Taming the Gods Read online

  Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.” So goes the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about the evangelical preacher Elmer Gantry, a great American character, boundless in his greed, a sinner obsessed with the Devil, a salesman of astonishing energy who believes in the greater good of his own success, a man of great charm and destructive power. It is difficult to imagine Gantry as a European. He is too capacious, too full of enthusiasm, too careless about fate, class, and tradition. In short, Elmer “Hellcat” Gantry is way too optimistic to be anything but a full-blooded American.

  Lewis wrote his book in 1926 as an indictment of American evangelical fervor. He dedicated it to H. L. Mencken, the journalistic scourge of rural boobies, boosters, and religious hucksters. We are not supposed to admire Gantry. Indeed, we should fear him and the people who believe in hustlers like him. And yet, especially in the movie version, with the magnificent Burt Lancaster, it is difficult not to admire Gantry a little, or even to like him. Playing on people’s fear of death (the main source of his power), the preacher, like the culture that spawned him, is brimming with vitality.

  The novel, as well as the film, begins, as all good stories about American preachers do, with the hero as a sinner, a drunk who sweet-talks women into shabby hotel beds only to abandon them the next morning. Folks who have found Christ like their preachers to have been sinners: that way they can identify with them; they feel like sinners themselves and live in hope of redemption. But unlike many crowd-pulling preachers, Gantry did not start as an amateur. He acquired the taste for preaching ever since he was prompted by his devout mother during Annual Prayer Week to get on his knees at the Baptist church and confess his sins: “He was certain that he would never again want to guzzle, to follow loose women, to blaspheme; he knew the rapture of salvation—yes, and of being the center of interest in the crowd.”1

  Gantry is later ordained in Paris, Kansas, as minister of the gospel in the Baptist Church while studying at the Mizpah Theological Seminary until he gets kicked out for spending Easter Sunday at a drunken orgy with a bunch of businessmen at the Ishawonga Hotel in the town of Monarch.

  The successful evangelical preacher combines a talent for showmanship, business acumen, and a plausible air of sincerity. Scholarship is a drawback in this line of work. Learning, if acquired at all, should be disguised. The point is to be a man of the people, a regular guy, and not some stuck-up, college-educated snob who thinks he is better than the rest of us. The latter type, in Lewis’s novel, is represented by the Reverend Cecil Aylston, a High Church man, English (of course), educated at Oxford. He is in fact no better than Gantry: an adulterer, a forger, and a drunk, forced to seek his fortune in the New World. But he puts on gentlemanly airs and is the devoted assistant and teacher of Sharon Falconer, a pretty young preacher whom he has instructed in the use of proper English grammar and encouraged to tone down the histrionics. Gantry took one look at Sister Sharon and instantly became Aylston’s rival for her affections.

  By then, after a stint as a salesman of agricultural tools, Gantry had taken up professional preaching again. He is promoted as “a power in the machinery world.” His sermon to the good people of Lincoln, advertised as “Increasing Sales with God and the Gideons,” promises to be “a revelation of the new world of better business.”

  There is no need to vulgarize the flock, says Aylston, in his mincing English accent. But Gantry understands that this is precisely what is needed, even though he wouldn’t put it quite that way: “The good old-fashioned hell,” that’s what people want. Sister Sharon takes his advice and, as usual with Gantry, ends up in his bed. Coached by her lover, she becomes wildly successful as a charismatic faith healer, telling people to drop their crutches and walk with the Lord (until they drop to the floor, out of sight of the ecstatic believers). Together Brother Elmer and Sister Sharon rake in the cash. But it doesn’t last. Her world literally goes up in smoke, when a smoldering cigarette lights up her prayer tent. She dies after trying to assure the panic-stricken mob that the Lord will help her lead them safely through the flames.

  The death of Sister Sharon marks the end of the movie, but not the novel. Gantry is irrepressible. Nothing will deter him in his ambition to draw bigger crowds, to make more money. No story about an American evangelical preacher is complete without a serious scandal—usually followed by redemption. Satan must have the penultimate word. So it is with Gantry, who is married by now. A sordid affair with his secretary, who attempts to blackmail him with the help of a small-time hood, is exposed in the papers. Gantry does what all good sinners do. He goes to his church and falls on his knees, stretching his arms to his flock, sobbing. And with him “they all knelt and sobbed and prayed, while outside the locked glass of the church, seeing the mob kneel within, hundreds knelt on the steps of the church, on the sidewalk, all down the block.”

  “Oh, my friends!” cried Elmer, “do you believe in my innocence, in the fiendishness of my accusers? Reassure me with a hallelujah!”

  The church thundered with the triumphant hallelujah, and in a sacred silence Elmer prayed.

  And he prays, and prays, against Satan, and for the freedom from all temptations. Then, just as he turns to include the choir in his entreaties to the Lord, he spots “a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes,” and vows to make her acquaintance. But he doesn’t let this thought interrupt the paean of his prayer for more than an instant.

