Attain Elmer Gantry Authored By Sinclair Lewis Conveyed As Booklet

ELMER GANTRY was first published, it so outraged the country that it provoked, among other incidents, a personal invitation to the author for his own lynching,

In, it is as powerful and has shockingly truthful as when it was first written, Elmer Gantry In Novel And Opera

After listening to a new recording of an opera, "Elmer Gantry" by Robert Aldridge with a libretto by Herschel Garfein, I wanted to read the famousnovel by Sinclair Lewis on which the opera was based.
Composed in, the opera receives an excellent performance from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Florentine Opera Company and a cast of distinguished singers,

The outlines of the Elmer Gantry story are familiar from the novel and from its wellknown movie adaptation, Set in the American Midwest in the earlyth Century, the title character is a footballplaying hard drinking young man who becomes a minister by virtue of his speaking voice.
Gantry is an evangelist before becoming the pastor or a series of increasingly larger churches, Gantry is crude, a scoundrel, and a hypocrite, While making a name for himself as an uncompromising crusader against vice, he has a series of affairs before he is blackmailed by a pair of conniving criminals, He has a narrow escape, Gantry has become one of the stock hypocritical figures and villains of American literature,

It was valuable comparing the novel to the opera, The novel is lengthy and prolix, Although operatic librettos most commonly are inartistic and subservient to the music, the libretto for "Elmer Gantry" is a outstanding example of compression and telescoping, The opera ends with the death of Sharon Falconer,the enigmatic and charismatic woman evangelist with whom Elmer has been having an affair, Sharon Falconer is easily the most fascinating character in both the opera and the novel, In the novel, she dies before the Elmer Gantry's midpoint, Although she receives a masterly portrayal in both the novel and the opera, the opera makes her a more complex character than the book, In addition, the opera shows a great deal of sympathy for the midwest rural people who were the primary target of the revivalists, This sympathy is largely absent in Lewis,

In some ways, the opera improves upon Lewis' "Elmer Gantry" but, as with a movie, it is no substitute for reading the book, The book has substantial strengths I found myself gripped by it, While the opera drastically shortened the time frame of the story, the novel takes its course over a lengthy period, fromto the mids', The book is filled with extraordinary detail of harsh life in the American Midwest, In places the book reads more like a sociological description than an imaginative, dramatic work of fiction, When the reader meets Gantry, he is a senior at a small evangelical college, The book moves slowly through Gantry's "call" to the ministry, his seduction and manipulative abandonment of a young, naive woman, Lulu, and his education at the seminary, The key section of the book involves the portrayal of Sharon Falconer and Gantry's relationship to her, Following her death, Gantry becomes involved in New Thought, He then takes a series of Baptist pulpits, marries a woman he does not love to advance his career, has numerous affairs, and then nearly meets his downfall in a toohastily written conclusion.
For all its weaknesses, "Elmer Gantry" is a powerful novel with a strong cumulative effect,

The book has been described as "the noisiest novel in American literature, the most braying, guffawing, belching novel that we have, " Lewis' biographer Mark Schorer, as quoted in the liner notes to the opera, Besides all the rattling, the deceit, and the melodrama, Lewis' novel includes a degree of thought, The novel makes reference chapter XX, sectionto the great American idealist philosopher, Josiah Royce, a thinker Gantry cannot begin to understand, Together with the hypocrites and timeservers, the novel includes two good, thoughtful characters, Gantry's college friend Jim Lefferts, and Gantry's fellowstudent at the seminary, Frank Shallard, both of whom come to unfortunate ends.
The book also includes several scenes among clerics in which issues of science, religion, faith, fundamentalism, morals, skepticism are discussed with some sensitivity, Some of these scenes detract from the pace of the story and result in a book that drags in places, But some rethinking of the nature of religion is occurring in the novel, In places, "Elmer Gantry" is not the simple burlesque stereotype of religion that some critics have found it,

The novel was the subject of strong and understandable criticism when it appeared due to its portrayal of both revivalist and more mainline Protestant ministers and for what was perceived as the Elmer Gantry's mockery of religion.
The book is onesided on any account, The opera is much less so, But it is not the total, shrill antireligious screed of some readers, For all its length, rambling, and flaws, "Elmer Gantry" held my interest and attention, The book also has more power to inspire thought than is sometimes realized, I greatly enjoyed the AldridgeGarfein operatic version of "Elmer Gantry", They realized aptly that the book merited an artistic rendition in music, For all the virtues of the opera, I was glad to have the opportunity to think more about Elmer Gantry and about American religion by reading Lewis' classic American novel.


Robin Friedman The Revival of the Revival

It has always impressed me that Donald Trumps political rallies are little more than evangelical tent meetings.
These gatherings are a uniquely American institution dating to before the Revolution, They seem to run in cycles of popularity of approximately fifty years from the middle of theth century, What Trump has accomplished quite apart from any political disruption is the latest revival of the Revival, Elmer Gantry is a howto manual for this kind of work and has dated very little since it was written a century ago, And if Donald Trump has never read it which is likely, he has certainly learned how to live it, and to exploit its presence in American cultural DNA,

The central core of a tent meeting is of course the preacher, What he preaches about is not nearly as important as how he does it, He is a showman. And his audience expects a good show, Those who participate in a revival do not do so in order to learn or to consider, much less to argue, but to believe in something, anything really, with others whom they perceive as tribal members.


