My initial inspiration for this came in the mid-l980s, while reading an interview with a theatrical group out in San Francisco called "Ladies Against Women" (LAW). Assuming the costume and character of conservative, true-Christian, anti-feminist "ladies," these men argue passionately against, and in the process effectively make the case for, feminism, among a great many other things.

I was living in a school bus in a cow pasture at the time -- me and my bovine companions, trying to process our experiences traveling around the country into a compact, well-held-together whole, and coming up with similar results.

Everyone was saying, "Non-fiction is the fiction of the 80's!", and giving me Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to read.

But after reading this interview, I wondered whether fiction might not be the non-fiction of the 90s, and began creating my own polar opposite to get behind, to dramatize in non-fiction form what has really been on my mind since I was a child: that the Jesus-figure worshipped as God by fundamentalist Christians is the Antichrist for whom they are forever on the lookout, and that their religion is a kind of cosmic "sting" operation, designed to get them all in one place and then "boom!", collapse their own whitewashed walls in upon them in the manner of Ezekiel 13.14.

Forsaking all progressive publications, I cast my net entirely on the other side, subscribing to every fundamentalist Christian publication I could find, getting my name on every fundamentalist Christian mailing list, studying at the electronic feet of Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, et al. And lo, as Jimmy Swaggart used to say, I began to catch more fish than you could ever even think about. And the reason this happened, I now realize, goes back to my childhood.

Though we went to church religiously every Sunday when I was growing up, we were not a particularly religious family. My father said church was a good place to pick up business, and my mother watched the occasional Billy Graham Crusade on TV.

Both grandmothers were deeply fundamentalist, however -- one the daughter of a circuit-riding, fire-and-brimstone, Southern Baptist preacher from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, the other a Bible-toting Seventh-Day Adventist from Jackson, Mississippi, overflowing with mysterious dates and numbers, and all manner of strange, symbolic beast.

Since I was the only child in either family who showed any natural interest in the Bible (though none whatsoever in church), each grandmother set her sights on winning my soul to the greater glory of her particular Jesus's kingdom, each with his own peculiar, often contradictory requirements for one to be considered officially "saved."