Paris.
Winnemac. Fictional midwestern state in which Gantry preaches before being advanced to a large city. Its villages include Schoenheim, Banjo Crossing, and others, all of which Lewis disparages as he does Paris. The narrow cultural climate of midwestern rural villages produces narrow, bigoted people, easily impressed by Gantry and readily manipulated by him.
Clontar. Fictional New Jersey coastal resort where Gantry and the itinerant revivalist Sharon Falconer try to start a permanent church. The two revivalists plan to transfer their increasingly mechanical operations to an enormous and deteriorating auditorium, in which an opera company earlier went bankrupt. To the cheaply built knotty-pine building, decorated in red and gold paint, they add a huge revolving cross covered with yellow and ruby electric lights. Freed from having to share the donations their revivals harvest with the community churches that sponsor them as they move from town to town, they hope to reap great personal profits. However, their greed causes them to ignore fire safety, and their flimsy wooden church building goes up in flames, ending Falconer’s life and Gantry’s hope of wealth.
Zenith. Largest city in the state of Winnemac and the site of Gantry’s greatest preaching success. He is promoted from a small town pastorate to a church in a rundown neighborhood mostly populated by Italians and other immigrants. However, he discovers that his own Methodist congregation consists primarily of transplanted rustics who grew up in the same cultural milieu as their pastor. One parishioner has become a wealthy manufacturer, yet chooses to remain in the denomination of his childhood, rather than join a more prestigious congregation. Another member, a successful, though not very pious lawyer, values religion’s effectiveness in controlling workers–believing it focuses their thoughts on higher things than instigating strikes and increasing wages.
Gantry uses flamboyant feats of showmanship to censure the people of Zenith. Although he himself indulges in drinking and womanizing, he leads raids into the city’s red light district, excoriating the immoral gambling, bootleg liquor, and prostitution he finds in an area heavily populated by poor immigrants. He inveighs against such vices, blaming the godless materialism of the urban population for being their source. Gantry condemns the city as a cesspool of decadence, an evil Sodom that contrasts sharply with the virtuous countryside where his own boyhood congregation grew up.
Gantry’s theatrics attract favorable media attention and increasing membership for his congregation, turning his rundown church into a financial success, and gaining him invitations to join the Rotary and Tonawanda Country Clubs, where he can mingle with the bankers and industrialists who rule Zenith. When Gantry tours Europe, Lewis savagely satirizes Gantry’s inability to understand its culture, the background from which much of Zenith’s population originally came.