History & overview · every faith gets one
The slowest-growing religion in the world.
Dudeism asks one thing of its adherents: take it easy. It takes its pattern from Jeff Bridges's character in The Big Lebowski and its content from Taoism, Epicureanism, Zen and the older strand of Western thought that holds ambition to be a kind of illness. Ordination is free, instant and online, and the church counts its priests in the hundreds of thousands. Its founder maintains that the joke is only the packaging — that the underlying philosophy is ancient, that the film merely restated it, and that a religion which asks nothing of you is not thereby less serious than one that asks everything.
Why it is filed this way
The framing is a joke and the content is not, which its founder says constantly. Dudeism presents itself as the modern branch of a very old lineage — Laozi, Epicurus, the Zen masters, Montaigne, Walt Whitman — that holds ease and non-striving to be a moral position rather than a failure of one. Its ordinations are legally weightless almost everywhere and it has never sought recognition from any state, which distinguishes it from every other line in this sweep.
The founding
Benjamin, an American journalist living in northern Thailand, founded the Church of the Latter-Day Dude in 2005 after watching The Big Lebowski with a mixed crowd of travellers in the resort town of Pai and noticing that the film's protagonist was a recognisable Taoist. He wrote the Dude De Ching, a rewriting of the Tao Te Ching in the film's idiom, opened free online ordination, and published The Abide Guide in 2011. The church has no buildings, no fees, no meetings it requires anyone to attend, and no affiliation with the film or its makers, which it states on its own front page.
Its founding is bound to Oliver Benjamin — 2005 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world that does not need to be fixed by you, and mostly gets worse when you try. Taking it easy is not resignation but the correct response to a universe indifferent to effort..
The divine. No god. Dudeism is explicitly a practice rather than a cosmology, and declines to make claims about what stands behind the world..
Death and after. None taught. The line the church quotes on the subject is that the Dude abides, which is about continuing rather than surviving..