History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Stang and Drummond assembled SubGenius Pamphlet #1 in Dallas in 1979 from clip art, xerography and mail-order sales patter, and mailed it out. The Book of the SubGenius followed from a mainstream publisher in 1983 and moved the church from the photocopier network into bookshops. Stang has said he had not read the Principia Discordia when he made the first pamphlet and was alarmed, on being shown it, until he checked its publication date. The two communities merged afterwards regardless: Robert Anton Wilson, a Discordian, was an ordained SubGenius minister and is known in the church as Pope Bob.
Its founding is bound to Ivan Stang (Douglass St. Clair Smith) and Philo Drummond (Steve Wilcox) — 1979 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world run by a Conspiracy that has stolen Slack from the abnormal in order to sell it back to them, and a small remnant of mutants who can see this and are therefore not to be trusted either..
The divine. J. 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..
Death and after. X-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..