History & overview · every faith gets one
Victory over horseshit.
The Neo-American Church was founded in 1965 by Art Kleps, who took the title Chief Boo Hoo, and taught that psychedelics are sacraments and that enlightenment is the realisation that life is a dream. Its clergy were Boo Hoos, its emblem a three-eyed toad, its official hymns Puff, the Magic Dragon and Row, Row, Row Your Boat. In 1968 a federal judge in Washington read that list aloud in an opinion and held that the church was not a religion at all — the first American court to test a satirical church and find against it, and the precedent every parody faith since has been measured against. Kleps insisted to the end that the satire and the sincerity were the same thing.
Why it is filed this way
Genuinely argued, and the argument was had in court. The Neo-American Church wrote its own satire into its constitution — the motto, the toad, the hymns — and Judge Gesell treated that as proof of insincerity in 1968. Scholars of American religion have since taken it more seriously than the court did, reading it as a real psychedelic religion that chose ridicule as a defence against a state it expected to lose to. It is filed as parody because that is the reading its own documents support; readers who take Kleps at his word that it was sincere are in respectable company.
Kleps died in 1999. The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church continues to enrol members and publish his writings; the 1960s congregation of Boo Hoos does not survive in anything like its original form.
The founding
Kleps was a psychologist who fell in with Timothy Leary's circle at Millbrook and founded the Neo-American Church there in 1965, later excommunicating Leary from it. He testified before a United States Senate subcommittee in 1966 and published the Boo Hoo Bible — the Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook — in 1971. The church's sacramental claim was tested in United States v. Kuch, 288 F. Supp. 439 (D.D.C. 1968), when an ordained Boo Hoo indicted on marijuana and LSD charges pleaded free exercise. Judge Gerhard Gesell found no belief in a supreme being, no discipline and no ritual, and read the motto and the hymnal into the record as evidence that the church was a satirical device for evading the drug laws.
Its founding is bound to Arthur Kleps — 1965 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Life is a dream and enlightenment is noticing. Psychedelics are the means by which the dreamer is woken, and the state has no standing to forbid them..
The divine. No god. The church's own formulation is solipsist rather than theist: what is ultimate is the dreaming consciousness, and the sacrament is the instrument for recognising it..
Death and after. None taught. Kleps held that death ends a dream, which is not the same as a doctrine of survival..