Spoiled yet cowed, he becomes a man who keeps sneaking behind God's back. To live on both sides of that wall without psychic miscegenation, this Southern man puts some spin on his sin to keep from technical fornication. Bill Clinton withheld his seed and denied the temptress her pleasure. Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis addressed their desire for little girls by marrying them. Swaggart, she contends, was undone in part because he could never acknowledge how fully eroticism powered his preaching.
Seaman offers a fascinating history of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues.
The Catholic Church condemned this inspired babbling as satanic 900 years ago, though many considered it evidence of blessing by the Holy Ghost. Around 1900, two Pentecostal fundamentalists, one white and one black, revived the practice, and it spread quickly around the United States. The same crossover, in the same religious milieu, would produce rock and roll. Instead of bragging about whose son got into which university, mamas would recount their boys' gibbering and twitching on the church floor. Along with overreaching from her armchair, Seaman foreshadows too portentously too often, and the book is a third longer than it needs to be.