In the novel, the United States is more than a geographic setting: it is a country shaped by a pronounced divide between restrictive public morality and less restrained private behavior. That contradiction helps explain the cultural conditions in which Reverend Foster’s movement can flourish. Later, the country’s legal and religious institutions become part of the same story, setting boundaries around worship while struggling to contain the consequences of Foster’s influence.

Cultural Character and Contradictions

The narrator describes America as having a deeply divided personality throughout its history. Its formal laws are often puritanical, while covert behavior tends toward the opposite; its established religions are generally restrained, yet its revivals can become fervent and emotionally charged. The contrast is particularly pronounced in the twentieth century: sexual behavior is strongly suppressed, even as public interest in it remains unusually intense. The country’s religious culture thus carries the tensions it seeks to police.

Reverend Foster is presented as someone who recognizes and exploits this cultural pulse. His religious leadership combines personal magnetism with a sexuality that falls outside what the narrator calls the human norm. He is not celibate, and the conversion practices associated with his wives and high priestesses are later understood by Valentine Michael Smith as fostering intimacy and closeness. In the account of the United States, these details connect private desire to public religious authority without reducing the movement to doctrine alone.

Foster’s Movement and American Institutions

The narrator places Foster’s success against a history of religious groups using similar methods, but emphasizes that such methods had not previously operated on a comparable scale in America. Foster was driven out of towns more than once before developing an organization capable of expanding his movement. Its structure drew selectively from freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, Madison Avenue, and earlier scriptures, while presenting itself to its intended audience as a return to primitive Christianity.

The movement’s layered organization also reflects an American setting in which religious identity can be approached gradually. An outer church is open to anyone, and a seeker may remain within it for years while receiving some of the church’s benefits. The evidence describes this as only the beginning of a broader structure. The result is a movement that adapts familiar institutional forms and public religious language to its own purposes, rather than standing outside American culture altogether.

Law, Worship, and the Meaning of a Church

A conversation between Jubal Harshaw and Ben Caxton makes the legal breadth of religion concrete. Harshaw argues that a roller-skating rink could qualify as a church if a sect regarded skating as essential to faith and worship—or even as a religious practice serving a function comparable to church music. He points to temples in Malaya that appear to outsiders to be boarding houses for snakes, yet receive legal protection as churches from the same High Court that protects other religious groups.

That protection has limits, although Harshaw describes some of them as difficult to pin down. A church generally cannot charge for fortune-telling or purported communication with the dead, but it may accept offerings that custom effectively turns into fees. Human sacrifice, he says, is illegal everywhere, while questioning whether it has disappeared in practice. He also observes that practices otherwise likely to be suppressed can be confined to an inner sanctum from which outsiders are excluded. When Ben asks whether anything is ruled out, the answer reveals a legal tension: religious protections are broad, but they do not make every claimed religious practice lawful.

Public Conflict and Cultural Reach

The United States’ struggle over Foster’s legacy is visible in the fate of an unauthorized biography, The Devil and Reverend Foster. A bootleg edition appears simultaneously on newsstands across the country, but by nightfall every copy has been burned and the printing plates destroyed. The campaign causes damage to property as well as mayhem, maiming, and assault. The book is said, falsely, to survive in the British Museum; a copy is in fact held in the Vatican Library, available only to certain church scholars. The episode shows that the conflict over Foster is not merely an argument about religious ideas: access to the record itself is contested.

Religious debate also reaches into political life. A fundamentalist interchurch group opens an office in Van Buren, Arkansas, to solicit money for missionaries to the Martians. Jubal Harshaw sends a generous donation, but uses the name and address of the editor of the New Humanist, a militant atheist and his close friend. The prank places the country’s competing religious and secular commitments in the same small gesture, while demonstrating how even a local fundraising campaign can be drawn into the novel’s larger debate over faith, public identity, and American cultural conflict.