In the movie version of Elmer Gantry, the title character (played by Burt Lancaster) is a sleazy salesman who says anything, or tells any lie, to make a sale, and joins up with a traveling revival show, preaching the gospel. He preaches against booze, but drinks; he preaches against adultery, but has an affair with the lady who runs the revival show; and generally shows every sort of religious hypocrisy that could possibly exist within Christianity.

Note: It's highly recommended that you see the movie before reading this.

Hypothesis: ESTP

Elmer Gantry lives in the moment. He says whatever it takes to play to his crowd and keep his audience mesmerized and stimulated. He's funny, he's melodramatic, he's whatever it takes. He can whip up a crowd with his musical delivery and poetic improvisation. He's got a ton of amusing anecdotes to entertain people with (probably none of them true, of course), and he has several canned bits of semi-poetry to bedazzle and confuse anyone, by appealing to their deepest needs. "Love...love is the morning and the evening star."

He doesn't worry himself with philosophy or even with truth. One moment, he'll use the Bible to discredit an opponent in the simplest possible way: by getting him to admit that he (the opponent) doesn't believe it's the literal word of God. No fancy non-literal interpretations for him: what the Bible says is written there on the page, and it needs no explanation. Five minutes later, he'll violate two or three commandments at the same time, showing that he obviously doesn't take a word of the Bible seriously, even though he can quote chapter and verse.

In Lenore terms, his little trial of the newspaper reporter calls upon the vocabulary of extraverted feeling to turn the tribe against an opponent, but he doesn't feel bound by it himself. This is classic tertiary Fe. The truth doesn't matter. What matters is leveraging the Christian language of group loyalty to gain some social advantage for yourself.

He knows perfectly well that most of the people who come to his revival meetings and shout condemnation upon boozers and gamblers spend their free time in back rooms drinking and gambling. He doesn't make them cut it out and fly straight, he uses the information to blackmail them into helping out his church. His followers are virtually all hypocrites and he knows it. He himself would appear to be the ne plus ultra of the Christian hypocrite.

By the end of the movie, though, you see him differently. He violates the literal word of the Bible, but he lives every moment in tune with a spiritual truth that transcends words. He truly lives in each moment, bringing forth what he's got to give. He is a living paradox. His hypocrisy is his integrity. He enjoys the physical pleasures of life, and he lies a lot, and perhaps a literal reading of the New Testament frowns on that. But of all the people in the movie, only he, Sister Falconer, and the newspaper reporter truly have integrity--an integrity that goes beyond rules and prohibitions, but consists simply in our ability to be fully what we are and accept others for what they are, truly without judgement, only love.

See Extraverted Sensation, Introverted Thinking, tertiary Extraverted Feeling, Introverted Feeling, Introverted Intuition.