Roe v. Gantry

by David Benjamin

“Elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them.”
— Sinclair Lewis

PARIS — On the flight over here, I finally got around to reading Elmer Gantry — during which it readily dawned on me that the movie is way different from Sinclair Lewis’ original story.

This is not to say I don’t appreciate director Richard Brooks’ cinematic abridgment of Lewis’ sprawling, polemical novel. The film gave us one of Burt Lancaster’s most powerful characters, plus Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer and the joy of seeing Shirley Jones playing against type. But the movie cannot convey the vast, swollen insidiousness of Elmer Gantry, Lewis’ archetype of a uniquely American phenomenon, the amoral tent-show, radiophonic, telegenic, millionaire/billionaire spellbinding evangelist.

We’ve had Billy Sunday, Father Coughlin, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham and his boy, Jimmy Swaggart and the inimitable Marjoe Gortner. But first, we had Elmer Gantry.

As I waded through the enticement and terror of Elmer’s pulpit roar, I clicked on a childhood memory. I recalled, incongruously, a monsignor who came as a guest preacher to little St. Mary’s Church in Tomah, Wisconsin. I wasn’t sure then — and still don’t know — what qualifies a priest for promotion to monsignorhood. I figured, at the time, it was something like making Webelos (whatever that is) in the Boy Scouts. In any case, the monsignor was a hot ticket, his Mass was close to Christmas and the pews were packed.

I was about ten, I think. I’d never heard a sermon like this. The monsignor began by describing the miraculous genesis of a tiny babe inside a sort of magic cocoon. He gave the baby a name, something unmistakably Catholic — Theresa, Bridget, Bernadette? Little by little, itty-bitty Bernadette grew parts of herself — pudgy little arms and legs with tiny fingers and toes, each digit perfectly formed. Eyes sprang up on her precious face, and then a nose, a tiny rosebud of a mouth, little ears and wisps of golden hair. Her heart beat bravely inside her translucent breast. She began to squirm and kick. Was that a smile on her lips?

But then, wham! An icy steel spear, with claws at the end, pierced her tiny liquid bassinet, plunged into her heart, sundered her lungs, drained her blood and ended her existence before it had ever begun.

Suddenly, the monsignor’s tone altered entirely. From the gentle narration of Bernadette’s wondrous formation, he roared into a tantrum against the assassins who had wielded against the tiny helpless girlchild that silvery, deadly bodkin. The monsignor rained down on these murderers a storm of towering rage, vituperation, abomination and fiery damnation to the bowels of a Hell unspeakably horrific and eternally agonizing. By the time he got around to mentioning the word “abortion,” the congregation, especially me, was scorched and traumatized.

I had a problem besides. I was then still in my pre-birds-and-bees stage. So, “abortion” was both a new word and a mystery that had not been solved by the monsignor’s onset of allegorical frenzy. As the best speller in my grade at St. Mary’s, I knew absorption, ablution, aberration, abstention, abutment, abracadabra and lots more of the A’s. But abortion was a stumper.

Afterwards, I never asked what had sent the parson off the rhetorical deep end. Kids in those days knew better than to question the weird stuff that went through grownups’ heads. Besides, as fun as it was, the monsignor’s incendiary sermon blew over swiftly. Abortion was neither a popular nor political issue then. It existed as a peculiar fixation of a particularly dogmatic slice of the Catholic clergy. Otherwise, it was merely whispered about in back alleys where I never ventured.

Since then, especially since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court fourteen or fifteen years after the monsignor’s conniption fit, abortion has been a veritable crusade from which no American can escape.

Abortion is not mentioned once in the 465 pages of Elmer Gantry, which was published in 1927. Among the myriad sins that inspire Elmer’s righteous bellow and terrify his flock are drink and dissipation, lust and prostitution, smoking, cussing, dancing, agnosticism, socialism, masturbation, evolution, uppity women and Catholic priests — but not abortion.

Still, it’s Elmer Gantry who triggered my memory of the ferocious monsignor to St. Mary’s pulpit. Each of them — the fictional hypocrite and the visiting cleric — were religious figures of exceptional importance, each raging theatrically against a timeless human and social dilemma. In voices of unassailable authority and rigid conviction, they were demanding that people stop doing something — in God’s name — that they had always done and would never stop doing.

I wondered when I was ten years old, and today: Why all the fuss?

An answer lies in Sinclair Lewis’ exposition, throughout his novel, of the force behind Elmer’s every decision and denunciation, every colleague-crushing step upward on the ecclesiastical ladder. At one point in the story, after Elmer has been golfing and toadying at the country club with the richest men in town, he exults at the influence he has attained: “Some day, I’ll be able to put it over with the best of ’em socially. When I get to be a bishop, believe me I’m not going to hang around jawing about Sunday School methods! I’ll be entertaining the bon ton, senators and everybody…”

So, why all the fuss?

Because fuss is the gateway to notice, which leads to status, which bestows power. Elmer fussed spectacularly about sin and the specter of damnation in order to spellbind the rubes and swell his congregation. He used his swollen congregations to cultivate influence with the rich and powerful, with whom he never broached unpleasant topics like sin and damnation.

My monsignor fussed apocalyptically about the evil of abortion because it was then — and is now more than ever — a linchpin of patriarchal Catholic dogma. Abortion elevates and insulates every preacher who rages and fumes against the shameful, careless women, the strumpets and sluts who breed the unwanted and want to be freed from the burden of motherhood.

Who knows if the monsignor really cared? Who cares if I understood what the hell he was raving about? The essence of it all — for the moralizer who faces no consequences — is the show. It is the notion, the promise, the threat that excites the crowd. It is the grand finale, after a seductive setup, when Elmer can “slam home, good and hard, some pretty straight truths about the horrors of starting children straight for hell by letting them read the colored comics on Sunday morning.”

When powerful men talk ominously about the colored comics, they’re not talking about the funnies. They’re talking about adult dominion over the lives of children. And when, today, political hacks like Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito talk about abortion, they’re not talking about abortion. They’re simply explaining, “good and hard,” that women have to do what powerful men tell them they have to do, or not do.

Or else.

When you hear the word “abortion,” think Bernadette if you must. But think, equally, about status and subjugation. Think power. Think Elmer Gantry.