Fosterites

The Fosterites are a large, adaptable religious movement organized around the teachings and legacy of Foster. Their success rests on more than public services: the movement combines charismatic authority, carefully graded membership, practical political tactics, and a private inner church. It becomes both an established religious power and a point of comparison for Mike’s emerging Church of All Worlds, whose own circles and ceremonies borrow recognizable organizational forms without erasing the differences between the two faiths.

Origins, Appeal, and Organization

The movement answers to a divided religious culture in which public moral restraint coexists with intense private interest in sexuality. Foster understood this tension and built a religious system that presented itself as a return to primitive Christianity while drawing organizational techniques from freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, commercial advertising, and earlier scriptures. The result is described as a carnival-like faith of happiness and revival, designed to attract and retain adherents rather than remain a small sect.

Fosterite membership is layered. The outer church welcomes seekers, who can receive some benefits for years without entering deeper levels. The middle church is the public-facing body of saved members: adherents support the movement financially, participate in its economic network, and are expected to deal honestly with fellow Fosterites and remain happy. Beneath it is an unnamed Inner Church, whose dedicated members comprise the priesthood, lay leadership, keepers of records and keys, and policy makers. Its members are considered reborn and beyond sin, and they alone participate in the inner mysteries and qualify for direct admission to Heaven.

The innermost organization was deliberately selective. Foster personally chose candidates when the movement was smaller, favoring people who were dynamic, convinced, and capable of sustaining its communal life. Married candidates had to be accepted as couples; the movement also guarded against jealousy and imbalance among its members. These requirements show how its intimate ideals were linked to institutional control: the inner church was not simply an informal fellowship, but a carefully managed body with rules for admission and leadership.

Public Tactics and Political Resilience

The Fosterites combine religious growth with coordinated political action. When a community tries to suppress a developing movement, adherents from other places converge on it in numbers, overwhelming local jails and police capacity. Such confrontations can involve violence and damaged jails, but the movement also understands how to make prosecution difficult. Foster learned to ensure that official action against the group could be framed as persecution under the law; the novel notes that convictions of Fosterites as such were not upheld by the national Supreme Court or, later, the High Court.

The same resilience appears in the organization’s response to later accusations. A county attorney lists charges including public lewdness, statutory rape, conspiracy to defraud, operating a disorderly house, and contributing to the delinquency of minors; a further dispute concerns the movement’s parochial school and the cancellation of its operating license. Anne expects the charges to attract publicity and then be dropped, reasoning that the most technically serious allegation cannot be proved. The episode depicts legal pressure as a recurring contest over evidence, public attention, and political backing, rather than as a straightforward means of dissolving the movement.

By the time Mike’s church is facing its own troubles, Fosterites are among the groups with grievances against it. Ben Caxton also identifies them alongside other churches, a gambling syndicate, and the city political machine as part of the opposition facing Mike’s community. Yet the novel distinguishes suspicion from proof: Caxton doubts the Fosterite squads carried out the attack on the Temple, judging the work too professional and suspecting outsiders instead. Fosterite influence therefore forms part of the wider political danger without being established as the cause of that particular attack.

Encounters with Mike and His Church

Mike’s early response to Fosterite religion exposes a basic difference between his understanding of truth and ordinary human religious claims. After hearing about a service, he takes its assertions at face value and proposes asking the Fosterites to consult the Old Ones. Jubal realizes that Mike has assumed the Fosterites are in close contact with humanity’s spiritual authorities. Mike has learned the definitions of lying and falsehood but does not yet grasp deliberate deception; to him, a person can speak wrongly only through accident or misunderstanding. Jubal tries to explain that human religions all claim some relationship to the Old Ones but give different answers. Mike remains troubled by the contradiction because, in his experience, the Old Ones always speak rightly.

