Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry: A Study of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy

Abstract

Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1927) is a novel famous for its eponymous anti-hero. It received widespread criticism upon its release from America's clergy and their congregations for its characterization of Elmer himself and for its associated representation of his religious practices and beliefs. Indeed, this critical reception of Elmer Gantry has almost become a codified interpretation of the novel. This interpretation, however, is incorrect. Elmer Gantry is not a novel that ridicules Christianity. Drawing from the battle between theological conservatism and liberalism, it reveals the complexity of American belief at the turn of the twentieth century in surprisingly sensitive ways.

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) grew up fascinated with the architecture, rites, and rituals of Minnesota's German Catholic cathedrals.¹ He also grew up during a period of America's religious history that saw significant transformations affect the foundations of Christian belief. Embracing evangelical Christianity as a student at Oberlin College, Lewis vocally proclaimed the Gospels. He was a proponent of muscular Christianity and became an active member of the YMCA.² Lewis would later disavow the church at Yale University, but the subject of faith and the structure of institutional religion did not fail to have an impact on his works. And in 1927, he published Elmer Gantry, a novel that emerged from the literary heritage of Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888) and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896).

Upon publication, Elmer Gantry received widespread criticism from the clergy and the laity alike primarily because it threatened the Bible and fundamentalist conceptions of biblical truth and morality. A review of Elmer Gantry that appeared in the Sauk Centre Herald, for example, described the novel as being "the product of a mind that is dead—dead to goodness and purity and righteousness."³ H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)—Lewis's friend and journalist to whom Lewis dedicated Elmer Gantry—praised the novel as "fundamentally true" and joked that "all the Gantrys of the land rose up as one man to denounce the book."⁴ Recent reviews of the novel on Amazon reveal that Lewis's work continues to ignite passions: "it's clear that Lewis attempts to undermine Christianity in general," one reviewer writes.⁵ A particularly eloquent review entitled "A Dire Depiction of Modern Christianity" even suggests that "as an evangelist, I resent the depiction of the various characters in this book. They ring too close to home."⁶

Recent critical approaches to the novel, however, differ in their interpretations of its purpose. Ball, for example, explores the "conflation of commerce and religion" in Elmer Gantry and presents Elmer as a character who is "at once a clergyman and a successful businessman."⁷ Dixon argues that Lewis devised Elmer Gantry to expose the "ignorance, racism, hypocrisy, materialism, and spiritual bankruptcy" of his native Midwest.⁸ Seaton even suggests that Lewis's target in Elmer Gantry is not hypocrisy or Elmer Gantry, but "Christianity itself."⁹

This article is different because it explores Elmer Gantry as a product of religious culture—the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. Yes, Lewis wrote Elmer Gantry to shock and to disrupt, but the novel expresses the cultural opinion that plurality of belief within and without the Church should be embraced, because, like it or not, progress does occur—although some may try to prevent its march forward. In his summation of the 1925 Scopes trial¹⁰–which he covered for The Baltimore Evening Sun—Mencken argues that "a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights" to their own beliefs, but he said, too, that they have no right "to try to inflict them upon other men by force."¹¹ Mencken does not deny an individual the right to believe and express their religious beliefs; neither does Lewis.

And the characterization of Frank Shallard and contemporaneous preachers like him are critical to this interpretation of the novel. The paper refers to the nineteenth-century tradition of the homiletic novel to read the conflicting theologies, and the fates, of Elmer Gantry and his modernist "other" Frank Shallard. Early in the novel both Elmer and Frank operate a railroad hand-car together, and this becomes a metaphor for both men in the novel; a hand-car—and even society—can best move forward if more than one person operates it.¹² Elmer Gantry, then, has far wider implications than the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.

The recent crisis of Brexit in the United Kingdom often dissolved to little more than mudslinging battlegrounds in a once "green and pleasant land,"¹³ and the battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the 2016 US presidency unearthed deep-seated tensions at the heart of communities across America. During Trump's tenure as president, society again turned to Lewis. It Can't Happen Here (1935)—Lewis's novel about the rise to the presidency of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip—became a bestseller again, and online news sources were replete with references to Elmer Gantry.¹⁴ The paper closes, then, with an analysis of why Elmer Gantry is still important today, and why its themes are still a prescient warning to a world that can sometimes seem all too quick to become captive to political and social dualities.

