Preach It

Would it be bad of me to spread the name of the worst mascara I ever owned?And this is the pricey stuff. But it goes on in such awful clumps that it’s been months since I went out in public, batting a lovely fringe around my eyes.

Call me Tammy Fay.

Oh, you don’t remember her?

She was the sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping wife of a television preacher and boy, when she got to weeping, the mascara could run. And she eventually had a lot to weep about. Her husband built an empire on his promises to save souls in exchange for your most generous donation. Then he turned out to have a very wide-eyed girlfriend on the side and a few other very human weaknesses, I don’t recall it all now that it’s about thirty years blown over.

Journalists at the time compared it all to Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Elmer Gantry. Naturally, this was yet another novel my education skipped, so I hunted the book down.

According to Wikipedia, Lewis’ research included attending two or three church services a week. He must have sat through all the preaching with quite a jaundiced eye for what came out of his pen portrayed religious conversion as nothing but being carried aloft by the singing, weeping and pleading of an hot and bothered tent meeting.

When Elmer Gantry meets a new congregation, he works the room like a star, parting his coat to show the “elegant white piping” had has just added to his vest; wowing the worshipers with a made-up anecdote about a sinner who repents too late; and back-pedaling his plans to skip Sunday School for a cigar because of an angelic-looking Sunday School teacher.

In Lewis’ hands, preachers possess “flabby, white, holy” hands. When they come together, they “converse . . . not only on the sacraments but on automobiles and the use of pledge envelopes.” An enlightened few doubt their own messages, but can no more walk away from their jobs than can any funeral director or Wal-Mart cashier.

Lewis feared fascism or, in other words, an enslaving conservatism. And don’t forget that Gantry was written in the era of the Scopes trial, when literal-minded faith began to bump up seriously against rational, scientific learning.

Gantry upset a lot of readers in its day. While Lewis teaches us much about hypocrisy through the maneuvering of a Kansas boy who finds his ticket to fame, he also brands faith as stupid and dangerous. He wrote in an era when believers were the majority, when a voice-in-the-wilderness like his highlighted the excesses of a shady but popular enterprise.

Is it the same world today? Or do we find new hotbeds of excess and hypocrisy that need rooting out?

While you mull over these matters, you might dine on a church-supper-worthy Microwave Mac ‘n Cheese. Then again, it falls short of your normal church-supper dish because it’s not covered with buttered crumbs. Add them if you want. And enjoy your bonus recipe of Lemon-Butter Snow Peas.