New Religion - an excerpt from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Read the text and make a list of problems Foster faced when organising and promoting his new religion.

New Religion

            The Reverend Foster, self-ordained – or ordained by God, depending on authority cited – had an instinct for the pulse of his times stronger than that of a skilled carnie sizing up a mark.. The culture known as “America” had a split personality throughout its history . Its laws were puritanical; its covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were Apollonian; its revivals were almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed – and nowhere was there such deep interest in it.

            Foster had in common with every great religious leader of that planet two traits: he had an extremely magnetic personality, and sexually he did not fall near the human norm. On Earth great religious leaders were always either celibate or the antithesis. Foster was not celibate.

            Nor were his wives and priestesses – the clincher for rebirth under the New Revelation included a ritual uniquely suited for growing closer.

            In Terran history, many cults had used the same technique – but not on a major scale in America before  Foster’s time. Foster was run out of town more than once before he perfected a method that permitted him to expand his capric cult. He borrowed from Freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, and Madison Avenue just as he borrowed from earlier scriptures composing his New Revelation. He sugar-coated it all as a return to primitive Christianity. He set up an outer church  which anybody could attend. Then there was a middle church, which to outward appearance was “The Church of the New Revelation,” the happy saved, who paid tithes, enjoyed all benefits of the church’s ever-widening business tie-ins, and whooped it up in an endless carnival of Happiness, Happiness, Happiness! Their sins were forgiven – and very little was sinful as long as they supported their church, dealt honestly with fellow Fosterites, condemned sinners, and stayed Happy. The New Revelation did not specifically encourage lechery, but it got quite mystical in discussing sexual conduct.

            The middle church supplied shock troops. Foster borrowed a trick from early-twentieth-century Wobblies; if a community tried to suppress a Fosterite movement, Fosterites converged on that town until neither jails nor cops could handle them cops had ribs kicked in and jails were smashed.

            If a prosecutor was rash enough to push an indictment, it was impossible to make it stick. Foster (after learning under fire) saw to it that prosecutions were persecution under the letter of the law; no conviction of a Fosterite qua Fosterite was ever upheld by the Supreme Court – nor, later, by the High Court.

            Inside the overt church was the Inner Church – a hard core of fully dedicated who made up the priesthood, the lay leaders, all keepers of keys and makers of policy. They were “reborn,” beyond sin, certain of heaven, and sole celebrants of the inner mysteries.

            Foster selected these with great care, personally until the operation got too big. He looked for men like himself and for women like his priestess-wives – dynamic, utterly convinced, stubborn, and free (or able to be freed, once guilt and insecurity were purged) of jealousy in its most human meaning – and all of them potential satyrs and nymphs, as the secret church was that Dionysian cult that America had lacked and for which there was enormous potential market.

            He was most cautious – if candidates were married, it had to be both spouses. Unmarried candidates had to be sexually attractive and aggressive – and he impressed on his priests that males must equal or exceed in number the females. Nowhere was it recorded that Foster studied earlier, similar cults in America – but he knew or sensed that most such had foundered because possessive concupiscence of their priests led to jealousy. Foster never made this error; not once did he keep a woman to himself, not even those he married.

            Nor was he too eager in expanding his core group; the middle church offered plenty to slake the milder needs of the masses. If a revival produced two couples capable of  “Heavenly Marriage” Foster was content. If it produced none, he let the seeds grow and sent in a salted priest and priestess to nurture them.

            So far as  possible, he tested candidate couples himself, with a priestess. Since such a couple was already “saved” insofar as the middle church was concerned, he ran little risk – none with the woman and he always sized up the man before letting his priestess go ahead.

(Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land)