Elmer Gantry

Last weekend I saw the Tulsa Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry, based upon the famous novel by Sinclair Lewis. I read the novel decades ago, so my memory may not be clear. I have a copy of it in front of me, but not enough time to reread it. I also saw the classic Burt Lancaster movie decades ago.

The primary message of the novel is that religion is just a way of getting money from gullible people. (Lewis modeled Gantry after Billy Sunday who, despite the image created by Lewis, was apparently a sincere man, and who did not drink and dally.) Gantry’s principal launch to success in the opera was the generous support of local businessmen, who saw religion as a good source of black ink.

But the opera changes this message ever so slightly. The opera, as the novel, begins with Elmer Gantry (star football player for a Bible college in Missouri) drunk in a bar, in the company of his more level-headed roomie Jim Lefferts. Well, that’s the name in the novel. The opera changed it to Frank something. And changed the character. In the opera, Frank became a preacher, just like Elmer, only he was sincere. There is a long scene in the opera in which Reverend Frank struggles, with intense sincerity, with the fact that he cannot force himself to have the simple faith that his parishioners have. He sits alone at a piano, picking out the tune of “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” with harmony that starts falling apart. If there was such a scene in the novel, I cannot relocate it now. In a move that Sinclair Lewis—in his quest to prove that everyone who disagreed with him was evil—would presumably have never made, the opera presents an honest clergyman. Only he is an agnostic clergyman.

The opera also presents other religious figures as sincere, although deluded. First, consider the evil ones. The president of the Bible college, Quarles (changed in the opera to Baines), was deluded enough to overlook the obvious insincerity of Gantry in order to get him to become a preacher. In both the book and opera, Gantry’s arch-enemy is Eddie Fislinger, a sincere zealot. In the movie, Gantry is framed when he sincerely tries to help the prostitute Juanita with whom he had previously interacted; but in the opera, the bait is none other than Lulu Baines, the daughter of the college president and the wife of Eddie Fislinger. Baines and Fislinger and their women were sincerely religious, but blind to the fact that the ruse they designed to entrap Gantry (in the opera, Fislinger offering his wife as sexual bait to Gantry) was if anything more evil than anything Gantry did. The opera’s Lulu was so primly innocent; or was she more sinful than Juanita?

Second, consider other sincere but deluded religious figure, the evangelist Sharon Falconer, whom Lewis modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson. This character apparently believed herself chosen by God to spread the gospel of love. In the opera, Falconer finally gives in to the amorous advances of Gantry; but she remains sincere to the end about her vocation. The famous climax scene is when the tabernacle catches fire and everybody dies except Elmer Gantry. Sharon Falconer has the chance to flee with Gantry, but chooses to die with her parishioners.

In the movie, Gantry had been an insurance salesman before getting into the religion business, and he went back to selling insurance at the end. But in the opera, Gantry goes off to join an Eastern mystic and, we presume, to eventually turn faux Buddhism into a money-making venture. So the opera presents other religions, not just fundamentalist Christianity, as ways of making money. The novel, in contrast, ends with Gantry continuing to preach about morality from his pulpit, even while ogling the choir girls.

The opera did a good job of focusing on many important ideas. It had a great dramatic structure too: Act One ended with Eddie Fislinger’s rage and his vow to take revenge against Gantry, the perfect way to keep the audience in anticipation of Act Two. There were running gags, also: the sermon topic of “What is love?” kept resurfacing, much to the amusement of the audience; and Fislinger’s anger at the end of Act One took the form of writing a sermon about “What is rage?”

But the impression I came away with was that this was an opera I should have liked. It did everything right. But the music, dramatic at times, just seemed chaotic most of the time. And when it was over I was glad to leave; in the parking garage, where voices boom, I sang operatically and atonally, “What was I think—ing? To come to this opera?” The echoes gave me a feeling of relief. The climax fire scene could have had flames projected on the back screen but instead there were big red mounds that did not look like fire but rather like tubeworms along a deep sea volcanic fault.

During the intermission, I had a book to occupy me: Lame Deer Speaks, the biography of a Lakota medicine man, published in the 1970s. I read the part about how some diseases were caused by gophers shooting porcupine quills and blades of grass into people, and medicine men would cure the people by sucking the quills and blades out of them. I have seen documentaries of this practice, in which the medicine men sneak quills and grass blades in their hands and pretend to suck them out. It would appear that much of Native American religion is also psychological manipulation. But there is a difference. Lame Deer said that the medicine men got lots of gifts in return for their healing, but then they gave these things away, and continued to live in shacks. They were psychologically manipulating their people, but not to accumulate wealth. One could say that they were knowingly purveying placebos. But placebos sometimes work, so long as the patient does not know that they are placebos.

From this juxtaposition, I began to think that even if religion is a placebo, it can do some good. It is just that in many cases preachers use the placebo as a way of getting your money and controlling you. Caution advised.

The Church of Hopeful Uncertainty: A Message from Frank Schaeffer

In the 1970s and 1980s, Francis Schaeffer was an iconic figure among evangelical Christians. He popularized the intellectual underpinnings of religious and political conservatism. Perhaps his principal sidekick was his son Franky, who wrote his own books, including one that defends capitalism as the Christian system by which the world should run. Franky now goes by Frank and visited Tulsa yesterday to tell us about the changes that have emerged in his thinking since the 1980s. He is now appalled at the monster that political evangelical Christianity created.

Schaeffer and many others describe the political right, today, as the American Taliban. It is no joke. The religious right does not want democracy; they want to establish a religious dictatorship, and they are accumulating caches of weapons to do so. Polls repeatedly show that a large minority of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. There is no more opportunity for dialogue or compromise with this position than it is possible to have meaningful compromise with Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Schaeffer pointed out that the conservatives among whom he grew up, such as his father and William F. Buckley, would not recognize the monstrous form of conservatism that now dominates the political scene. Schaeffer said that Barack Obama represents our last and best hope to avoid a religious dictatorship in the United States; if his presidency fails, a religious dictatorship is nearly certain. The motivation of the religious right is not godliness—an astonishingly large number of the leaders of the religious right lead immoral lives—but power, and they have no more esteem for truth than they do for godliness. He also pointed out that conservative leaders would publically talk about Christianity but in secret they would laugh at the Christians who played into their hands. Schaeffer changed his views when he realized that he would not want to live in the world he was trying to create, and that the secularists whom he publicly opposed were better people, personally and morally, than the leaders of the religious right. Schaeffer said that if Obama fails, this nation is screwed for the next hundred years.

Schaeffer also talked about what he now considers to be true religion. To the American Taliban, all that matters is that you assent to certain religious doctrines and are willing to use any and all means to oppose those who disagree with them. But to those who are truly religious, the right way is openness to the beauty and awe of the universe. The American Taliban fantasizes that it fully understands the truth; but we can never know the full truth. Our brains are biological structures that evolved within a physical universe; we are “stuck in” the universe and cannot objectively observe it or ourselves. Schaeffer opposes fundamentalist atheists as much as he does fundamentalist Christians, although, of course, the former are not dangerous like the latter. He describes his religious affiliation as “the church of hopeful uncertainty.” We cannot understand the universe any more than an infant can. We can never be certain but there is reason for us to believe that goodness and love are fundamental truths. Theology just gives us a rationalization for what we already know is true and good. In saying this, Schaeffer echoed the views of evolutionary psychologist Michael Gazzaniga, although Schaeffer may never have heard of him.

Schaeffer said nearly everything that people like me are saying, but much more powerfully—and from a position of being a former insider in the religious right.