Later, Senator Boone delivers a personal invitation from Supreme Bishop Digby for Mike to attend services at the Archangel Foster Tabernacle of the New Revelation. The invitation brings the movement directly into Mike’s public life, but the exchange also emphasizes that religious titles and institutions are new to him: he has already had to learn that a senator is not an Old One. The Fosterites approach him through ordinary human channels of prestige and invitation, while Mike continues to interpret religious authority through assumptions formed on Mars.

The churches also meet through the movement of individual adherents between them. Patricia Paiwonski is a Fosterite and an ordained minister who mainly teaches Martian to beginners and helps novices. She and Dawn work to show Fosterites that joining the Church of All Worlds need not conflict with their existing faith, comparing the compatibility to that between Baptist membership and the Masons. Patricia displays Foster’s kiss and explains its meaning alongside the corresponding mark given by Mike. In this way, a visible Fosterite sign becomes a bridge between communities, helping curious adherents approach the Church of All Worlds and its demanding spiritual training.

Ritual, Membership, and Comparison

The novel sets Fosterite structures beside the Church of All Worlds’ own initiation practices. Mike’s church uses nine circles, with advancement tied to study, training, and assessment. At a meeting, Mike combines feats of magic with performance and conversation, deciding which curious attendees might be suited to deeper work; only a fraction are considered possible candidates. The staged miracles attract attention, but the process also tests people and controls access to further teaching. Fosterite experience helps Patricia and other converts explain this system to potential members, while the two churches remain distinct in belief and purpose.

The Innermost Temple makes the comparison especially concrete. Patricia identifies it as the place where new brothers are received into the Nest; it is a large circular room with a central pool. At a ceremony, Jill appears to the candidates as Mother Eve beside a serpent, and the first candidates enter the Garden. Mike and Jill conduct the elevation rites, while Patricia leads Ben away so the candidates can continue without interruption. The scene presents ritual as a managed transition: candidates approach an inner community, undergo a change in status, and are then directed onward into the Temple of the Eighth Circle.

Patricia’s account of Sam and Ruth shows that admission does not follow a rigid timetable. Mike offered them water when they had only entered the Third Circle, after they began to think in Martian; they later became a priest and priestess. Other leaders may notice a candidate for special training, but such early advancement is rare and generally discussed with Mike. Ordinarily, members proceed through the inner circles toward the Eighth Circle, where sharing and growing closer begin, and then the Ninth Circle and the Nest. A formal Sharing-Water service welcomes new brothers into the whole community, even though water is shared in daily life as well.

Persecution, Adaptation, and Significance

As pressure mounts, the community around Mike considers organizational adaptation rather than treating a single church name as indispensable. Sam proposes closing the Church of All Worlds and reopening congregations under successive names, such as the One Faith, the Temple of the Great Pyramid, or the Brotherhood of Baptism. Each new congregation could draw in fresh people while preserving a disciplined core able to reconnect with more advanced pilgrims. The strategy echoes the Fosterite ability to survive local suppression, but the passage presents it as the Church of All Worlds’ own plan, not as evidence that the two groups are identical.

Fosterite participation in public life continues to shape the conflict. Patricia and Dawn’s dual religious standing helps make the Church of All Worlds intelligible to Fosterites, while the Fosterites’ backing of a campaign against a rival religious figure shows how established religious authority can be mobilized against newcomers. At the same time, Mike’s own critique of failed conversion reaches its sharpest expression when he says that many people treat his teaching as a prize rather than accepting its demand for personal responsibility. The Fosterites’ promise of happiness and its organized pathways into membership thus stand in contrast to the burden Mike places on individual understanding.

The Fosterites matter not only as opponents or allies but as a developed model of religious organization. Their layered church, chosen inner leadership, public appeal, ritual signs, and ability to regroup under pressure demonstrate how charisma can become durable institution. The Church of All Worlds adopts some comparable forms—circles, initiation, teaching, and community—yet its exchanges with Fosterite adherents reveal that shared techniques do not mean shared doctrine. The movement’s presence makes the novel’s central religious question institutional as well as personal: how a faith recruits, disciplines, protects, and changes its members, and what is demanded of them in return.