The Historicism of Elmer Gantry

Lewis states at the beginning of Elmer Gantry that "no character in this book is the portrait of any actual person,"¹⁵ but the reader is left in no doubt that Lewis's interpretation of his contemporary preachers, Billy Sunday (1862–1935) and Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), influence the spirit of the novel. Indeed, critics have long-noted that the novel's Sister Sharon Falconer—who is instrumental in Elmer's development—bears "many things in common" with McPherson.¹⁶ And Firstenberger even argues that Lewis incorporated his opening disclaimer because "some of the similarities to Sunday's life were so obvious."¹⁷ Lewis turned to Sunday and McPherson because they were the theological and cultural epitomes of evangelical fundamentalism in the 1920s. Their theology was the product of a series of changes that emerged in the American church, and it is necessary to understand these changes, and their effects, in order to understand Elmer Gantry.

The dominant force in American Protestantism during Lewis's early life—the late nineteenth century—was evangelicalism. But during this period there emerged those within evangelical society who were willing to incorporate into their faith new scientific and historical methods of viewing the world and of interpreting the Bible.¹⁸ These became known as liberals or modernists—or liberal evangelicals. The tension between liberal and conservative evangelicals intensified during the turn of the twentieth century, so much so that Marsden argues that "in almost every major American denomination, sometime between the late 1870s and World War I, serious disagreements broke out" among the two groups.¹⁹

The publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth between 1910 and 1915 codified the position of conservative evangelicals. Curtis Lee Laws (1868–1946)—Baptist minister and editor of The Watchmen Examiner—developed and spread the neologism "fundamentalist" in the early 1920s to describe conservative evangelicals who embraced The Fundamentals.²⁰ The neologism quickly spread into contemporaneous parlance, and its modern usage now even includes conservative—and even misguided—members of all faiths.²¹ Sutton even argues that The Fundamentals was itself a catalyst in the emerging "Protestant schism."²²

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925)—who faced Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) in the Scopes trial (1925) and whom opponents would often refer to as the "fundamentalist pope"²³–warned in Seven Questions in Dispute (1924) that "as modernism attacks all that is vital in the Christian religion, the real issue presented is: Shall Christianity remain Christian?"²⁴ Seven chapters then set out a series of beliefs that Jennings Bryan regards as critical, which include biblical inerrancy, the deity of Christ, and a rejection of Darwinian evolution. Seven Questions in Dispute was previously a collection of Bryan's articles that appeared in The Sunday School Times (1859–1966), which was an antimodernist and influential evangelical publication.²⁵

For example, an article from "A Minnesota Reader"—ironically enough Lewis's home state—entitled "What Is The Difference Between Modernist and Fundamentalist?" comments upon a cartoon by the preeminent Christian cartoonist of the 1920s, Ernest James Pace (1880–1946).²⁶ The cartoon—"No-Middle Ground-Only a Chasm"—compares modernist "theology" with fundamentalist evangelicalism.²⁷ A chasm separates both sides of the argument, and the commentator argues that "the two positions are hopelessly opposed to each other."²⁸

These same questions and arguments that mattered so much to fundamentalists like Bryan and to contributors to The Sunday School Times throughout the 1920s appear time and again in Elmer Gantry. For example, early in the novel, when Elmer is a student at Terwillinger College, Dr. Lefferts—the father of Elmer's friend Jim—sardonically questions another student, Eddie Fislinger, about the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Lefferts asks "You're a real Bible believer? … You believe every word of it, I hope, from cover to cover?" He comments: "now of course you believe in the premillennial coming—I mean the real, authentic, genuwine, immediate, bodily, premillennial coming of Jesus Christ?" He argues for the virgin birth of Christ and mockingly states that "of course there are doctors who question whether the virgin birth is quite in accordance with their experience of obstetrics."²⁹ Lewis, therefore, taps into this vibrant socio-religious context of American Christianity and creates a novel for which the research alone would be laudable enough. But this historicism is not unique to Elmer Gantry.

