Reverend Foster

Reverend Foster is the founder of the Church of the New Revelation and a religious innovator whose personal magnetism was matched by an instinct for organizing belief. He recognized the tension between America’s puritanical public ideals and its private appetites, then shaped a movement that promised happiness, offered layers of belonging, and transformed a revivalist following into a disciplined institution. In the novel’s later spiritual frame, he reappears as an angelic authority, still assessing people and assigning them work.

Identity and Religious Appeal

Foster’s authority rested on a magnetic personality and a gift for sensing the needs and contradictions of his culture. The narrator notes that detractors called him a hypnotist, while presenting his appeal as more than a matter of performance: he understood that a society that publicly suppressed sex could also harbor intense interest in it. His religious message answered that divide by presenting happiness as a divine gift to be accepted rather than a pleasure to be treated as inherently suspect.

Patricia Paiwonski conveys this teaching to Jill and Mike as a faith centered on happiness. She describes Foster as sent to Earth to restore the truth of Jesus’s teaching, which she believes had been altered over the centuries. Her account makes Foster’s claim to revelation both restorative and disruptive: he presents himself not as inventing a new religion, but as recovering a truer one. Patricia’s conviction also demonstrates how his teaching could become a lived identity; she insists that the faith’s most important change is inward, even as its visible signs and rituals help make that change legible.

Building the Church

Foster’s movement developed through successive levels of participation. An outer church welcomed seekers, who could remain at that level for years while receiving some of the church’s benefits. The middle church gathered the saved, who supported the organization financially and took part in its exuberant public religious life. Beyond them stood the unadvertised Inner Church: a closely selected body of priests and lay leaders who held the keys, records, and policy, and who alone participated in the innermost mysteries.

The organization borrowed methods and forms from freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, advertising, and earlier scriptures. Foster presented this combination as a return to primitive Christianity, while giving the church a structure capable of attracting members and coordinating activity. Its layers made conversion a gradual process: seekers could advance, while the existence of a further circle remained undisclosed until they were ready to enter it.

Foster also developed a means of resisting suppression. When a community tried to contain a new congregation, members from elsewhere could converge in support; the resulting scale made ordinary enforcement difficult. The narrator describes this approach alongside the church’s careful attention to legal form: prosecutions of Fosterites as such did not result in convictions upheld by the national Supreme Court or, later, the High Court. The movement’s defenses were therefore both collective and institutional, turning threatened suppression into a test of its capacity to mobilize.

Doctrine, Practice, and Succession

The New Revelation’s doctrine framed pleasure as something God had placed in the world for people to enjoy responsibly. Patricia explains that happiness is not permission for abuse or neglect; it is a reason to use good things rather than reject them. This teaching gave the church a message that could be expressed in ordinary social terms, even as its inner life remained more demanding and selective.

Foster personally chose the early members of the inner leadership. The account describes him looking for forceful, committed people and, among married candidates, requiring both spouses. It also stresses his effort to prevent possessiveness from destabilizing the group: he did not reserve women exclusively for himself, even among those he had legally married. The church’s intimate practices are presented in the novel as part of Foster’s effort to make closeness, rather than jealousy, a discipline of belonging.

The institution’s methods continue to shape the later Church of All Worlds, though the two churches are not treated as identical. Patty is ordained in the Fosterite tradition and teaches beginners’ classes in Martian; she and Dawn, both high priestesses, explain to other Fosterites that membership in the Church of All Worlds need not conflict with their faith. Foster’s kiss, paired in Patty’s account with a miraculous companion from Mike, becomes a visible credential in that bridge between traditions. At meetings of Mike’s church, staged tricks and the promise of more demanding instruction help draw seekers toward its nine circles. Foster’s legacy thus persists not only as doctrine but as a model for turning public spectacle, ritual distinction, and progressive initiation into organized religious commitment.

Foster in the Afterlife Frame

The novel later presents Foster from an afterlife perspective, where he recognizes Patricia as a holy figure and considers the meaning of her earthly life. He regards her as spiritually distinctive but also reflects that she did not fit the kind of assertive candidate he would have chosen for a priestess. His view preserves the contrast between a person’s value within her own spiritual path and the institution’s criteria for leadership.

Foster also confronts Digby over his preoccupation with the young man who may be their brother Michael. He redirects Digby’s attention to a former secretary and explains that she has advanced in the church’s hierarchy. Foster then assigns Digby to a new sector as a Guardian-in-Training, presenting the post as useful experience despite its lower nominal rank. When Digby complains that he is being sent away to prevent interference, Foster insists that interference is impossible while allowing him to continue trying. The exchange turns Foster’s old talent for directing followers into an afterlife version of administrative command.

His retrospective commentary gives the earthly church a double aspect. Foster had built an organization through charisma, selective recruitment, ritual, and strategic adaptation; in the spiritual frame, he appears as a confident manager of assignments and destinies. The church’s institutional endurance is echoed in Sam’s later plan for its members: if one congregation is shut down, they can regroup under another name, preserving a disciplined core while seeking a society in which they can no longer be easily persecuted.