The Reverend Foster, self-ordained - or directly ordained by God, depending on authority cited - had an intuitive instinct for the pulse of his culture and his times at least as strong as that of a skilled carney sizing up a mark.  The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history.  Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degree - its religious revivals were often hysterical in fashion almost Dionysian.  In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America - and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.