Preparation for Elmer Gantry

Lewis took a keen interest in modernism during his early literary career, too. Before Elmer Gantry, he had been exploring and developing its themes in his work. In Main Street (1921)—Lewis's satire of small-town, Minnesotan life—Carol Milford, later Kennicott, flees from the conservative Blodgett College, which Lewis describes as "still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll."³⁰ Later in the novel, the freethinking Carol visits Mrs. Champ Perry, a member of society's churchgoing elite. Mrs. Champ Perry complains that "we don't need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in college."³¹ She believes that "what we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us."³² In Babbitt (1922), Lewis's satire of 1920s business culture, Mike Monday—a thinly veiled Billy Sunday—refers to the higher critics as "a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice" that "prefer a lot of Hun science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple word of God."³³

Billy Sunday himself reacted against the impact of higher biblical criticism and fueled his own criticism of it with German xenophobia—a conflation that Sutton suggests was common to premillennialists like Sunday in the early twentieth century.³⁴ Sunday described higher criticism as "rotten" and "loathsome;" he also claimed that it emerged "out of a beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!" because much higher biblical criticism emerged from Germany.³⁵ Das Leben Jesu (1865) by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) is a good example of German criticism that created both excitement and furore.³⁶ Lewis still remembered the impact of this period of American history much later in his career, too. In It Can't Happen Here, he wrote, "remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it?"³⁷ He even targeted William Jennings Bryan, writing that Jennings Bryan "learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution."³⁸

Lewis continued his interest in evangelicalism during his preparation for Elmer Gantry. He kept clippings of the fundamentalist campaigner John Roach Straton (1875–1929) and witnessed J. Frank Norris (1877–1952)—the "Texas Tornado"—preaching. Lewis interviewed Aimee Semple McPherson, and he even underwent a fake conversion at the hands of Billy Sunday just to experience what all the fuss was about.³⁹ But he also questioned God and the Christian faith in public. In 1926 at a church meeting in Kansas City, Lewis challenged God directly—"I defy Him to strike me down within the next ten minutes," he boasted.⁴⁰ Immediately after the publication of Elmer Gantry, Billy Sunday raged at the novel and still remembered Lewis's Kansas City stunt. Sunday declared "if I'd been God, I sure would have landed a haymaker right on the old button [of Lewis]."⁴¹ Sunday, though, was more than just a personal sparring partner for Lewis. Sunday's biography and his own relationship to Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899) powers both the fortune of Elmer and the ultimate demise of Frank.

Elmer Gantry and Robert Ingersoll

Ingersoll—whom Lewis had already referred to in Main Street—was an outspoken critic of the church. His popularity cannot be overstated, and he toured America selling out at any venue at which he chose to speak.⁴² In 1882, Ingersoll delivered a Decoration Day address to the Grand Army of the Republic.⁴³ And in 1915, Billy Sunday faced accusations from The Truth Seeker magazine for plagiarising Ingersoll's address in a sermon that Sunday preached three years earlier in 1912.⁴⁴ The New York Times printed parallel transcripts of Sunday's 1912 sermon and the words of Ingersoll from The Truth Seeker. The similarities are apparent.⁴⁵

Sunday categorically denied borrowing from Ingersoll's address. He explained that "people … send him clippings" and perhaps this was how the work of Ingersoll found its way into his sermon.⁴⁶ Whether one Powell Arnette knew this or not—in a later letter to The Sun (Baltimore)—is unclear, but Arnette wrote that "after vilifying Colonel Ingersoll in a scandalous manner [Sunday] finds the speeches of such an intellectual genius very useful in business."⁴⁷ In a sermon entitled "What Shall the End Be," for example, Sunday explains that Strauss and Ingersoll could not "answer the cry and longing of my heart."⁴⁸ He would even claim that "Bob Ingersoll wasn't the first to find out that Moses made mistakes. God knew about it long before Ingersoll was born."⁴⁹

