Sinclair Lewis’s Godseeker is even more relevant today than his It Can’t Happen Here

Columnist Alice B. Lloyd, writing for The weekly standardrecently published an article about the novel’s renewed popularity can’t happen here by Sinclair Lewis. That 1944 book about the fictional election of a president who goes on to rule the United States as a dictator has been a bestseller since Donald Trump took office.

Instead of praising the importance of that book, Lloyd reveals in his column that he described can’t happen here as one of Sinclair Lewis’s most disappointing efforts. She admits that the author from Minnesota, in addition to being the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, she has at least four novels that are more relevant today than I am.It can’t happen here.

His classic about a small-town real estate agent in the fictional town of Zenith, Minnesota, a novel titled Babbitt after his main character, he is the first listed by Lloyd in his column. the next is Main Streetan early feminist account of the ambitious wife of a small-town doctor.

Also listed as a novel on Lloyd’s List Dodsworth, which chronicles the troubled marriage and life adjustment of a retired car tycoon. The final novel focuses on the hypocrisy of a traveling evangelist named Elmer Gantry, which was made into a popular movie starring Burt Lancaster as the title character.

The list omits an even better examination of religion in the United States, a novel called the seeker of god. This largely forgotten book by Sinclair Lewis is set in America before the Civil War, but the message of it is quite relevant to the religious upheaval we are experiencing today.

Aaron Gadd is a teenager when the book begins, working as a carpenter’s apprentice in a small New Jersey town. After hearing an evangelist at a revival, he convinces Aaron to join the man’s mission camp in the unsettled territory that would eventually become the state of Minnesota.

As the missionaries attempt to bring the teachings of Jesus to the Sioux tribesmen on the plains, Aaron eventually finds himself questioning the many inexplicable aspects at the heart of Christianity. Through his association with those he was supposed to convert, the young missionary learns to appreciate the faith of the Native Americans around him.

A Dakota tribesman named Black Wolf has Gadd consider some of the wacky rituals of Christianity, which he claims are more far-fetched than those involved in his people’s worship.

“Naturally, since we know our God pervades every inch of space, we don’t single out any place as sacred to him,” Black Wolf tells Aaron. “Christians dare not worship together unless they have built an isolated shelter against evil spirits, and this they call a church, a chapel, or a temple.”

Aaron has to admit that worship should be done everywhere, just as the Dakotas believe. He too doubts, once Black Wolf points it out, the Christian practice of setting aside Sunday for worship.

“The Christians have a special day that is sacred to their main god, while for the Indians every day, hours and minutes are filled with duty and gratitude towards God,” Black Wolf tells Gadd. “His voice of his is in every breeze, in every flowing water, to be revered as much at midnight on a Wednesday as at noon on a Sunday.”

Black Wolf also makes Aaron question the ritual of Christian marriages compared to the Dakota and other tribes, who are outraged at the pomposity of the wedding ceremony.

“The suggestive rites and gruesome jokes of public marriage are the most horrible of all,” Black Wolf says of the typical Christian wedding. “Between us, Dakota, marriage is a strictly private affair between a man and a woman who run away for a while to consume their marriage only in view of the stars and clouds.”

In the seeker of god Sinclair Lewis has shown Americans that it’s okay to question their faith from time to time and allow themselves to be heard about how they may be perceived by other cultures. With the religious and cultural divide among citizens of the United States today, many of us could benefit from reading a book from 1949 that somewhat sadly addresses many of the issues we have today.

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