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jerwin300's review
challenging
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
jsem's review against another edition
3.0
Lewis really tears into ministers. All but one is a fraud or hypocrite. Very disturbing and thought-provoking for this pastor. The items in a series with the last one being ridiculous got old about 1/3 of the way through.
crimsonsparrow's review against another edition
4.0
On the surface this book is about religion and hypocrisy. I think what makes this a more powerful, disturbing, and lasting message, however, is its exposé of the fundamental misogyny, narcissism, dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse of power at the heart of American history, her capitalist gospel, and her narrative of manifest destiny.
Elmer Gantry is the personification of the American dream, and the only way we can see its wretched individualism, destructive consumerism, and ridiculous façade is to see it in the church.
Is that what Lewis intended? I'm sure his was modernity's simple critique of fundamentalism as Darwinism took its place. Yet we have his snapshot of America's heart beneath its golden gilding regardless, and it is not a pretty picture.
Shall we continue to flock to it in mindless adulation? Or shall we wise up?
Elmer Gantry is the personification of the American dream, and the only way we can see its wretched individualism, destructive consumerism, and ridiculous façade is to see it in the church.
Is that what Lewis intended? I'm sure his was modernity's simple critique of fundamentalism as Darwinism took its place. Yet we have his snapshot of America's heart beneath its golden gilding regardless, and it is not a pretty picture.
Shall we continue to flock to it in mindless adulation? Or shall we wise up?
lizaroo71's review against another edition
2.0
This book, I think, was written to reflect the frustration a person might feel when listening to a sermon of epic proportion or perhaps a person proselytizing: weary.
Lewis is condemning not only ministers (the people that are the vessels of God), but religion itself. He paints Gantry as a man that is uncertain of his belief in God, but confident of his ability as a charismatic speaker and so Gantry becomes an ordained Baptist minister. When that religion doesn't work out for him, he finds a home elsewhere.
And that's the problem. This goes on for 476 pages. Gantry drinks, he smokes, he is a womanizer and when he gets married he philanders. He lies at every opportunity (even to himself) to get what he wants. There is never a lesson learned because Gantry gets away with his bombastic behavior throughout the book. And that gets boring.
The writing is good, most of the time, but I found that often there were sentences that were fragmented and I wasn't sure if that was intended or bad editing.
On a good note, I learned the word jeremiad (n: a prolonged lamentation or complaint; a cautionary or angry harangue) which I will incorporate into my conversations from this point forward.
Lewis is condemning not only ministers (the people that are the vessels of God), but religion itself. He paints Gantry as a man that is uncertain of his belief in God, but confident of his ability as a charismatic speaker and so Gantry becomes an ordained Baptist minister. When that religion doesn't work out for him, he finds a home elsewhere.
And that's the problem. This goes on for 476 pages. Gantry drinks, he smokes, he is a womanizer and when he gets married he philanders. He lies at every opportunity (even to himself) to get what he wants. There is never a lesson learned because Gantry gets away with his bombastic behavior throughout the book. And that gets boring.
The writing is good, most of the time, but I found that often there were sentences that were fragmented and I wasn't sure if that was intended or bad editing.
On a good note, I learned the word jeremiad (n: a prolonged lamentation or complaint; a cautionary or angry harangue) which I will incorporate into my conversations from this point forward.
lukesmorris's review against another edition
4.0
Loved it mostly even though the rise-collapse-rise-collapse-rinse-repeat got tiring at times.
ewg109's review against another edition
3.0
I found the book repetitive and tiresome and I really struggled to get through it. Yep. Gantry is a terrible person. Americans are dumb and naive. Religion is corrupt and hypocritical. And there is no comeuppance, no revelation, no change--just 400+ pages of tongue in cheek activity.
jdintr's review
I have to say that Elmer Gantry is one of the great anti-heroes in American literature, right up there with Captain Ahab. I was riveted by his tale from start to finish.
Lewis asks profound questions of the "faith-based industry" that seem as relevant today as they did back when he wrote it in the 1920s. Sure, Gantry is scandalous, but he's not just another televangelist. It is his private betrayals (of Jim Lefferts, of Frank Shallard, of Lulu Bains) that are fascinating, not just his public hypocrisy. Elmer is a menace to the very society he seeks to moralize.
I appreciated Lewis's research. Not only had he covered skepticism and revivalists like Mary Semple McPherson, but his conversations between ministers have a fly-on-the-wall quality to them and really bring out the struggles that ministers face between private doubt and public faith. In the process, Lewis foresees the modern televangelists and even megachurches.
I would recommend this book to non-Christians for the sheer pleasure of peeking "behind the veil" of organized Christianity to see the plotting and shamelessness. For Christians, I think Lewis issues a challenge to be true to core beliefs and not to be afraid of exposing charlatans.
Lewis asks profound questions of the "faith-based industry" that seem as relevant today as they did back when he wrote it in the 1920s. Sure, Gantry is scandalous, but he's not just another televangelist. It is his private betrayals (of Jim Lefferts, of Frank Shallard, of Lulu Bains) that are fascinating, not just his public hypocrisy. Elmer is a menace to the very society he seeks to moralize.
I appreciated Lewis's research. Not only had he covered skepticism and revivalists like Mary Semple McPherson, but his conversations between ministers have a fly-on-the-wall quality to them and really bring out the struggles that ministers face between private doubt and public faith. In the process, Lewis foresees the modern televangelists and even megachurches.
I would recommend this book to non-Christians for the sheer pleasure of peeking "behind the veil" of organized Christianity to see the plotting and shamelessness. For Christians, I think Lewis issues a challenge to be true to core beliefs and not to be afraid of exposing charlatans.
lgpiper's review against another edition
4.0
Elmer Gantry had a golden tongue that could reach into the hearts of the blackest sinners. He also had rather a wandering eye for a well turned ankle.
A rather interesting tale of fraudulent "evangelical" preachers, an ilk which abounded a century ago, and which still persists today.
4½* were that possible, i.e. most excellent.
A rather interesting tale of fraudulent "evangelical" preachers, an ilk which abounded a century ago, and which still persists today.
4½* were that possible, i.e. most excellent.
blackoxford's review against another edition
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.
a_o_on_the_go's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely magnificent. A certain top ten, maybe top three book for me. The world could do with another Lewis or two.