All this matters to Elmer Gantry because Ingersoll also wrote in About the Holy Bible (1894) that "love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds radiance on the quiet tomb."⁵⁰ Elmer's road to success in the novel stems from his plagiarism of this very passage.⁵¹ Elmer reasons, "chances are nobody there tonight has ever read Ingersoll."⁵² In the much later work Gideon Planish (1943), too, Lewis resurrects Elmer, who has become "the best known of the Manhattan radio pastors," despite (or perhaps because of) continuing to rely upon the words of Ingersoll.⁵³ There is a "folksy quality about his regular daily broadcast, 'Love Is the Morning Star,'" Lewis writes.⁵⁴ Critics such as Engeman⁵⁵ and Francescato⁵⁶ have also highlighted Elmer's plagiarism, but this article takes the analysis a step further by situating the plagiarism in the wider context of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy—the same context from which Elmer Gantry emerged.

Ingersoll is significant, then, because he is the satirical masterstroke that begins Elmer's journey and the modernist foundation upon which Lewis develops the conflicting lives of Elmer and Frank. But the critical heritage of Elmer Gantry often overlooks Frank. Hamner, describes him as taking a supporting role in the novel,⁵⁷ Mark Schorer views Frank as an exterior character "hovering on the fringes of the plot,"⁵⁸ Charles Genthe describes him as a "minor character,"⁵⁹ and Douglas Walrath asserts that Frank is "the most tragic pretender in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American fiction."⁶⁰ But without Frank, there is no Elmer Gantry. The battle between Elmer the fundamentalist and Frank the modernist represents the wider fundamentalist-modernist controversy that powers Lewis's work.

Elmer first meets Frank at Mizpah Theological Seminary in the novel's timeline of 1905–1906. Lewis immediately shows authorial awareness of his contemporaneous cultural context: writing that Mizpah "belonged to the right-wing of the Baptists; it represented what was twenty years later to be known as 'fundamentalism.'"⁶¹ Lewis describes Frank as "timid and fascinated" at this stage in the novel, but Frank already begins to express unease with the life of a preacher: "just why are we going to be preachers, anyway?" he "[meditates] unhappily."⁶²

Towards the end of the novel, however, Frank is a very different character altogether. If Elmer plagiarized Ingersoll to find success at the beginning of the novel, Frank Shallard becomes the novel's theological Ingersoll. Frank questions the "personality and teachings of Jesus;"⁶³ Ingersoll regarded Christ's "character" as a product of the "falsehoods" of "zealous disciples."⁶⁴ Ingersoll argued that "had we been born in Turkey … most of us would have been Mohammedans and believed in the inspiration of the Koran."⁶⁵Frank believes that "most people believe in a Church because they were born to it."⁶⁶ Frank asks "what did he [Christ] teach?;"⁶⁷ Ingersoll wondered why Christ did not elucidate upon elements of Christian doctrine that the later Pauline church introduced, such as the "scheme of salvation."⁶⁸

The Homiletic Novel and Frank Shallard

But how does Frank get to this point in the novel, and why is it important for this article's study of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy? Jackson argues that Charles Sheldon's bestselling In His Steps: "What Would Jesus Do?" (1896) is the prototypical example of a homiletic novel. Novels like this were extremely popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and they encouraged readers to engage in "private devotion" and spiritual improvement as they encountered social contexts familiar to them.⁶⁹ Jackson includes an image of the book's cover—which illustrates a staircase rising from Bethlehem to Calvary—to demonstrate how novels like In His Steps lead the reader on an upward devotional journey.⁷⁰ It is easy to miss, but In His Steps also appears in Elmer Gantry when Elmer visits Bishop Loomis in search of a new job. Lewis writes that "there were the necessary works of theological scholarship befitting a bishop" upon the bishop's bookshelf, which includes Sheldon's novel.⁷¹

