Foster Great Angel

Archangel Foster is the charismatic founder of the Church of the New Revelation, whose success rests on his ability to convert cultural contradictions into religious organization. The novel presents him both as an unusually perceptive religious entrepreneur and, after his death, as an angelic authority whose institutional legacy remains active in the lives of his successors. His story links personal magnetism to the structures that preserve a movement beyond its founder.

Identity and Cultural Insight

Foster understands that American public morality and private behavior pull in opposite directions: laws and established religions tend toward restraint, while popular conduct and periodic religious revivals express less restrained impulses. He builds his movement for that divided audience, presenting it as a return to primitive Christianity while giving it a distinctive, exuberant culture of religious revival. The narration treats his reading of the country as a source of practical power, not merely a matter of doctrine.

Foster is described as intensely magnetic, with detractors calling him a hypnotist, and as far from the human sexual norm. He is not celibate, and the novel connects the intimate customs of his religious leadership to the New Revelation’s appeal and to a ritual that Valentine Michael Smith later understands through the idea of growing closer. Foster’s authority therefore combines public performance, religious promise, and a deliberately unconventional private culture.

Founding and Structure of the Church

Before developing a durable organization, Foster is driven out of towns more than once. He responds by refining the movement’s methods and building a structure capable of expansion. In assembling its organization and teachings, he borrows from Freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, advertising, and earlier scriptures; he then presents this composite inheritance as primitive Christianity.

The public-facing church has graduated levels of participation. An outer church welcomes attenders, who may remain seekers for years while receiving some of its benefits. The middle church consists of the saved, who pay tithes and participate in the movement’s expanding business connections and continual revival atmosphere. Its forgiving moral code is tied to continued support of the church, honest dealings with fellow Fosterites, denunciation of sinners, and the demand to remain happy. The New Revelation is not described as expressly encouraging adultery; rather, it treats sexual conduct in mystical terms.

Beyond the outward church is an inner body that is never formally named as such. Its members are the dedicated core: priests, lay leaders, custodians of records and keys, and makers of policy. They are regarded as reborn and beyond sin, certain of their place in heaven, and uniquely eligible for direct admission. Foster initially selects them personally, choosing men who resemble him and women who resemble his priestesses in energy, conviction, and freedom from jealousy. Married candidates must be accepted as a couple; unmarried candidates are expected to be sexually attractive and assertive, and the priests are instructed to maintain at least as many men as women. The account presents these rules as an organizational answer to jealousy and violence that had undermined comparable groups.

Power, Conflict, and Institutional Survival

The saved members of the middle church serve as a reserve for confrontations with opponents. When a community attempts to suppress a new Fosterite movement, Fosterites from elsewhere converge on it in sufficient numbers to overwhelm local enforcement and disrupt the jails. Foster also learns to frame prosecutions so that they qualify as persecution under the letter of the law. The narrative says that convictions of Fosterites as Fosterites have not been upheld by the national Supreme Court or, later, by the High Court. His methods thus join mass mobilization to legal protection, making the church difficult to contain by local authorities.

Foster’s organizational achievement is visible in the later Church of All Worlds. Patty, herself a teacher of Martian and a helper to novices, explains that she and Dawn work to show Fosterites that membership in Mike’s church does not conflict with their faith, comparing the compatibility to being a Baptist and a Mason. She displays Foster’s kiss and explains its significance, alongside the companion mark placed by Mike. Familiarity with the kiss and with Mike’s miracles helps make some Fosterites ready to undertake the work of advancing to a higher circle. Foster’s ritual signs and institutional language thus remain legible within a newer movement, even as its practices and authority are not simply identical to his.

Death, Succession, and Legacy

After Foster’s death, the narrative shows him at work in an angelic role, addressing Digby as an assistant whose earlier temporary duty has earned him a new name. Foster asks to be called Fog in the studio rather than by his ceremonial title, and he tells Digby that the name Digby is earned rather than bestowed as a favor. The scene gives institutional succession a personal form: recognition and naming mark a change in the assistant’s status, while Foster continues to exercise authority over the work.

That authority is not presented as uncomplicated mercy. Foster briefly considers the fate of Patricia, then reproaches himself for the thought as almost human, concluding that angelic compassion leaves no room for mercy. The juxtaposition makes his heavenly role continuous with his former capacity to organize and judge, but also exposes its severity. His continuing work is framed within the larger deliberations of the Martian Old Ones, who extract what Mike has learned of humanity and consider, after a long period of waiting, whether Earth should be destroyed. Foster’s institutional legacy therefore persists within a story where religious authority, human survival, and alien judgment intersect.

Foster’s movement also supplies a point of comparison for the Church of All Worlds’ development. Sam describes the newer church’s strategy of closing, relocating, and reopening under successive names as public opposition gathers, while building a disciplined core and retaining advanced pilgrims who may rejoin later. He contrasts Mike’s uncertain beginnings, supported by three untrained priestesses, with the solid Nest that has formed little more than a year afterward. The parallel underscores a distinction: Foster had made religious charisma durable through layered membership, ritual, and coordinated action; Mike’s movement likewise develops structure and resilience, but its repeated dispersal and return are presented as its own response to persecution. Foster’s importance lies not only in founding a church, but in establishing the organizational example against which later religious movements can be understood.