  Let me count this day, Lord, as the beginning of a new and more vigorous life, as the beginning of a crusade for complete morality and the domination of the Christian church through all the land. Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!2

  Sinclair Lewis is not a subtle novelist. His message leaves no room for ambiguities. Yet Elmer Gantry is an unforgettable character who seems like a crude caricature until one has seen his real-life colleagues on television. Examples of contemporary Gantrys are not confined to the evangelical stages. They appear in all their pomp at political party conventions in election years. Ronald Reagan had some of Gantry in him, even though he was not very religious; so had Bill Clinton and, despite his lack of natural charisma, George W. Bush, a man who exemplified to many Americans the hard road from sin to redemption. The difference between selling the gospel, agricultural machinery, or a political candidate is not always obvious in the United States. For all mix show business with popular sentiment, the reassuring air of the regular guy, and the braggadocio of the carnival huckster.

  When Rush Limbaugh, a Gantry figure if there ever was one, was interviewed at his palatial Florida mansion about his extraordinary success as a right-wing political radio jockey, he explained what drove him: “Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn’t buy this house. First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”3 These words might have been written by Sinclair Lewis, and quite possibly we might have faulted him for laying it on too thick.

  In fact, Lewis’s book caused such a scandal when it was published that it put evangelical preachers on the defensive. Elmer Gantry embarrassed them—that and the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925, when a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution, which made Pentacostalists and other holy-rolling fundamentalists look foolish. Partly as a result, they shied away from politics. And yet they still managed to cast such a long shadow over American life that when the movie version of Elmer Gantry came out in 1960, the producers added a message that young and impressionable children should be shielded from the contents of the film.

  When Europeans watch American television, they are often astonished by the money-grubbing crassness of the present-day Elmer Gantrys. Here, they think, is a culture that truly divides the New World from the Old: the sheer vulgarity of the howling, sweating televangelists and the primitive no
tion of America as a land blessed by God, a City on the Hill, inhabited by a chosen people, glassy-eyed, in double-knit suits.

  Not just religion but American democracy itself appears to be corrupted by this type of commercial boosterism. People call the United States a democracy, but Americans don’t vote for their own good or along the lines of political reason but for candidates who are most successfully marketed, like movie stars or products backed by huge commercial enterprises. Venal ambition comes wrapped up in showbiz. When you add to this mix the puritanical goals of businessmen-preachers whose sermons are eagerly lapped up by millions of television viewers, Gantry’s victory seems to be complete; the borders between church and state have been fatally breached. Or so it seems to many Europeans, as well as American liberals. There are plenty of examples to back this view. But is it the whole picture?

  It is easy to forget that revivalism actually began in Europe, as did the idea of God-chosen countries. To Dutch Protestants rebelling against Catholic Spain in the sixteenth century, their republic was the new Zion. Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Protestants believed that they had a covenant with God in their struggle against papism. German Pietists in the seventeenth century and English Methodists, Shakers, and other dissenters in the eighteenth century preached that every man had his own pipeline to the Lord and salvation did not come from membership in established churches or need the mediation of official clerics.

  The First Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America was led by an English evangelist named George Whitefield, who drew huge crowds wherever he appeared from New England to Georgia. Whitefield was a born actor. David Garrick, who attended one of his prayer meetings in England, was particularly impressed by his vivid portrayals of biblical characters. Whitefield sang and danced and hollered, leaving the crowds begging for more. His American colleague, Jonathan Edwards, is perhaps better known today. Edwards’s passionate sermons about God’s wrath against sinners were famous for making people swoon and faint. But of the two, people who saw them recalled, the Englishman was the more inclined to pull out all the stops.

  However, even though the roots of American evangelical faith are in Europe, and Europeans were the first to spread the good word, it really came into its own in the New World. In the mid-nineteenth century, the established Anglican and Congregationalist churches of the early colonists had already been overtaken by Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other sectarians roaming the land of cabins and prayer meetings. They were followed by Pentacostalists, Restorationists, and charismatic healers, dancing and jerking, and speaking in tongues, while attendance at the old churches was shrinking. The trend has continued to this day. A Gallup Poll in 2004 found that 43 to 46 percent of Americans think of themselves as born-again Christians, and 77 percent of American Christians believe in Hell and 70 percent in Satan. Meanwhile in France, a largely Catholic country, less than 20 percent even bother to attend Mass. In the rest of Europe many of the most ancient churches and cathedrals are kept open for tourists, while the less distinguished ones are turned into chic apartment buildings or mosques. This is why more and more liberal Europeans sneer at America, especially when a president presents himself as a born-again sin and redemption man.

