"Presbyterian."
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Shrug emoji. All Christian denominations are the same thing to me! This probably indicates something to somebody who grew up in the Midwest or the South. But I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. I'm a fucking heathen. Nobody ever taught me what all the differences to all the denominations were!
The extent of my "religion" was being baptized when I was born (my mother is, technically, Catholic. My father is one of those other ones) and being forced to go to one Sunday School class when I was about six during a trip to visit my uncle's wife's family in Salina, Kansas.
So I did the most minimal research possible on Presbyterianism (which means I read the Wikipedia article until I found something that ties it in to Pynchon's themes across various novels). I learned Presbyterianism was greatly influenced by John Calvin who believed in predestination. He said, "All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death." Pynchon seems fascinated with the idea of predestination, mostly in the idea that if one believes in it, one must hold in their hearts the belief that most people, including themselves, can do nothing to attain God's grace. They are damned at birth. The only hope is that they aren't damned at birth (which seems like a pretty major narcissistic hope). In Gravity's Rainbow, he uses the term "Preterite" to describe those destined for death. Here, he brings it up with one mere word. In Mason & Dixon, he brings it up in line 38, page 9, when he invokes the names of Wesley and Whitefield, the founders of the Methodists who had a falling out between them regarding predestination. I can't speak for his other books having either not read them or read them over twenty years ago (The Crying of Lot 49).
That's probably more than enough to write on one word.
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