The frontispiece to Bryan's Seven Questions in Dispute, moreover, includes a cartoon by E. J. Pace who, as already described, contributed to The Sunday School Times. The cartoon is entitled "The Descent of the Modernists," and it depicts a collection of modernist scholars descending a staircase—on which each step a statement of unbelief appears—to the basement of "unbelief."⁷² The opposing staircases of In His Steps and "The Descent of the Modernists" are a useful metaphor for viewing the opposing rise and falls of Elmer and Frank's lives—they become a distorted homiletic journey of sorts. Elmer finds material success—he becomes "the William Jennings Bryan of the Methodist Church"⁷³–but he loses his soul; Frank, however, gains his soul, but he loses the world because he descends the staircase of modernism. Indeed, one cannot help thinking of Matthew 16:26 as underpinning the very fabric of Elmer Gantry: "what good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?"⁷⁴ In Seven Questions in Dispute Bryan even wrote that "there are nearly in all evangelical churches members, even ministers—not many, but a few—who openly reject orthodox teachings in regard to Christ's personality."⁷⁵ Frank Shallard is one such preacher.

Frank's descent of the staircase of modernism begins at Mizpah when he meets and forms a relationship with Dr. Bruno Zechlin. Lewis's description of Zechlin—with a "heathenish tawny German beard"—incorporates the theme of German xenophobia that Lewis recognized in Babbitt and which contemporaries like Sunday propagated.⁷⁶ Zechlin provides Frank with "bootlegged" works that provide theological and cultural windows into the kinds of arguments that liberals were making against fundamentalist belief.⁷⁷ The books are Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863) Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), Morgan Davenport's Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals (1917), Jabez Thomas Sunderland's The Origin and Character of the Bible and Its Place Amongst Sacred Books (1893), and Nathaniel Schmidt's The Prophet of Nazareth (1907).⁷⁸

These books have a greater significance for Elmer Gantry, though, because Lewis uses their themes to represent the steps of modernism that Frank descends. The first theme that these books introduce is the humanity of Jesus. Renan explores the development of a mythologized Jesus and argues that he never claimed to be an "incarnation of God," writing that "at times Jesus even seems to take precautions to controvert such a doctrine."⁷⁹ Schmidt also explores the development of a modern conception of Jesus as a divine member of the Trinity and focuses on creating an understanding of him as a human figure. The second theme is a questioning of biblical inerrancy. Sunderland's inclusion points to the biblical criticism that is so important throughout Elmer Gantry. He argued that "perhaps there is no subject of more living or more urgent interest now before the religious world than that of 'Higher Biblical Criticism' and its consequences."⁸⁰ Sunderland does not set out to refute biblical truth, rather he explores the "modern view" of the Bible which he views as "tending slowly to displace" the conservative view of biblical inerrancy.⁸¹

The third theme explores the validity of religious experience. Davenport argues that those who attend mass conversions all too easily fall victim to mob mentality. He explains that "whole groups may be thrust into hypnotic trance with little difficulty."⁸² Mass conversion is an important theme in Elmer Gantry, and the experience of peer-pressure relates to Elmer's own conversion early in the novel. Lewis writes that Elmer's "willing was not his but the mob's; the phrases were not his but those of the emotional preachers and hysterical worshipers."⁸³ Lewis's use of words like "emotional," "hysterical," "noisy," "volitionless," "shrieking," and "rhapsodic mob" all directly question the validity of these experiences and threaten fundamental beliefs that God engages with humanity.⁸⁴ An alternative is, of course, deism, and Lewis pairs Thomas Paine's (1737–1809) The Age of Reason (1794) with Ingersoll at several points in the novel to underline the threat that deism posed to fundamentalist beliefs.⁸⁵

But Dickson White is the most useful work with which to view Elmer Gantry. White rejects that there is a war between science and religion but argues instead that the true battle is between "science and dogmatic theology."⁸⁶ Here is the essence of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and its relationship to Elmer Gantry. If characters like Frank Shallard and Bruno Zechlin did not exist, then Seaton's analysis of Elmer Gantry as being essentially anti-Christian would be true.⁸⁷ Grebstein also criticizes Lewis's "shortcomings" as a theologian and views the works that Frank reads as "ammunition for an assault on fundamentalism."⁸⁸ But the fact that both Zechlin and Frank can accommodate liberalism points to a novel that does not intend to discredit all manifestations of Christian faith. Moreover, the young Lewis may have written in his diary that "there are many things as to the Christian religion that make it almost impossible to believe it," but his use of the work "almost" is an important lens through which to view Frank Shallard.⁸⁹ It allows for the existence of belief in a novel and the development of an accord between the fundamentalist and the modernist.