  Scorn for the culture of the United States has a long history in Europe, to be sure. When a famous Dutch writer named Menno ter Braak published an essay in 1928 titled Why I Disdain “America,” without ever having set foot there, no one found this remarkable. Amerikanismus (Heidegger’s term) was seen by Ter Braak and other conservatives as a threat to European civilization. It was shallow, devoid of high culture, greedy, obsessed with meretricious fame, and so on. An excess of religiosity was usually not something cultural conservatives in Europe held against the materialistic New World. Today’s European critics of the United States, however, who cite evangelical fervor as one of the reasons for their disdain, sound much like Menno Ter Braak. Evangelical zeal has to be the result of deep ignorance, cultural emptiness, and an addiction to celebrity and primitive pizzazz.

  There is, however, another possible explanation for the success of popular faith that throws a less negative light on the American scene. The peculiar forms that Christian faith has taken in the United States are in fact closely linked to American democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat who celebrated the birth of democracy while fearing some of its consequences, wrote that the religious atmosphere was the first thing that struck him on arrival in the United States. A pious Catholic himself, he approved of religion; indeed, he thought it was indispensible to maintain social stability, especially in a democracy. For moral ties had to be tightened, in his view, when political ties were relaxed. And this could only be done through religious faith.

  Tocqueville traveled in America during the Second Great Awakening, when Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses headed for the western frontier. It was a time of camp meetings: lonely settlers from isolated outposts would gather for weeks at a time, dancing and praying for salvation. Two things struck Tocqueville about the religious atmosphere he encountered. One was the devotion to liberty: “For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other; it is not a question with them of sterile beliefs bequeathed by the past and vegetating rather than living in the depths of the soul.”4 This was in contrast to Europe. In France, wrote Tocqueville, “I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.”5

  The other thing he noted was the worldly character of much religious preaching. While paying proper attention to the future life, American preachers freely allowed their followers “to give some of their hearts’ care to the needs of the present, apparently considering the good things of this world as objects of some, albeit secondary importance.”6 The “honest pursuit of prosperity” was clearly seen as a good thing. The pursuit of material success and hope for salvation in the next world were not distinct, but closely linked. It is a point Tocqueville might have made about Protestantism in Europe, too, but in the United States he found that this was the dominant ethos even of the Catholic faith.

  The reason why Americans were so religious, while in Europe the churches were under attack (to Tocqueville’s evident dismay), was the severance in the United States of church and state. “I have no hesitation,” wrote Tocqueville, “in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.”7 He thought it was especially important in democracies not only to have strong faith but also to keep it well away from worldly power, because political theories, not to mention political leaders, come and go. If the Americans, “who have handed over the world of politics to the experiments of innovators, had not placed religion beyond their reach, what could it hold on to in the ebb and flow of human opinions?”8

  In other words, Americans felt that they could believe freely, not just because religious freedom was protected by the Constitution but because religious authority was not in the hands of worldly politicians. Again, Tocqueville points out the difference with Europe in one of the most important passages of Democracy in America: “Unbelievers in Europe attack Christians more as political than as religious enemies; they hate faith as the opinion of a party much more than as a mistaken belief, and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of God than because they are the friends of authority.”9

  The third thing noticed by Tocqueville about American religious practices was the lack of traditional flimflam, of smells and bells, of robes, miters, and other signs of rank, or deference to custom. The Great Awakenings, all the barking and swooning and fainting notwithstanding, were an assault on the authority of established churches as much as French Jacobinism was, even though it was considerably less violent. The aim of French revolutionaries was to build a secular republic on the ashes of the oppressive Catholic
Church. Most of them were opposed to the church that baptized them. But they did not seek alternative ways to Jerusalem, in freelance churches. For the face of God still bore the features of the hated priests.

  Americans, too, revolted against the established church. In New England, for example, where Anglicanism was the official religion and heresy was still a capital offense in the eighteenth century, people were burned at the stake for their godlessness. Thomas Jefferson, himself raised in the English Church, made it clear that worldly powers should have no authority over matters of faith: “our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”10

  Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, a Francophile who believed passionately in reason. He was probably less religious than Tocqueville, but in regards to religious freedom his cause was the same as that of the Restorationists, the “New Lights” Congregationalists, and other Protestants of the Great Awakening, who believed that men could be born again through God’s grace and held no truck with the hierarchy of Old World churches. Jefferson may have had nothing much in common with the charismatic holy-rollers and fire-and-brimstone preachers of Georgia or upstate New York, but when it came to their freedom to believe whatever they wanted, in any way they wanted, he was entirely on their side.

  Elmer Gantry’s scorn for the pretensions of Cecil Aylston was shared by the early revivalists who set up shop along the new frontier. As Frank Lambert, historian of the Great Awakening, put it: “The spirit of the American Revolution tilted toward New Light individualism, encouraging an ‘egalitarian theology’ and a ‘Christianity of the people.’ . . . [They] insisted that, as in politics, in religion all are on equal footing before God.”11