Slack is the church's one original idea and the reason it outlived its own joke. It names something the language did not have a word for: unearned ease, the time and freedom that are not the reward for anything. The Conspiracy is whatever took it — employers, normality, the demand that a life justify itself in output — and the church's doctrine is that this theft is the organising fact of modern life. Everything else in SubGenius material is scaffolding: the aliens, the pipe, the fee. Stang has been explicit that the church is a parody of televangelism and mail-order salvation, and equally explicit that Slack is not a joke. Members in the 1980s and 1990s used the word to describe a real experience of being ground down by work, and it passed from the church into hacker slang and from there into general use.