Elmer Gantry (1927)

What makes this such a fascinating story is that, in spite of how villainous Elmer Gantry is (I'm assuming I didn't need to put "spoiler alert" before that, you were already aware of that, weren't you?), he doesn't know it; he feels he has no choice in the things he does, he can justify any action, and he truly believes he will turn over a new leaf. It would be easy to misunderstand how Elmer reacts, thinking he lets life lead him along like a Camus character. But Elmer, after letting life set him on the original path, takes control and drives the decisions that are made.

The story starts with Elmer's college years where he is compelled to come to Christ. Normally, when speaking of the power of Christ compelling someone, it would be the power of the Holy Spirit. However, it is the people in Elmer's life that compel him (which he admits, then backs away from.) It is then that he learns he has a gift for giving powerful speeches. With that revelation, he begins to take control of his life, paying less and less attention to what others say and paying more attention to getting whatever it is he wants. He builds his power through the ministry, while continuing to display the more base attributes of human kind.

One of the more depressing aspects of this story is how relevant it is to today's situations. Suffice to say that condemnation for sin, back room deals and payoffs, blackmail, and mindless stoicism are not a brand new product of today's world.

The reader expects a comeuppance. But, after a while, you know it isn't going to happen. It is like the cliché of watching a train run headlong to a disaster. And with each dangerous curve, disaster seems more likely. And yet, for Elmer, the train never crashes, and he careens forward reaping undeserved success after undeserved success. Even at the end of the book, (to continue this belabored analogy) the brakeman let's go and more fire is fed into the boiler, with Elmer smiling at the handle. ( )

Elmer Gantry is a womanizing troublemaker who manages to become a successful preacher despite his frequent questionable conduct, and often destroying the lives of those around him along the way.
This is really a fantastic book and one that, although it was written 80 years ago, is still quite fresh and thought-provoking. It explores religion and the lives of those who deliver it to us in a way few authors would dare. ( )

Fiery and acidic satire of the best kind. Makes fun of the hypocrisy of a certain type of preacher which I thought only existed recently as televangelists, but in fact were there long before. ( )

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Rating: 4.25* of five

The Book Description: Today universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church - a saver of souls who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence - is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since Voltaire.

My Review: I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother was a pedophile, and I was her philed pedo. She was also the most thunderational kind of christian nutball, the most conservative kind of social fascist conformist, and a chilly, appearance-obsessed harpy. Unless you were a stranger, when she presented as a pious, charming, lovely woman.

So Elmer Gantry was, for me, a documentary not a novel. I read it at maybe fifteen or so, just after I read Babbitt, and was astounded to read my own experiences of the asshole religiosifiers who surrounded me in a book over fifty years old! I hated them, powerfully and corrosively, then as now, and there was for me a giant pouring of balm over my outraged soul as I read this book: These people aren't the first! These people didn't invent this idiocy! If Lewis escaped to tell about it, so can I!

The rise of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and that ignorant ilk is not new, ladies and gents, it's happened before. This novel will show you that this kind of perverted conservative religious stupidity has always been with us, and its basic small-souled evil isn't unique to our times either.

Depending on my mood, that's either a comfort or a misery. But it always makes me feel less alone, less like I'm missing something and misinterpreting other things, to read this classic exposé of the long-standing culture of ignorant and evil exploitive "salvation artists." ( )

על הצביעות והחמדנות של הממסד הדתי במיוחד הממסד הדת​ ( )