Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on an Evangelist’s Planned Jersey Shore Project)

“The pier was an immense structure, built of cheap knotty pine, painted a hectic red with gold stripes. It was pleasant, however, on hot evenings. Round it ran a promenade out over the water, where once lovers had strolled between acts of the opera, and giving on the promenade were many barnlike doors.

[Evangelist Sister] “Sharon [Falconer] christened it ‘The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle,’ added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs….

“All of Clontar, with its mile of comfortable summer villas and gingerbread hotels, was excited over the tabernacle, and the Chamber of Commerce had announced, ‘We commend to the whole Jersey coast this high-class spiritual feature, the latest addition to the manifold attractions and points of interest at the snappiest of all summer colonies.’

“A choir of two hundred had been coaxed in, and some of them had been persuaded to buy their own robes and mortar boards.

“Near the sand dune against which Sharon and Elmer [Gantry] lolled was the tabernacle, over which the electric cross turned solemnly, throwing its glare now on the rushing surf, now across the bleak sand.

"‘And it's mine!’ Sharon trembled. ‘I've made it! Four thousand seats, and I guess it's the only Christian tabernacle built out over the water!’”—Pulitzer and Nobel Literature prize-winning American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), Elmer Gantry (1927)

I came across this quote after watching on TCM, decades after the first time I saw it, the 1960 film adaptation of Elmer Gantry. (In the attached image, that’s Burt Lancaster as the titular preacher and Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer.)

In the movie, the grand evangelical center that Sharon envisions is built (and then destroyed in a fire) in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. I was all the more surprised, then, to discover that Sinclair Lewis set Sharon’s project in a seaside community in New Jersey. I wondered, given that the novelist conducted extensive interviews and research while writing his fiction, if he had a particular Jersey Shore town in mind.

For help, I turned to Dr. Sally E. Parry, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Illinois State University and Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society. She wrote back that though the novelist did most of his research in the Midwest as he visited churches (especially in Missouri), he did not, to the best of her knowledge, model the tabernacle on a particular place.

Sharon Falconer, she continued, is strongly based on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose ministry was primarily centered in California.  “The novel was also inspired to a certain extent by Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which Lewis admired (Carol Kennicott discusses it in Main Street). Theron Ware is a Methodist preacher who is awakened to a variety of religious beliefs, including some by Sister Soulsby.”

Dr. Parry confirmed one possibility I raised: that Lewis might have learned about some Jersey Shore spots while working as a janitor for six months at Helicon Hall, the novelist Upton Sinclair’s 1906 utopian experiment in Englewood, NJ.

Now that I think of it, locating Sharon’s tabernacle by the shore might have appealed to the novelist in a couple of other ways: it would have testified to the growing national ambitions of her ministry, and this geographic location would have been even more resonant for a structure named after “the Waters of Jordan.”

Whatever the case may be, this novel, like so much of the writer’s other work at the height of his influence on American culture in the 1920s, continues to reverberate a century later.

In the late 1980s, in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, Tom Wolfe highlighted the conclusion of this stinging satire, where Gantry notices “a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted.” Lewis had certainly anticipated the sensational sex scandals that had recently engulfed televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, he observed.

The death this past week of the latter reminded me that Swaggart was involved in another scandal three years after the one that led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God. 

Unfortunately, the immense moral and political sway wielded by today’s mega-church leaders has led them to ignore the lessons of history offered by the Bakker and Swaggart cases, with Robert Morris and Mike Bickle among the recent high-profile preachers who have strayed from the straight and narrow path through sexual misconduct.

I can’t imagine that Sharon Falconer’s “Waters of Jordan” could cleanse the enormous sins they have committed.