“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.
“During the period from 2025 to 2030 no man was safe in his home. The night riders might come knocking at his door and spirit him away to be flogged and perhaps tarred and feathered for such crimes as neglecting to attend church or a disrespectful attitude toward the movement or any fancied slip from the stern moral code of the brethren which might occur to the fanatical intolerant mind of a Crusader. Or his daughter might be torn from her parents, stripped naked and branded with a hot iron as punishment for some innocent frivolity regarded by the brethren as mortal sin. Or a merchant might find his store windows broken and his stock vandalized for the crime of employing an ungodly man. By 2028 Scudder had an iron grip on the Mississippi Valley and was a strong force throughout the country. Blue laws controlled the whole life of the valley. Not a vehicle moved on Sunday. Churchgoing was obligatory in many places, and it was safer to do so in any case. Women wore somber clothing which completely hid their bodies. Dancing, singing other than hymns, games and other vanities were verboten. Higher education was discouraged. Idleness was dubbed vagrancy and treated as a crime. Scudder was looking forward to two national changes, the abolition of the distribution of the credit checks without work in return, and the open establishment of the church.