Frank's relationship with the Reverend Andrew Pengilly develops the theme further. Pengilly is a Methodist minister who befriends Frank during Frank's pastorate at the Baptist Church at Catawba—Frank is deep in battle with his own doubts at this point in the novel. Pengilly is aware of higher biblical criticism and encroaching liberalism, but he pays little attention to them: "his Bible he knew, and believed, word by word."⁹⁰ Pengilly is a fundamentalist, but he would not describe himself as such. He may not like liberalism, but he does not condemn Frank's questioning. He rather chooses to concentrate on Frank's relationship with God: "When do you feel nearest to God? When you're reading some awful smart book criticizing the Bible or when you kneel in prayer and your spirit just flows forth and you know that you›re in communion with him?"⁹¹ Lewis allows Pengilly to exist because his faith can accommodate liberalism: he does not initiate force—to borrow the terminology of Ayn Rand–against those who do not share his viewpoint⁹²–just as Mencken suggested believers have no right to inflict their beliefs on others.⁹³ And the evidence suggests that this is exactly what Lewis had in mind when he developed the characterisations of both Pengilly and Frank himself.

In a 1928 letter to Alfred Harcourt—Lewis's friend and publisher—Lewis suggests some copy for the advertising of Elmer Gantry in Kansas City. Lewis was semi-seriously targeting the General Conference of the Methodist Church—held that year in Kansas City—but it does reveal Lewis's purposes:

You have read and talked about E.G. [Elmer Gantry] maybe preached about it but have you read the book itself? You have heard that Gantry is a scoundrel, but do you know that in Frank Shallard and Mr. Pengilly, one a liberal and one a fundamentalist, Mr. Lewis has produced two of the noblest and most inspiring of preachers in fiction?⁹⁴

But Lewis's exaltation of Frank must come at a cost because Elmer Gantry is still a novel that attacks the intolerance that Lewis believed some fundamentalists were apt to demonstrate. To orchestrate Frank's downfall in the novel, Lewis again turns to the history of the Church.

Elmer Gantry and The Cost of Liberalism

In 1893, the Presbyterian Church convicted Charles Augustus Briggs—the new chair of biblical theology at Union Theological Seminary—of heresy, and it excommunicated him. Briggs' crime was embracing higher biblical criticism and daring to question the Bible's perceived inerrancy. Briggs stated that "higher criticism has forced its way into the Bible itself and brought us face to face with the holy contents, so that we may see and know whether they are divine or not."⁹⁵ Almost thirty years later, Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969)—an influential Manhattan pastor—created an enormous cultural impact just before Elmer Gantry with a sermon entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" (1922).⁹⁶

Lewis would even incorporate Fosdick into a later short story entitled "Onward Sons of Ingersoll" (1935).⁹⁷ It is interesting to note, too, that Fosdick made and kept notes on Mencken's Prejudices (1919)—a collection of essays about American life—and that Lewis likely dined with Fosdick during the preparation for Elmer Gantry.⁹⁸ Fosdick argued that fundamentalists aimed to "drive out of the evangelical churches" those who held liberal viewpoints.⁹⁹ For Fosdick, fundamentalism was "essentially illiberal and intolerant."¹⁰⁰ Consequently, in 1924, he resigned from the Presbyterian Church and became a Baptist minister.¹⁰¹ Fosdick's position was so threatening to Billy Sunday that Sunday even attributed pejorative stereotypes that resemble the same attacks he made against the German biblical critics—Fosdick was a "garlic-smelling, bomb throwing, unassimilated immigrant."¹⁰² The Moody Monthly (1920–2003)—the periodical of the Moody Bible Institute—even stated in an article entitled "Modernism a Perverted Chiliasm," May 1924, that Fosdick "would merit the respect and gratitude of a great number of people" if he would become the head of a liberal church.¹⁰³ That same article also included the original version of Pace's 'No-Middle Ground-Only a Chasm' that would appear in The Sunday School Times.¹⁰⁴

