The White American Church:
arose during the lunatic years in the later twentieth century;
became popular in the southern states of the former US;
was a reaction against social troubles and science;
was backed by some politicians but, unlike Robert Heinlein's Angels of the Lord, did not win political power, at least not on Earth;
colonized Ganymede and wants to pay the Planetary Engineers to terraform Ganymede and Callisto.
Terraforming Jovian moons links the White Americans to characters in Anderson's Twilight World, Heinlein's Farmer In The Sky and James Blish's The Seedling Stars.
The Pilgrim Church, which had colonized Mars in "Un-Man," is an attempt to return to an imagined past whereas the White Americans try to leap forward to an imaginary millennium. Future religions are as diverse as past ones.
On the next street to ours, an entirely black church meets on Sundays in hired premises but I have no reason to believe that they are either millennarians or supremacists. That is not the nearest place of worship to where we live because there is a mosque at the end of our street. Everything in the present is a potential seed of the future. Any current religious group might conceivably form a government or colonize Ganymede in the next century.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The Protectorate of Anderson's "The Bitter Bread" came to my mind. It had a Baptist like state church vastly better than either Heinlein's church founded by Nehemiah Scudder or the White American Church seen in "The Snows of Ganymede.
Ad astra! Sean
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