Eris, "Bob," the FSM... and who else?

October 26, 2009 9:18 AM

I know Eris, "Bob," and the Flying Spaghetti Monster... but what faux-religions came before?

Humorous mocking (gentle or otherwise) of dominant religious organizations and beliefs are central to these "disorganized religions" but there's also an element of fellowship and "getting the joke." Are there other examples of this kind of thing? I find it hard to believe it's a spontaneous manifestation of the late 20th century.

posted by lekvar to religion & philosophy (12 comments total)

Well, there's the Invisible Pink Unicorn, but that's from pretty much the same time frame.
posted by polymath at 9:30 AM on October 26

I suspect that the internet is the primary reason for the proliferation of these 'faux-religions' in the late 20th century and beyond. The internet enables people to form these loosely knit groups without the need for physical meets or any particular agenda.
posted by jonnyploy at 9:36 AM on October 26

Kibology.
posted by nobeagle at 9:43 AM on October 26

The Church of the SubGenius (Bob) claims to have been founded in the '50s, but was definitely publishing a pamphlet as early as 1979.

Discordianism is less clearly parody, but it clearly is to me and was definitely founded in the 50s.

Parody religion, Wikipedia.
posted by cmoj at 9:49 AM on October 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

Reformed Druidism is the only other example I can think of of something that explicitly started as a joke. There seems to me to be an in-on-the-jokeness to some followers of Anton LaVey's Satanism and chaos magick and some people into Crowley's magick, although maybe not the actual adherents of Thelema.
posted by Zed at 9:54 AM on October 26

I think one of the problems you'll run into while looking for this sort of thing is that a willingness to mock the idea of the divine is something that people, historically, aren't comfortable with and don't express. In the Classical world, people tended to take a "the more gods, the better" attitude. You could be persecuted for refusing to worship particular gods (see: the Jews and early Christians), but there wasn't an upper limit for deities. In addition to the Greco-Roman Pantheon, a lot of people in the Classical world at least paid their respects to unlikely-sounding foreign gods like Mithras and Cybele. You have to understand that the "normal" Greco-Roman religion included animal oracles and, after the 1st century AD, a belief that Julius Caesar literally transformed into a comet when he died. The diversity of the greater ancient pantheon (Greco-Roman gods + Egyptian gods + maybe a few West Asian gods) was such that, even if you traveled back in time and made up something as ridiculous as the Spaghetti Monster, people would probably believe you-- or, at least, not mock you for your "beliefs."

Later on, the medieval church took things pretty literally, so I doubt a joke religion would end well. In my non-expert opinion, you probably won't have any luck looking at time periods before the Enlightenment (in the West, at least).
posted by oinopaponton at 9:55 AM on October 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

Do you accept "churches" that have sprung out of a given fandom? Because THE XFILES spawned THREE entirely different tongue-in-cheek "religious organizations" -- the "Church of X", the Order of the Blessed St. Scully the Enigmatic, and the Jebusslug cult. Mainly these are more about fandom in-jokes, though, than religious commentary.

Not sure what the first group did -- the second group was mainly just a bunch of Agent Scully devotees who turned to doing charity work in short order, and the Jebusslug group was a collective fan in-joke poking fun at a plot point from an episode in which Scully came upon a group of religious cultists in the desert who worshiped a weird slug-like alien parasite as the Messiah (and regularly abducted people to feed it). Fans started speculating what would prompt people to worship such a being, and someone started writing fake "hymns" to the slug and it snowballed from there. (FYI -- the link for the Jebusslug goes to a Geocities page, so act fast!)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:09 AM on October 26

Jedi church in New Zealand?
posted by bashos_frog at 12:44 PM on October 26

Oh - misunderstood the question. I suppose there's always this:

And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

That Moses guy, though - no sense of humor.
posted by bashos_frog at 12:48 PM on October 26

The Mythical Smoking Head of Bob from the Church of the Sub-Genius is actually none other than Mr. Applebee from "The Applebees". This was a comic which ran in the pages of National Lampoon for years.
posted by Oireachtac at 1:42 PM on October 26

The real Hellfire Clubs practiced "mock religious ceremonies" in the 18th century, although rumors of Satanism seem to have been either overblown or deliberate playing up.

Freemasonry, as well, could be said -- without regard to modern or historic conspiracy theories and/or principled opposition -- to be a sort of deconstruction of religious orders, and a number of 19th-century social clubs in somewhat direct imitation of Masonic practices had quasi-religious rituals and practices as a way of reinforcing club solidarity. I doubt most people participating saw themselves as mocking religion, though. In some ways the movement generally can be viewed as a parallel power structure to religion opening the way for broader social participation in the 20th century.

Certainly there is also an older strain of religious satire including Candide or even Euripides. But these were more incidental rather than participatory.
posted by dhartung at 3:12 PM on October 26

Later on, the medieval church took things pretty literally, so I doubt a joke religion would end well...

"In some districts, there was the celebration of the ass, in which a donkey dressed in a silly costume was led to the chancel rail where a cantor chanted a song of praise. When he paused, the audience would respond: "He Haw, Sire Ass, He haw!". The University of Paris complained:

"Priests and clerks.. dance in the choir dressed as women.. they sing wanton songs. They eat black pudding at the altar itself, while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play dice on the altar. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap throughout the church, without a blush of their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby carriages and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and with scurrilous and unchaste words."

In 1300 at Cologne, [the Goliards] were forbidden to preach or engage in the indulgence traffic."
posted by ormondsacker at 3:20 PM on October 26