Featured among the current glossy-covered paperback books is the reissue of Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel Elmer Gantry, that infamous caricature of a clergyman. Recent rumor has it that a Hollywood studio is projecting a movie version with Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher in the lead female role.
The Reverend Elmer Gantry is but one example of the many ministers who live in the pages of American and British novels of the past 100 years. The picture of clerical compromise, both in theology and in morality, is infrequently relieved even now. When religious leaders lament the lack of spiritual vitality in this day when church membership is so popular, they can attribute no small blame to the effect of these widely-read books.
The close interrelation between literature and social trends is universally recognized and documented. It is not always possible to determine with exactness whether the changing age is simply reflected in literature, or if the literature has something to do with inspiring and creating social changes. The fact remains, however, that the effect of literature upon the public mind and mores, both as creator and abettor of social change, is dynamic. Even when the literary coterie is defeated, or when the public does not respond for a decade or two, the cumulative shaping power of literature on public life is without equal among the many influences that mold us.
The importance of fiction, especially where it deals with religious themes and persons, is underscored by the perennial popularity of the subject. The religious motif has been, still is, and probably always will be appreciated and sought by the general reading public. From the time of Chaucer, English-language writers have been interested in the gentle and not-so-gentle satire of the clergy.
SOME APPARENT TRENDS
Through the year 1915, almost one-third of the best sellers were religious. Since 1915 this ratio has probably not prevailed, but the percentage is still significant. Perhaps we are too close to these years to draw precise conclusions or detect inexorable trends. However, it would seem that certain observations are valid.
Novels immediately prior to the Darwinian impact (1859) were already expressing with some force the rising dissatisfaction with evangelicalism. Generally respectable criticism of evangelicalism and commendation of liberalism and the social gospel marked the time of the publication of Darwin’s work to the era of the muckraking books (1902–1916).
Since that time, two world wars, the great depression, the general breakdown of public and private morality, complete disillusionment of utopianism, and the always terrifying post-Korean cold war have provided a matrix in which discredit of the Gospel has been bred. By fair means and foul, novelists have sought to spread before the reading public their diatribe against the Church, the clergy, and the Christian message.
On the eve of World War II and to the present day, there has been a counter-trend in defense of the faith. The effect has been partially ameliorating. Writers have been creating or describing virtuous and able men of the cloth, and yet have denounced devastatingly the people in the pews. For example, Hartzell Spence’s biographical book One Foot in Heaven (1940), subsequently made into a successful film version, had as its main character the amazing and redoubtable Reverend William Spence. Despite certain foibles in the man, he was revealed as the sort of dedicated minister who accomplishes things. But the overall picture of ministerial life, as well as the calibre of church people, hardly commended that life or calling to anyone.
In this period also is Rachel Field’s All This and Heaven Too (1947) with the two diverse but equally admirable ministers—the Reverend Monod and the Reverend Field. Here, particularly through the eyes of the minister’s wife, one sees the pettiness and near-cruelty of church people.
Nonfiction books, having to do with our subject, may be noted just in passing. In the area of biography, A Man Called Peter acts as a palliative to the general malaise. In the realm of missionary biography and adventure such volumes as The Keys of the Kingdom, Through Gates of Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty, and The Small Woman (which has been given further stature in the film version Inn of the Sixth Happiness) reflect a continuing sympathetic interest in the cause of Christ. Can it be that people are in sympathy with the propagation of the Gospel to heathen lands but appreciate sublimation of the claims of Christianity at home?
ROOTS OF THE DECAY OF FAITH
Nineteenth century Protestant clergymen were confronted with skepticism in their congregations as well as within themselves.
For example, higher criticism, born in Germany, had its influence in England in 1841 with George Eliot’s translation of David Strauss’ rationalistic Life of Jesus. Her repudiation of the evangelicalism of her youth was abrupt; but, as E. Wagenknecht says in Cavalcade of the English Novel, she never really reached the “certitude of unbelief. Like Renan she might have said, ‘I feel that my life is governed by a faith I no longer possess.’ ”
Men felt compelled to readjust their views on creation when Darwin’s Origin of Species came out in 1859. The concept of evolution was popularized as a view of life. It was the actual “turning point in the history of modern thought” as George Sampson points out in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature.
Learned and respected professors urged the college-age generations to ignore outdated Mill and Spencer and turn to Kant and Hegel. The English philosophy “idealism” was thus conceived, and the latter half of the nineteenth century was studded with works by writers directly influenced by Kant and Hegel.
The awakening of social consciousness also involved a dramatic readjustment in ecclesiastical thinking. Many a minister found himself tossed upon the pointed horns of a dilemma: should he cultivate the wealthy who were the financial mainstay of the church but often guilty of injustice, if not sheer inhumanity, in the acquisition and maintaining of their fortunes; or should he risk career, calling, church, and compensation to relate the Gospel to man’s total life and thereby run athwart the vested interests of pillars of the church?
