Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, July 18, 2004
 | Sinclair Lewis and Elmer Gantry
Until yesterday's news of The Last Year of the War by Shirley Nelson, the only novel that I knew of that addresses Fundamentalism is Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry. I started reading it about two weeks ago, as I was able to get to it. I just finished it. |
It's been twenty years since grad school, but I equate Sinclair Lewis' style with American Realism and American Naturalism. His characters operate according to drives and needs rather than by strength of will or sense of purpose. Writers of those two genres (and they overlap) depicted men whose motives and perspectives rest on sex, liquor, and luxury or status. So it gets depressing to read these writers, as even the alleged good guys in the story are good guys because they are smart enough to bring their drives and wit together, rather than because there is any transcendent quality to them.
Nevertheless, American Realism and Naturalism define early twentieth century American Lit and show the effects of early Darwinism on literature. Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, even Mark Twain wrote in this genre, though they pre-dated Lewis by a decade or two. Their stories tended to be photographically accurate in details of setting, peopled with characters whose minds operate on a level one notch above the reasoning of very smart dogs. Indeed, in some stories, (Norris's The Octopus and London's "To Build a Fire" come to mind), the setting itself takes on the role of a powerful adversarial character.
The novel can be divided into three sections:
1. The Baptist Fundamentalism era of Gantry's life (college and first church)
2. The traveling salvation shows
3. The Methodist morality crusades (including his marriage)
In all three sections, the character of Gantry is a man hungry for what he wants. In true American Naturalist form, his senses are sharp. Colors, fabrics, textures, and the type of women around him profoundly affect his moods and aspirations. Previous writers of this genre did not depict religious men; naturalist characters usually have no more religion than a very good sled dog. But Sinclair Lewis adds a twist to this type of story by showing the lustful, restless, and hungry Gantry trying to fit his huge and powerful frame into a religion, without giving up his pleasures.
What Sinclair Lewis brings to the table is a relentless documentary style of writing. Elmer Gantry, documents some very real abuses in the Fundamentalist movement of that era, but the novel is not all that readable to modern eyes. Its powerful cynicism could easily injure new or inexperienced believers, but it is not much of a threat to the faith of vulnerable readers today, simply because the book is so detail-dense and difficult for the casual reader to enter. Getting through it is like pushing yourself through a brick wall of miniscule facts.
And Sinclair Lewis, though no longer credited as a major literary figure in this country, remains the sovereign ruler of getting the facts right. He did indeed live among church men for several months to gather data, and his knowledge of the sub strata of groups within groups in the Religious Right of his day rivals that of any church history teacher I have ever read or heard. He visited the saloons and brothels after large tent meetings and learned for himself the habits of corrupt preachers when he saw them enjoying themselves. He met with religious leaders in their own comfortable closed-door meetings and listened to them as some proclaimed their faith and others rationalized it away.
The real problem of accuracy in Elmer Gantry is that Lewis writes from a premise that there is no God at all. So Gantry and his corrupt preacher cohorts are presented as men of too much virility to be able to endure the morality of the Bible or Baptist moral code. They preach on Sunday and seduce women, drink whiskey and rye, play cards, and smoke cigars every other day of the week. They lie and they steal, ruin lives of the gullible, and betray each other. Lewis portrays the sincere pastors as men of weak constitutions and unsteady nerves. In his perspective, they can live moral lives simply because they lack the physical drives of superior physical specimens and have no courage to seize what they really want.
But under his pen, all the men (except one) of the story yearn for more physical gratification: more sex (and with women more exotic than the ones they have), more intoxicants in larger and larger quantities, and more luxury and status. Sinclair Lewis suffered from all these sharp desires all his life. He was ruined by womanizing and alcoholism, so if you understand him, you see that he was truly writing about religious experience only as far as he could understand it. He did investigate real religious corruption and documented it, but when confronted with sincere faith, he had to find a rationale to explain it away.
He excludes one remarkable character from his dismissal of faith. Otherwise, the story depicts all Christians as hypocrites with a dreadful secret atheism beneath their protests of having faith. The one exception is a Methodist minister---Andrew Pengilly---who is what we would call a follower of the "Deeper Life." Lewis spares Pengilly from the pen of cynicism. I think this character may be based on Andrew Murry or one of Murry's American followers. Alone of all the characters, it is Pengilly who sees right through Gantry's false profession. After listening to Elmer ramble on about the benefits of true religion, Pengilly asks the younger man with some alarm and concern why it is that Elmer does not believe in God at all.
Any IFB person reading this story will see scenes all too familiar to us. And the depiction of Gantry's first rise in the estimation of his fellows is a genuine, honest depiction of a rushed salvation decision and the ramifications of easy-believism. The first quarter of the book was worth reading, to me. The Fundamentalists in the story focus on exterior signs of being right with God, and they rush people to make decisions and walk the aisle under waves of guilt and emotion. Bible reading is a heavy task that men must undertake in order to be preachers.
But Lewis appears ignorant of the emphasis that some Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism places upon a secret devotional life, a seeking of the Lord's presence in the humble labor of the day. When Lewis writes about the Deeper Life character, he is at his most respectful and yet his most distant. It looks like he documented what such a character said and did (and how astonishingly like Christ he is), yet Lewis never addresses the spiritual power that has made the man able to be so unfailingly kind and generous to others. What Lewis has entirely missed among those who profess Christ is that secret devotional life by which we learn to depend upon God through Christ. I really think he honestly missed it. Having hob-knobbed with the fallen and corrupt preachers of his day, he still documented at least one outstandingly good Christian man who wanted neither fornication, nor money, nor status, nor power. The man goes out of his way to befriend the town atheist and lives at peace with all his neighbors. Lewis apparently admires Pengilly but never perceives why such a man stays true to Christ when others fall away.
Within two or three pages this character passes from the book and returns briefly in a reprise towards the end. The cynical pen of Lewis halts and pays a brief homage to him, chronicling his daily habits, his clothing, his method of speaking, and his genuine goodness, then moves on with the story.
The final quarter of the book is the weakest section to the mainstream reader, as the story becomes predictable. Yet Fundamentalist readers would be astonished at the similarities of Elmer the Crusader to Jack Hyles. Some of the scenes were positively striking, though the typical (secular) reader would not see such starkly identical words, habits, excuses, and stratagems to IFBx church leadership today.
If Sinclair Lewis were alive today and went to Hyles-Anderson College or any of its clones, he would continue to miss the crucial importance of the secret devotional life to the Christian, our dependence on God, the everlasting saving presence of Christ in us, givign us access to God by His Blood. Instead, he would see the IFBx emphasis on numbers, on soul winning, on proper dress, on submissive women, the corruption, the hypocrisy, and he would likely pen the exact same book. In much of Fundamentalism today, young people are hammered and hammered to read the Bible and pray as their duty, and yet the example of true fellowship with God from the leadership is missing. Gantry's appalling ignorance of Scripture and lack of comprehension of a devotional life would be pretty well duplicated in Jack Schaap or Bob Gray or the late Jack Hyles.
So maybe Sinclair Lewis got it right about Fundamentalism after all....
