Elmer Gantry: The Pope of the Tea Party

“Too unreflective ever to know himself, too incapable of thought ever to be really a hypocrite, Elmer is honored and beloved of most of those with whom he comes in contact because he is made of the same coarse clay as they, because no learning, no integrity and no spirituality sets him apart from those to whom he is paid to minister,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, describing Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.

“He is the type most fit to occupy the pulpit supported by materialists like himself to whom the church is half the defender of petty privileges against subversive forces and half the instrument through which a nominal respect may be paid to virtues inconvenient to practice.”

In 1927, Krutch couldn’t know he was also describing the “Christianity” of 21^st century Tea Baggers to a T. 
Fundamentalist Christianity pays lip service to love, but smacks its lips at delicious, mouth-watering hatred, which rhymes with “sacred.”