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The Good Book
The America portrayed by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry used to be a distant memory. But the novel’s surprising lessons are relevant again.

It has been almost 80 years since novelist Sinclair Lewis set his most iconic fictional creation, a hell-raiser turned hellfire preacher named Elmer Gantry, loose on an unsuspecting America. For a clergyman in his 70s, Gantry has proven to be remarkably hale and hearty. Op-ed writers and columnists lean continually on Lewis’ parson to represent a uniquely American type: the fundamentalist hypocrite serving up corn pone and brimstone to promulgate a strict public morality.

The type was on its way to the margins in Lewis’ day; the 1920s were when modernity won, if not in fact in the great heartland, at least in the larger self-image of a nation gorging itself on jazz, burlesque, motorcars, and bathtub gin. But the type -- the living, breathing Gantry, as it were -- is now back with a vengeance.

Take, for instance, the open letter written to President Bush by fundamentalist educator Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, on the day after the election. When Jones declares, “In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn’t deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism,” and then argues that liberals despise the president “because they despise your Christ,” he is channeling the call for a national “crusade” that Gantry delivers as the closing flourish of the novel: “ … 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!”

Elmer Gantry is sermonizing once again in the United States, and Lewis, once again, is relevant. He was, to be sure, an agnostic, and an intensely secular partisan whose rendering of the fundamentalist devout was brutal. But he was something else, too: He was a careful student and observer, and his method suggests a lesson for today’s liberals as they grapple with these hard-shell literalists who are, incomprehensible as it may seem to them, their countrymen. ...