Out of this context arose the “social gospel”—the effort to project the example of Jesus without the creedal dogmatism and pampered moneyed oligarchy of the churches. America with its industrial conflict, increasing squalid slums, and the evils of big business domination was a natural ground for such religious renewal. Dr. Washington Gladden’s “Applied Christianity” became famous. The Reverend Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896), originally preached as an evening service series at the Topeka, Kansas, First Congregational Church, rocketed into fame as an artless tale of a shabby Stranger whose appearance at a worship service of a comfortable congregation shamed nominal Christians into a more real following of Christ.
Thus a complexity of changes wrought the beginnings of a decay of faith, and the novels about clergymen chronicle the details of this defection.
FROM DARWIN TO THE MUCKRAKERS
One of this writer’s favorite books is Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847. In it Miss Bronte said the kindest things she could of evangelicalism in the Reverend St. John Rivers. The impression is one of unrelenting severity, uncompromising principle, and undaunted self-destruction in the Cause. Her more telling strokes are reserved for the Reverend Brocklehurst, a spouter of texts and neglecter of kindness, devoted to purity and devoid of charity. He, as treasurer of the Lowood School, was more concerned with balanced books than balanced diets. Such a monster could have started a whole decay of faith by himself.
Ernest Pontifax, the curate in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh (1859), is an immature man who has been raised in the strictest kind of fundamentalistic environment. In all of his preparation he had never been introduced to any work antithetical to evangelicalism, and was indoctrinated completely in a bibliolatrous theology. There are actually two clergymen in this book. The elder Pontifax to the end is bound to the past, portrayed in unflattering descriptive strokes as a mean, impatient, narrow-minded, ill-tempered, fraudulently pious man and prototype of the evangelical clergyman:
Theobald (the father) was always in a bad temper on Sunday evening. Whether it is that they are as much bored with the day as their neighbors, or whether they are tired, or whatever the cause may be, clergymen are seldom at their best on Sunday evening.
Against this harsh background, the character of Ernest, at first a twig bent by parental pressure and then by dint of will bent the other way and almost broken, emerges at last divorced from the church, liberated from submission to his parents, and financially enriched by a timely inheritance. He has become an integrated nationalist, the picture of contentment, a happy skeptic from the manacles of a jailer Christianity.
One paragraph describes the beginnings of this departure as the new attitude of supposed honest inquiry gains mastery:
the more he read in this spirit the more the balance seemed to lie in favor of unbelief, till, in the end all further doubt became impossible, and he saw plainly enough that, whatever else might be true, the story that Christ had died, come to life again, and been carried from earth through the clouds into the heavens could not now be accepted by unbiased people.… He would probably have seen it years ago if he had not been hoodwinked by people who were paid for hoodwinking him.
Butler, of course, stands at the beginning of the decay of faith. He is not the ultimate by any means. Critics of his day and ours regard him as a friend to true religion. Wagenknecht in the Cavalcade of the English Novel writes:
Butler was far from orthodox Christianity, yet he was a very religious man … in his view he was building a better foundation for the religion of the future. He believes that if a man loves God he cannot come to much harm. But, like the Quakers, he felt that to achieve this security a man must disregard theological dogmas and social conventions completely and listen to the voice of God within himself.
Thus the trend was established. One author after another added to the evil heritage of suspicion and ridicule of the ministry, specifically the evangelical ministry. The old way of faith and life was rejected as being outmoded and unrealistic.
An island in the midst of this flood appeared as Thomas Wingfold, Curate, written by George MacDonald, and published in 1876. Wingfold is an average minister whose hall mark is sincerity. His practice of prayer is purposeful, and his study of the Bible is a search for a truly meaningful message. The moment of his spiritual birth comes in the confrontation of a text. It dawns upon his heart with the radiance of the sun bursting through the clouds of perplexed meditation: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Clym Yeobright of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878) is the pawn of his creator’s philosophic pessimism—another symptom of the decay of faith in what Toynbee has called “this post Christian era.” Clym, after a successful career in Paris, is thoroughly disturbed by his “trafficking in glittering splendors with wealthy women and titled libertines”; and he longs to do something to help the poor and ignorant. Fate enters, and blow after unrelentless blow falls, bending, crushing, breaking, rending. At the nadir of his brokenness, half blind, and on the way to total blindness, Clym turns to the ministry as his only recourse. His success is indifferent, and the best opinion seemed to be that “it was well enough for a man to take to preaching who could not see to do anything else.”
In 1895 Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure, a novel currently appearing in eye-catching reprint as “the novel which shocked the Victorian age.” Published originally as a serial in Harpers magazine, it is a tale of unmitigated disillusionment, disenchantment, and despair. It presents the terrible refinement of Hardy’s pessimism. Jude is kept by Fate from becoming an educated cleric. Led from one shattering relationship to another, Jude spends his days as a laborer, fitting the stones in arches of apse and narthex, but never mounting the cherished steps to the coveted pulpit.
