“[In Elmer Gantry, author Sinclair] Lewis was suggesting that the churches, especially fundamentalist evangelical ones, could be buttresses for right-wing movements in the U.S.  Since America, in the novel, is portrayed as beholden to vulgar faith-based ideas, wouldn’t it be likely – Lewis’s text implies – that potential dictators would find a popular, unifying source of appeal and support across class lines by using the Bible as a spearhead?  It is a hypothesis that is made fully explicit in Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a political fantasy about a fascist state rising in Depression-era America.  The Antichrist-like dictator, Buzz Noel Windrip, is a Scripture-quoting, “rabble-rousing” “prophet” who “vomits Biblical wrath” “like Jeremiah cursing Jerusalem” while hordes “raise their hands to him in worship,” as if he were one “called of God.”  Elmer and Buzz are charismatic demagogues who want to rule the nation as God’s appointed leader, and many Americans seem willing to grant them that right.  The mass psychology of fascism is already incipient in the style of worship.” 

(from Jason Stevens’s 2007 Introduction to Elmer Gantry (1927), by Sinclair Lewis)