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A gasbag bishop, a yahoo press, jealous brother-shepherds and a sardonic lawyer help him to shout his way to fame. He introduces harmonicas, samples of grape juice, a wrecked motor car, weightlifters and radio in his church to put it on the map. He agrees that "Jesus Christ would have been a Rotarian." He crusades against Vice with roars, arresting amiable factory girls and German home-brewer, while his own pantry amours flourish and the lawyer offers him whiskey. The higher he climbs, the braver and cruder he grows. Just before he is called simultaneously to a Manhattan pulpit and the secretariat of a national morals censorship—having edified London with his famed sermon on Divine Love, originally cribbed for him from Agnostic Bob Ingersoll by Atheist Jim Lefferts—he neatly turns a blackmail plot, by comparatively harmless criminals, into a coat of whitewash that dazzles even himself. He dreams of scourging the entire nation into faith and morals. During his prayer of thanksgiving he ogles a new choir girl's ankle— without faltering on a syllable.
The Significance. What folk of the 21st Century are going to ask about 20th Century cinemas, tabloid newspapers and this book, is: "Did such people really live in the U. S.?" Their hastier historians will say: "Yes," and show convincing clippings from the N. Y. Times's rag editions (instituted 1927) about John Roach Straton, Edward Hall and Aimee Semple McPherson. Of course these headliners are no more representative of the U. S. clergy than Senator Heflin is representative of the U. S. Senate. But the Castigator, trained on newspapers to inflict sansculottism, portrays skeletal types of Americanos with all the malice, which is more than all the art, of which he is capable. The clerical creatures in Elmer Gantry are children of ideas and the ideas seem to have been whipped up out of unhappy memories of the Sauk Centre Sunday School, with all the panicky fury of a believer's wrestling with Doubt. This wrestling has cost the Castigator ill nature, megalomania, nervous breakdowns and the creatures of his forced moods are far less credible, as contemporary humanity, than Hogarth's Gin Alleyites, Swift's Anglo-Lilliputs or even Dante's infernals. As literature Elmer Gantry is compelling and permanent, but only for its violent virtuosity. The dogmas of Fundamentalism are battered unmercifully through out Elmer Gantry. The Castigator props them up and knocks them down with tremendous gusto, concentrating on oldtime Hell, Jonah, infant damnation, the Virgin Birth and a surly Jehovah. He goes so far as to let his spokesman criticize Christ for inconsistency and for overlooking sanitation. The spokesman (Frank Shallard) has faith of a variety too subtle for what the Castigator's friends call the "booboisie." Yet few of the latter will proclaim the Castigator, for his cerebral snobbery, what a papist in Elmer Gantry calls Frank Shallard: "Worse than a murderer." The Castigator's rabid theophobia is its own antidote. His bolts, loosed wildly, fly wide.