America is a Christian nation in at least this one important respect: believing is belonging, Belonging has historically been of great value to a folk on the edge of civilisation, living among others other refugees, native Americans, Black slaves with nothing in common except their location, and with constant fear of betrayal or attack.
Revivalism has always been inherently racist and super that is to say anti natural, Even at the beginning of theth century, it could attract as many as,people in what was the still largely wilderness of Kentucky,

The revival creates community by giving people something to believe in and other folk who are ready to believe, Historically revivalists have believed in rather outrageous things, from the imminence of the Second Coming to the peculiar holiness of the American Republic, to the superiority of Northern European culture.
The questionable character of such beliefs in

other than producing feelings of spiritual camaraderie is irrelevant to the participants, Their desire to believe in order to belong is overwhelming, It is not accidental that the most notorious cults, secular as well as religious, are the product of this aspect of American culture, The historical matrix of these intensely believing, intensely belonging groups is the revival,

It is remarkable how the grifting personality of Lewiss protagonist captures the social essence of Trump:

“Elmer was never really liked, He was supposed to be the most popular man in college every one believed that every one else adored him and none of them wanted to be with him.
They were all a bit afraid, a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit resentful, . . Elmer assumed that he was the center of the universe and that the rest of the system was valuable only as it afforded him help and pleasure, ”

Elmers electoral as well as clerical shenanigans are Trumpian in their shameless determination to dominate, But also in their obvious plea for acceptance, He needs his audience desperately as he plays on their need for belonging:

“The greatest urge was his memory of holding his audience, playing on them, To move peopleGolly! He wanted to be addressing somebody on something right now, and being applauded!”

Elmer, like Trump, is a creation of his audience: “He had but little to do with what he said.
The willing was not his but the mob's the phrases were not his but those of the emotional preachers and hysterical worshipers whom he had heard since babyhood, ” The lack of originality is crucial, What he says must be familiar, resonating not with thought or reason but with forgotten emotion, It is his sense of inarticulate feelings that is the source of his power,

Little does his audience know however that they will become more and more like him, and that what that means is literally diabolical because: “He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
” Elmer and Trump use religious language not because they believe it but because it is the opening to any amount of counterfactual nonsense: “Why is that it's only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience” This is not a query but a principle of method.
Faith is impervious to experience, This is what Elmer and Trump know, Essentially anyone who believes in the Virgin Birth, Predestination, and the absolute necessity of full immersion baptism will believe anything!

Elmer Gantry is not a period piece it is an insight into the perennial American culture, a culture of inherent alienation.
National and nationalistic mythology has never been sufficient to overcome the pervasive alienation among a country of immigrants, The line from George Whitfield in Savannah and his advocacy for the reintroduction of slavery in Georgia to Barton Stone at Cane Ridge a sort of Te Deum for the defeat of the native Americans in the Northwest Indian Wars to the involvement of white evangelicalism in the Jim Crow legislation after the American Civil War, to the gentile racism of Billy Graham and otherth century fundamentalists leads directly to Trump.
Elmer Gantry is not about a temporary and transient aberration in American culture but about its very constitution,

It might appear that I am overstating the case, I am not. Tertullian, a Christian apologist of the latend century explained the intellectual attitude of the new religion quite well in his dictum Credo quia absurdum “I believe because it is absurd.
” It is clear that this is the explanation for so much of modern life, particularly life with the internet, The more absurd the statements of Trump or QAnon or Tucker Carlson, the more they are taken as the way the world is, In short, The Christian idea of faith is central to American culture and generates its affection for salaciousness, It also goes a long way in explaining much of American advertising, Brothers and sisters! I say, brothers and sisters lend me your ear! I have read the words of Mr, Sinclair Lewis as set down in the good book Elmer Gantry in which this author of the earlyth century condemns organized religion, most notably the Baptist Church.
His main character, a one Mr, Elmer Gantry, as the title suggests, is an most insincere and hypocritical preacher of the faith, Insincere and hypocritical! Yes sah, that is the crux, the very essence of the text, A text of greater length than needs be, though great enough for the showing of many a various facet of the numerous Christian sects, Elmer himself floats most randomly from one to the other like the lowest sinner descending the layers of Hell, where evil takes on many a cunning disguise, Nothing is as it seems there, as can be said with Elmer Gantry where even "Scotty" the golf pro is not an actual Scot, but a fraud who's learnt his false accent from a Liverpudlian Irishman! False deceptors, ye be damned! Thus is the condemnation of Sinclair Lewis, a man who him very self has aspersion cast upon him.
Yes, it is true, my brothers and sisters! Though Mr, Lewis condemns the wayward ways of organized religion's leaders, he also condemns hisself, literally invoking his own name within these pages through the mouth of a criticizer of the author's past works.
Though he does this, still upon publication the people's of the State of New Hampshire, once known as the "Live Free or Die" State, invited Mr, Lewis to a New Hampshire jail cell, And the people of Virginia promised to hang, yes I said hang the good author for the work he had done, . . I ask you, brothers and sisters, is this Christianity Is this God's will,