March of the pagans, from the Bible belt to Hollywood

Thirty years ago, driving across the hill country in the South, every 50 miles I'd pick up a new Pentecostal radio station with the preacher screaming in tongues in a torrent of ecstatic drivel – "Miki taki meka keena ko-o-ola ka" – the harsh consonants rattling the speakers on my Newport station wagon.

I had a friend, an ardent Pentecostalist – "shouters", those hillbillies called themselves – whose trailer featured by way of cultural uplift only the Bible and a big TV set permanently tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Network, on which Pat Robertson used to denounce New Age paganism on an hourly basis.

Last time I visited, a few months ago, the hillbilly's nice house still featured the Bible, but next to it was a thick manual of astrological guidance – could Geminis pair up with Scorpios with any hope of success, and kindred pagan counsel – and he and his wife surfed through a ripe menu of channels Robertson would not have cared for.

Out on the highway my radio picked up Glenn Beck spouting drivel, but the old Pentecostalists had vanished from the dial. These days, my friend told me, he and his wife didn't tithe to any particular church and pastor. "All crooks," he said dryly. They stay home and hold their own Sunday service there.

It's still God's country, but all the landmarks are different. There are millions like my friend – a hillbilly in the Bible belt steering not just by God's compass and the Good Book, but also by the stars and natural forces of a pagan spiritual outlook.

The Bible's had a rough time of it in America these past 40 years. In 1967 came Lynn White Jr's famous essay 'The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis', denouncing God's OK to Adam on planetary pillage in Genesis: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion… over all the earth. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."

Late 1960s feminists found much to deplore in the Bible too, starting with God's tough talk to Eve in the Garden of Eden: "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

If a conclusive disrespecting of Genesis was required, wouldn't you think Robert Crumb was the man for the job? It would be as seditious as hiring the Marquis de Sade to write the history of the British royal family, a coup de grâce, the final revenge of the antinomian 60s on decency and faith and the bloodthirsty Creator. The patriarchs of the second half of Genesis would be crushed beneath the vast breasts and bottoms, hairy thighs and savage élan of Eve and her daughters.

Crumb encourages such hopes in the bit of his Book of Genesis Illustrated, published late last year, that I happened to read first: the notes in which he pays homage to Savina Teubal's Sarah the Priestess (1984), which argued that Genesis is in part a sequence of clues about the suppression of a powerful matriarchal order in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Genesis, Crumb writes, "The struggles and assertions of the female characters are all about this."

But this is not an overt theme in Crumb's Genesis. Why did Crumb really embark on this task? Maybe the clue is in three inviting words on the cover: "Nothing left out!" It would have been great to have had his frames for all 50 chapters of Genesis back in the 1950s, when we schoolboys had only our imaginations to work with, as Lot's daughters get their father drunk and lie with him, or when Sara tells Abraham to go in unto Hagar. There was Onan too, now frame-frozen by Crumb amid coitus interruptus.

But the overall effect is more solemn than satirical. Reading the verses in Chapter 15 in which God, a testy old