Stranger in a Strange Land

The Reverend Foster, self-ordained—or directly ordained by God, depending on authority cited—had an intuitive instinct for the pulse of his culture and his times at least as strong as that of a skilled carney sizing up a mark. The country and culture commonly known as “America” had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degree—its religious revivals were often hysterical in fashion almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America—and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

The Reverend Foster had in common with almost every great religious leader of that planet two traits: he had an extremely magnetic personality (“hypnotist” was a word widely used by his detractors, along with others less mild) and, sexually, he did not fall anywhere near the human norm. Great religious leaders on Earth were always either celibate, or the antithesis. (Great leaders, the innovators—not necessarily the major administrators and consolidators.) Foster was not celibate.

Nor were any of his wives and high priestesses—the clincher for complete conversion and rebirth under the New Revelation usually included a ritual which Valentine Michael Smith at a later time was to grok as especially suited for growing-closer.

This, of course, was nothing new; in Terran history sects, cults, and major religions too numerous to list had used essentially the same technique—but not on a major scale in America before Foster’s times. Foster was run out of town more than once before he “perfected” a method and organization that permitted him to expand his capric cult. In organization he borrowed as liberally from freemasonry, from Catholicism, from the Communist Party, and from Madison Avenue as he had borrowed from any and all earlier scriptures in composing his New Revelation… and he sugar-coated it all as a return to primitive Christianity to suit his customers. He set up an outer church which anybody could attend—and a person could remain a “seeker” with many benefits of the church for years. Then there was a middle church, which to all outward appearance was “The Church of the New Revelation,” the happy saved, who paid their tithes, enjoyed all economic benefits of the church’s ever-widening business tie-ins, and whooped it up in the endless carnival & revival atmosphere of Happiness, Happiness, Happiness! Their sins were forgiven—and henceforth very little was sinful as long as they supported their church, dealt honestly with their fellow Fosterites, condemned sinners, and stayed Happy. The New Revelation does not specifically encourage adultery; it simply gets rather mystical in discussing sexual conduct.

The saved of the middle church supplied the ranks of the shock troops when direct action was needed. Foster borrowed a trick from the early twentieth-century Wobblies; if a community tried to suppress a budding Fosterite movement, Fosterites from elsewhere converged on that town until there were neither jails nor cops enough to cope with them—and the cops usually had had their ribs kicked in and the jails were smashed.

If some prosecutor were brave enough to push an indictment thereafter, it was almost impossible to make it stick. Foster (after learning his lesson under fire) saw to it that such prosecutions were indeed persecution under the letter of the law; not one conviction of a Fosterite qua Fosterite ever was upheld by the national Supreme Court—nor, later, by the High Court.

But, in addition to the overt church, there was the Inner Church, never named as such—a hard core of the utterly dedicated who made up the priesthood, all the church lay leaders, all keepers of keys and records and makers of policy. They were the “reborn,” beyond sin, certain of their place in heaven, and sole participants of the inner mysteries—and the only candidates for direct admission to Heaven.

Foster selected these with great care, doing so personally until the operation got too big. He looked for men as much like himself as possible and for women like his priestess-wives—dynamic, utterly convinced (as he was himself convinced), stubborn, and free (or able to be freed, once their guilt and insecurity was purged) of jealousy in its simplest, most human meaning—and all of them potential satyrs and nymphs, as the secret inner church was that utterly Dionysian cult that America had never had and for which there was an enormous potential market.