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A review by blackoxford
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
5.0
The Revival of the Revival
It has always impressed me that Donald Trump’s 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 the 18th century. What Trump has accomplished quite apart from any political disruption is the latest revival of the Revival. Elmer Gantry is a how-to 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 the 19th century, it could attract as many as 20,000 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 Lewis’s protagonist captures the social essence of Trump:
Elmer’s 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:
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 counter-factual 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 other 20th 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 late 2nd 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.
It has always impressed me that Donald Trump’s 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 the 18th century. What Trump has accomplished quite apart from any political disruption is the latest revival of the Revival. Elmer Gantry is a how-to 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 the 19th century, it could attract as many as 20,000 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 Lewis’s 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.”
Elmer’s 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 people--Golly! 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 counter-factual 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 other 20th 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 late 2nd 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.