair Lewis's book when it was first published back in 1927. The novel Elmer Gantry was banned in various American cities and denounced by religious figures.

Yet it was the country's biggest-selling book of the year. Apparently many readers found it more thought-provoking than offensive.

The sinning preacher

The cinematic warning suggests the movie Elmer Gantry is actually a kind of defence of organized religion against "mockery", exposing the "abuse of faith" by some outside the mainstream.

However, in the novel Lewis has the satirized title character holding positions both inside and outside mainstream churches. For some years Gantry is depicted leading a large congregation in Zenith (yes, the same fictional Midwestern city introduced in Babbitt and briefly featured in Arrowsmith). As a Methodist minister he crusades against alcohol, sexual immorality and political corruption, while himself engaging in these and other wicked activities.

Gantry's worst hypocrisy may be his rapturous preaching about "love", while he himself is heartless, ruthlessly using and discarding others—often women—for his passing pleasures. He is an exhibitionist and narcissist (though that term was unknown back then) who destroys everyone close to him in the continual quest for his own success.

None of this would seem like a shocking revelation to anyone familiar with the numerous scandals and revelations about religious figures in the twentieth century. The hypocritical preacher has become a cliché in arts and entertainment, though probably never with as much detail as Lewis provides.

We are first introduced Gantry as a fast-talking barroom carouser, winning his way into becoming a travelling salesman for a farm implement company, preparatory to taking up his supposed calling as a Bible-thumper. Thenceforth, the similarity of sales and preaching is repeatedly hinted at.

At times Gantry's hyperbole threatens to lead the character to the brink of becoming a caricature. But Lewis pulls him back with some cleverly sustained writing in the narrator's third-person voice—clear, colloquial and gently ironic—between Gantry's larger-than-life outbursts.

The sharpest criticisms

Still, as the novel is presented mostly from Gantry's perspective and because he is such a charismatic personality, we can't help but root for his success, even as we recognize his deviousness. It helps that most of the people and institutions around him are also morally compromised, or weak enough to be easily manipulated.

One exception is the tragic figure of Frank Shallard who also gets some of the narrative perspective treatment. It is through him the sharpest criticisms of religion are expressed in the novel.

Gantry and Shallard meet early on as students at a theology seminar and their paths continue to cross as they progress in their clerical careers. Shallard's sincere belief contrasts with Gantry's opportunism. But he comes to question his faith, the value of his religious training, and the motivations of his supposedly pious colleagues. Shallard is honest in every way Gantry is false, which eventually brings about his pathetic downfall while the undeserving Gantry rises to ecclesiastical heights.

Gantry is never is forced to answer for his misdeeds. This may be the bravest part of Lewis's critique of religious practice in Elmer Gantry. For another author it would have been tempting to have Gantry exposed and brought crashing down once and for all.

But each time his downfall seems imminent, he manages to connive his way out of it—with a fake redemption even as the novel closes. Gantry is an charlatan to the end. One we cannot help but be enchanted by, even as we are disgusted.

Critique • Quotes

See also:

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Buy the book:

Elmer Gantry

On Twitter: