The Church of the SubGenius: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Eternal salvation or triple your money back.

The Church of the SubGenius sells salvation for a fixed fee and preaches Slack — freedom from work, from normality, and from what it calls the Conspiracy. Its god is J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, a grinning 1950s clip-art salesman with a pipe, and its apocalypse, X-Day, was fixed for 7:00 a.m. on 5 July 1998, when alien Xists were to arrive and remove the members who had paid. They did not arrive. The church kept the date, kept the fee, and has held X-Day every July since. It is the most sustained piece of religious parody in American life and it produced, in 2006, one of the few court cases in which belonging to a joke religion cost somebody custody of a child.

Why it is filed this way

The church has never claimed to be anything but a parody of American evangelism and mail-order salvation, and sells that parody at a price it publishes. Its members none the less form an actual congregation with an annual gathering, a radio programme running since the 1980s, ordained ministers and a forty-year continuous liturgy, which is more institutional furniture than several bodies filed here as traditions.

DeitiesJ. R. "Bob" Dobbs is the object of the church's devotion and is also described by it as a salesman who will cheat you. He is repeatedly assassinated in church literature and repeatedly returns. Nobody is asked to believe in him; members are asked to pay.

Founded1979 CE · Dallas, Texas

FounderIvan Stang (Douglass St. Clair Smith) and Philo Drummond (Steve Wilcox)

AfterlifeX-Day: the Xists arrive, the paid-up ascend, everyone else does not. The date passed in 1998 without incident and the church now reschedules it annually rather than abandoning it.

TextsSubGenius Pamphlet #1 (1979) · The Book of the SubGenius (1983) · Revelation X (1994)

The map

The Church of the SubGenius’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

Slack has been stolen from you, and it can be got back. Slack is the church's name for unearned ease — time, freedom, luck, the absence of obligation. The Conspiracy is whatever took it: work, normality, the demand that a life be justified. Everything else in SubGenius doctrine is scaffolding for that one distinction. Go deeper — context & 1 source →

Bob will cheat you, and you should follow him anyway. The church describes its own god as a salesman who cannot be trusted, and asks for money in the same breath. Members treat the contradiction as the doctrine rather than a flaw in it — a religion honest about being a sales pitch is making a point about the ones that are not. held by most Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

J J. R. Bob Dobbs. A clip-art salesman from a 1950s advertisement, pipe clenched, smiling. He is assassinated repeatedly in church literature and returns each time. His face is the church's entire iconography and is reproduced more often than any doctrine it holds. Domain Slack, salesmanship, the pipeStanding Worshipped and openly distrusted, in the same sentence Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

X-Day. The Xists were to arrive at 7 a.m. on 5 July 1998 and take the paid-up membership off the planet. They did not. The church has gathered every July since, waits out the night, and burns an effigy of Bob at dawn. When annual, the night of 4 July into 5 JulyWho members who have paid Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Buddhism — 9 shared ideas, a different faith Hinduism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Christianity — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Jainism — 7 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Church of the SubGenius — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Church of the SubGenius shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

1 cited texts

The SubGenius Foundation, subgenius.com where it is cited →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.