The Neo-American Church is a defunct religion founded in 1966 by Arthur Kleps, partly as satire and partly as an unsuccessful ploy to gain a religious exemption from American drug laws.
The primal text of the religion was The Boo Hoo Bible, The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook (ISBN 978-0960038817), written by Kleps, which included, among other things, the declaration that the ultimate goal of mankind is (or should be) the bombardment and destruction of the planet Saturn.
Church clergy, known as Boo Hoos, claimed LSD as a sacrament. One of the church's ministers, Judith H. Kuch, was arrested and put on federal trial on narcotics charges in 1968. Kuch claimed that her use of LSD was a religious requirement, analogous to the use of peyote by the Native American Church which had been given government protection. The judge ruled that the church rituals did not merit protection under the First Amendment as he could find no evidence of "a religious discipline, a ritual, or tenets to guide one's daily existence" and indeed that "...the membership is mocking established institutions playing with words... There is a conscious effort to assert in passing the attributes of religion but obviously only for tactical purposes."
Famous quotes containing the word church:
“Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell
And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls’ Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)