"In order to understand what happened subsequently and to appreciate the great power which Scudder wielded, it is necessary to understand the man and the people among whom he worked. He was a man of tremendous physical vitality and nervous energy, of middle height but powerfully built. His manner and speech suggested his backwoods origin. Deep set eyes under bony brows burned and gleamed and glared. His voice was normally low and mellow, but could scream and shout praise if need be. His mouth was large, his lips full and loose. In rest they were sensuous but in speaking they expressed a sadistic delight in his work. As to his private life, not much is known. He was married and his wife accompanied him and served him, but from time to time other female acolytes were added to his staff. The obvious conclusion is possibly not true, as there is a persistent story that the man, in spite of his great strength, was actually sexually impotent.

"A large portion of the population was ripe for such a leader. In the New World, since it was first settled, there have been two strongly dissident elements in the social body. One was anarchistic, and tolerant; the other sternly authoritarian and fanatically moralistic. It is a mistake to believe that our forefathers came to this continent in search of religious freedom. On the contrary they sought a place in which to exercise their own brand of religious totalitarianism. It is probable that the religious persecutions and moralistic intolerances practiced on dissenters by the colonists of New England were more severe than any from which they had fled. It is surprising that the Constitution contained an apparent guarantee of religious freedom. This seeming oversight may be attributed to two things, the mutual suspicion with which each colony viewed the other, and the staunch feeling for liberty felt by Thomas Jefferson who wrote the provision. It is very significant to note that the religious freedom clause was an injunction to the federal government. It did not limit the states. At one time the State of Virginia had an established church, and religious intolerance had been practiced, under the law, in every state in the Union. In addition to the puritanical factor in the American culture, there was the Roman Catholic strain, strong in some parts of the country, which supported many of the same intolerances as the Protestant churches.

"All forms of organized religion are alike in certain social respects. Each claims to be the sole custodian of the essential truth. Each claims to speak with final authority on all ethical questions. And every church has requested, demanded, or ordered the state to enforce its particular system of taboos. No church ever withdraws its claims to control absolutely by divine right the moral life of the citizens. If the church is weak, it attempts by devious means to turn its creed and discipline into law. If it is strong, it uses the rack and the thumbscrew. To a surprising degree, churches in the United States were able, under a governmental form which formally acknowledged no religion, to have placed on the statutes the individual church's code of moral taboos, and to wrest from the state privileges and special concessions amounting to subsidy. Especially was this true of the evangelical churches in the middle west and south, but it was equally true of the Roman Church on its strongholds. It would have been equally true of any church; Holy Roller, Mohammedan, Judaism, or headhunters. It is a characteristic of all organized religion, not of a particular sect."

Perry interrupted. "All this may have been true in 2020 but I saw no particular evidence of it in my day. There were churches of course and I went to Sunday School when I was a kid and chapel when I was a midshipman, but Lord, I didn't notice them after I grew up. They didn't bother me and I didn't bother them."

Cathcart smiled wryly. "What one has never had one doesn't miss. It might be instructive if I were to name over a number of the laws, and customs having the effect of law, prevalent in your period whose origins may be traced directly to some powerful organized church or churches."

"Please do."

Cathcart ticked them off on his fingers. "Sunday closing laws; tax exemption for church property; practically all laws relating to marriage and the relations between the sexes—including laws forbidding divorce, country-wide rule permitting only monogamous marriages, laws against fornication and other taboo sexual relationships, and laws forbidding birth control; laws prohibiting the teaching of certain scientific doctrines, especially man's kinship to other animals; all laws of censorship, for moral reasons, of the press, stage, radio, or speech; certain taboos of word and speech forms; laws prohibiting certain parts of the body being exposed to view; laws prohibiting the drinking of alcohol per se; laws against smoking cigarettes; any law which takes a paternalistic attitude toward the citizen with the purpose of ensuring his moral perfection rather than the purpose of regulating his conduct to prevent him from damaging other persons and, vice versa, prevent others from damaging him."

"But surely most of the laws that you mention arise from common sense rather than from religion?"

"You believe so because you were reared in the environment that the churches created. You were conditioned to regard them as the natural order of things. But it is a matter of historical record that in cultures where the organized religion held different views on morals, the exact opposite of every law I have referred to has had its day. But again we are getting away from the Reverend Scudder and his band of holy fanatics. In spite of what I have said the American churches fought a rear guard action for four hundred years. It is a far cry from the blue laws of early day Massachusetts to the tolerance and easy morals of the period under discussion. The libertarian spirit had great hold especially in the cities. With the perfection of technique for controlling conception and the elimination of contagious diseases associated with sexual intercourse, the sexual customs of the people were undergoing a rapid metamorphosis. The New Economic Regime produced more changes in moral relationships and made divorce easier. It produced another effect, too, in destroying the moralistic nature of work for work's sake. All of these things were offensive to a person of an old fashioned point of view, and none found them more distasteful than the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder. He preached against them, predicting Hell's fire and brimstone for the ungodly people of the United States! He denounced the pleasures of the flesh, all frivolities, the scandalous clothing, the demon rum, dancing, gambling, worldly music, light minded literature, and vanities of every sort. He called on his followers to stamp it out, fight the battle of Armageddon, and be led at once into the New Jerusalem, where the godly would never die, but live forever, singing hymns and praising God. Furthermore he advised his flock as to just how they might accomplish this happy end. He had a genius for organization and used it to weld together the most effective minority group ever seen in American politics. In the first place he claimed to represent the whole population and claimed a majority of the population as his personal following.

"Such was the effect of his organized agitation that he convinced the easy-going unorganized mass that his adherents were in the majority. In particular he convinced the politicians that he controlled enough votes to turn an election. In response to this belief, which may or may not have been justified, he began to accomplish through political means many of the changes in law which he desired, and what he could not get legally was obtained by his night riders, the terrorist Knights of the New Crusade or Angels of the Lord as they were variously known. There is a latent streak of sadism in the best of us. The Reverend Scudder turned it loose.