Theron Ware is the earnest, unsophisticated and terribly limited young cleric of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). In the May 2, 1896, issue of “The Critic,” the reviewer states that Frederic
has conceived a man of some intellectual and emotional readiness, with a meagre education and very limited knowledge of the world; inoffensively virtuous through lack of opportunity for vice, but with no genuine foundation of character.
In their third charge Theron and his wife, Alice, find themselves $800 in debt. An important elderly citizen, Abraham Beekman by name, bails them out with the fatherly advice that Theron study law and slip out of the ministry at the first good change. In the end, having been led from one damning association to another, and finally to his fateful “illumination,” Theron leaves the ministry, heads for the West, with a pipe dream of politics, perhaps even the White House some day.
Of all these novels, perhaps the most influential was the American Winston Churchill’s Inside of the Cup (1913). It was one of the most popular muckraking novels dealing with the Church that came out at the time the movement was strongest (1902–1916). John Hodder is the name of the minister. In these pages he changes from an extreme conservatist to the personification of the liberal movement in theology. His repudiation of the interpretations of the Christian belief in terms of the old orthodoxy is complete, and just as final is his identification with the whole new set of liberalism’s interpretations of the old articles of faith. At the end,
he perceived at last the form all religions take is that of consecration to a Cause—one of God’s many causes. The meaning of life is to find one’s Cause, to lose one’s self in it. His was the liberation of the Word,—now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the ashes. To help liberate the church, fan into flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the selfishness of the world.…
FROM 1916 TO WORLD WAR II
The period from 1916 to the beginnings of World War II is marked by the most abusive treatment of the minister and his mission. For example, H. G. Wells’ The Soul of the Bishop (1917) presents a sorry struggle revolving around Smoking versus Conscience, the story of a human crustaceon in a stew over creeds who leaves the church in favor of tobacco.
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), which even H. L. Mencken dubbed a profoundly immoral book (because of its treatment of murder), gives us the Reverend and Mrs. Griffiths, parents of the book’s protagonist, parroters of pious phrases even in the presence of the most bitter tragedy.
Well, blessed be the name of the Lord.… We must keep our hearts open. Yes, we mustn’t judge—We only hope for the best. Yes, Yes! Praise the Lord—we must praise the Lord! Amen! Oh yes! Tst! Tst! Tst!
We see the Reverend Freemantle of James Hilton’s And Now Goodbye (1931), a picture of frustration, thwarted escape, and final resignation to dullness; George Brush of Thornton Wilder’s Heaven My Destination (1935), a ridiculous figure, a composite of fundamentalists foibles, zealous without knowledge; the unspeakably vulgar Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s unthinkably vulgar Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Aron of the same author’s East of Eden, a man who literally degenerates into religion; and the Reverend Blampied of James Hilton’s Random Harvest (1941), a lazy man, rebellious against authority.
The decay of faith issues in waning morality, spiritual aenemia, or perhaps the atheistic bravado of a Mencken who said, “The noblest man I think is the one that fights God and triumphs over him.” Or in the melancholy of Will Durant who said in his On the Meaning of Life (1932):
God who was once the consolation of our brief life and our refuge in bereavement and suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope nor microscope discovers Him. Life has become in that total perspective, which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is certain in it except defeat and death, a sleep from which it seems there is no awaking.… The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, nor Europe vs. America, not even East vs. West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.
PRESENT DAY FICTION
Except for purely Christian fiction, which has a limited public, the plight of the parson is much the same in present day novels.
Peter DeVries’ The Mackeral Plaza (1958), a top 10 national best seller for a number of weeks last year, presents us with the racy story of a youngish widower, the Reverend Mackeral. He is theologically liberal, vituperative about fundamentalism, and morally more chased than chaste. His romantic involvement includes an actress with whom he has numerous clandestine meetings, and his housekeeper whom he finally marries after they thoroughly discover their happy compatibility. In the name of all that is holy, including the sacred office of the ministry, what effect must a book like this have upon the public mind?
It was perhaps the sobering effect of World War II, plus the widely-heralded findings of neo-orthodoxy, that stimulated the secondary trend noted earlier. By the end of the war, novels were appearing which made religion at least a matter of choice.
What can we say in conclusion? The minds and conduct of people have been molded and directed largely by the fiction they have been reading for years; and there is not nearly enough evidence yet of that kind of literature which will effectively counteract the poison that has touched the clergy, the church, and the claims of Christ!
Bright Legacy
Oh Earth, retreat with broken toys,
Torn ribbons, while I trace
Where Death and he went quickly forth
Out-orbiting known space …
His soul, released and bright
With joy of Christ’s own presence soars!
Glad for his coronation? Yes!
Yet, God, this lonely night
My human cry in darkness heed—
Thy tenderness, thy grace I plead.
RUTH WEBBER SHIVELY
Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.