This history matters to Elmer Gantry because Elmer echoes the same cultural sentiment when he orchestrates Zechlin's departure from Terwillinger. Elmer only really dislikes Zechlin because he "seemed singularly to enjoy flunking Elmer in Greek."¹⁰⁵ But Elmer understands enough of the threat of modernism to use it as a means by which to threaten Zechlin—writing on the classroom blackboard "I am Fuzzy Zechlin, the gazabo that knows more than God. If Jake Trosper got onto what I really think about inspiration of the Scriptures, he'd fire me out on my dirty Dutch neck."¹⁰⁶ Trosper subsequently ensures that Zechlin is "abruptly retired."¹⁰⁷

Frank's demise, however, is much more painful than enforced retirement, but it does draw upon the cultural legacy of Briggs and Fosdick. In the narrative's timeline of 1922—when in Lewis's contemporary America Fosdick was himself raging against fundamentalism—Frank is now the pastor of Dorchester Congregationalist Church. And his friendship with Phillip McGarry—the "enfant terrible" of the local Methodist Church because he too, is not opposed to modernism—attracts Elmer's attention.¹⁰⁸ He learns of Frank's doubts and sabotages him at a meeting with Dorchester's senior leadership. Frank rages that he does not believe Christ to be divine and that heaven probably does not exist. The stakes are clear: "then just why, Mr. Shallard, don't you get out of the ministry before you're kicked out?"¹⁰⁹

Mencken argued that fundamentalism had become synonymous with small-town America: it allowed rural America to mobilize against "modern culture and intellect."¹¹⁰ He wrote, in his coverage of the Scopes trial for The Baltimore Evening Sun, that "it would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton."¹¹¹ Mencken accused fundamentalists of being "everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds."¹¹² Mencken referred to fundamentalists as "Ku Klux theologians" in their attempt to prevent freethinking.¹¹³ He even raged against the American public more broadly—arguing that if an idea that challenged orthodox thinking emerged "it would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers."¹¹⁴ The Ku Klux Klan were influential in defending what they deemed to be biblical truths.¹¹⁵ An unknown member of the Klan claimed, for example, that "all true knowledge of consciousness" must come from the "application of Truth as taught by the Bible."¹¹⁶

Lewis places Frank in this very context for the final stage of his worldly decline but spiritual rebirth: "Frank had been with the Charity Organization Society for three years, and he had become assistant general secretary at the time of the Dayton evolution trial."¹¹⁷ Frank embarks on a lecture tour for them, and he plans to deliver a lecture entitled "Are the Fundamentalists Witch Hunters?" in the town of Western.¹¹⁸ But he is greeted with a warning: "We don't want you and your hellish atheism here. We can think for ourselves without any imported 'liberals' … The Committee."¹¹⁹ Lewis again develops in Elmer Gantry a finessed piece of social history that the bombastic Elmer obfuscates. Frank's social mission and liberalism put him on a collision course with the Klan—Lewis's "Committee"—and the fundamentalism that they protected.¹²⁰ They become a manifestation of the anger and the rage against modernism that has simmered throughout the novel. Sutton suggests, too, that the Klan of the 1920s concerned itself with protecting "the power of small-town, white, rural Protestantism" which often went together with premillennial eschatology.^121,122

They demand that he leave town because of his "hellish atheism," and they accuse him of being an "imported liberal."¹²³ Frank becomes a "God damned atheist," "a damn socialist," and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a labor union.¹²⁴ The Committee beat Frank to such an extent that he will eventually lose his sight: "the right eye was gone completely; he might not entirely lose the sight of the other for perhaps a year."¹²⁵

Lewis's choice to blind Frank speaks to a common appropriation of Samson's image to reflect the impending threat of modernism. An editorial in The King's Business of July 1922 included a cartoon of the blind Samson—who wears a sash with the word "modernism" on it.¹²⁶ The "denial of the Bible" appears on Samson's right thigh and "Darwinism" appears on his left; the "Church" and "schools" are the columns that support the entablature of "Christian civilization." Moreover, Billy Sunday—in a brief sermon, filmed and entitled "Billy Sunday Burns up the Backsliding World"—argued that "civilisation and society rests upon morals; morals upon religion; and religion upon the Bible."¹²⁷ Those who assail Frank sincerely believe that he, like Samson, threatens to destroy their own society: "you'd better be out of this decent Christian city before evening," they first menaced.¹²⁸ Like "any crusader" of old, those who beat him do so because of a moral justification derived from their interpretation of the Christian faith.¹²⁹

It becomes clear, then, why Walrath describes Frank as "the most tragic pretender in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American fiction."¹³⁰ Frank's modernist journey is now complete. He certainly rose the metaphorical staircase of conviction, but his modernism has destroyed his worldly prospects. Elmer's response—whose material star is rising ever higher—demonstrates his own spiritual decline: "this is the most outrageous thing I've ever heard of in my life," but "that was the last Elmer is known ever to have said on the subject."¹³¹

Elmer Gantry and Contemporary Society

Frank, for the fundamentalists then, is an outsider who would threaten the foundations of a nation. But we do not have to look far to see shadows of Lewis's concerns enacted in comparable ways in our own societies. Elmer Gantry is still relevant today because it continues to provide a note of caution whenever political and social viewpoints threaten to polarize communities to create latter-day "fundamentalists" of all types. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently included an article entitled "The Faith Behind Liberal Fundamentalism," and the National Post explored fitness zealots in "Fitness Fundamentalism … The Zealots of Extreme Exercise Have Created a Brand New Religion."¹³² "Trials by Twitter" and uploaded videos to TikTok and to the tabloids can shame individuals—often with no right to reply or an exploration of context and intent. This is not to defend the indefensible, but to look to caution lest society turns itself into Lewis's witch hunters? Indeed, Afflerbach warns that those who hoped to discover in It Can't Happen Here "a guidebook" by which to bolster anti-Trump sentiments may have "risk[ed] slipping" into the very behaviors against which they stood.¹³³ He refers to Lewis's "conflicted satirical imagination" in It Can't Happen Here, but could the same charge be made against Lewis in his exploration of modernism in Elmer Gantry?¹³⁴

Was Lewis himself guilty of modernist intolerance by putting fundamentalism on trial in a best-selling novel? Pengilly exists as a noble fundamentalist, but the reader does not meet an ignoble modernist to act as a balancing force on the metaphorical hand-car. The Minnesota reader from The Sunday School Times—to their credit—did recognize that modernists can be both "extreme" or "moderate"—although he regarded both as equally flawed in their thinking.¹³⁵ Seaton even argues that Lewis's analysis is "one-sided" and that the reader "is allowed to see religion only as Lewis saw it."¹³⁶ Seaton's argument is effective, but perhaps Lewis foresaw such charges and included a self-aware response: Pengilly explains to Frank how Lewis's Main Street bored him and that "all he [Lewis] could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn't go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—that was all he could see."¹³⁷

It is, of course, impossible to provide an analysis of authorial intention beyond the interpretive strategies employed in this article, but it has become clear that Elmer Gantry resonates today more than ever because our society is passing through a period of deep-seated unease on both sides of the Atlantic. Elmer Gantry cannot provide solutions, but it can offer a warning to all.

Conclusion

Elmer Gantry does harm other characters in the novel, although he does so arguably more because of his own immaturity than from any evil intent. Lewis describes him as "a huge young man … six foot one, thick, broad, big handed; a large face, handsome as a Great Dane is handsome."¹³⁸ "Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk," Lewis famously writes at the novel's outset.¹³⁹ But this paper looked past the bombastic Elmer Gantry to read the novel as a product of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. From Charles Augustus Briggs through to Billy Sunday, Elmer Gantry is a history of American evangelicalism told from the perspective of an author whose own life on occasion may even have made Elmer Gantry proud. Elmer Gantry is a novel in which Lewis invested a great deal of sensitivity and awareness to record what was important to him in America's continually evolving story of Christianity. The characterization of Frank Shallard was Lewis's primary tool for achieving this aim, but for every Shallard there is an Elmer Gantry. And the opposition between both men and the conflicting journeys that each took—this paper has argued—became Lewis's manifesto against dogmatic certainty of any tradition. And this is exactly why Elmer Gantry continues to be relevant in our contemporary culture.