Neo-American Church
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b8/Neo-American_Church_Seal.png/220px-Neo-American_Church_Seal.png)
The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church (OKNeoAC), mostly shorted Neo-American Church, is a religious organization based on the use of
The psychedelic churches exist to promote and defend the psychedelic religion, a religion which sees in the transcendental experience produced by the sacred substances the key to understanding life and improving the condition of man on earth.
— Arthur Kleps, Testimony before the [United States] Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, May 25, 1966[2]
Founding
The Church was founded in 1965
Church clergy, known as Boo Hoos,[note 1] claimed LSD as a sacrament. The original primary religious text of the church was The Boo Hoo Bible: The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook (1967),[7] written by Kleps, a mixed-media work integrating comics, news clippings, senate testimonies, and political-religious diatribes.[1] The Boo Hoo Bible has been described as "requiring its reader to transcend the personal in an act that simultaneously simulates and dissimulates, establishing and overcoming the ironic.... present[ing] a cosmology of simultaneity, which Kleps considers essential to psychedelic experience. A radical solipsism emerges that sees all conscious and unconscious life as part of one dream where meaning-making becomes completely associative";[1] it also includes the declaration that the ultimate goal of mankind is (or should be) the bombardment and destruction of the planet Saturn (which hoped-for event was depicted on the book's cover).[7][8]
The Boo Hoo Bible was supplemented or superseded by Kleps' later book Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism (1975, with new editions in 1977 and 2005) which provides an account of Kleps' founding of the organization along with a narrative of his experiences at the Hitchcock estate in
We think it is very important not to take ourselves too seriously in terms of social structure, in terms of organizational life. We tend to view organizational life as sort of a game that people play.
— Arthur Kleps, Testimony before the [United States] Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 1966[1]
While it incorporated whimsical or even absurdist motifs – for instance, Church hymns included "
United States vs. Kuch
The Native American Church (no relation) was around this time fighting successfully in several state courts to uphold its legal permission to use peyote (normally a banned substance) in religious ceremonies;[9] the Neo-American Church hoped to gain the same right, by analogy.[1] 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.
The judge ruled that the Church's rituals did not merit protection under the
Later years
All members of the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church subscribe to the following three principles: 1) The psychedelic substances, such as cannabis and LSD, are religious sacraments... 2) The use of the psychedelic sacraments is a basic human right. 3) We do not encourage the ingestion of the greater sacraments such as LSD and mescaline by those who are unprepared and we define preparedness as familiarity with the lesser sacraments such as cannabis and nitrous oxide and with solipsist-nihilist epistemological reasoning...
— Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church website[14]
The Church reached its greatest notoriety around the time of this 1968 United States of America vs. Kuch case but continues into the 21st century as a small, loose organization. Membership in the Church is loosely defined but is based on assent to three principles: holding the
Notes
- ^ "Boo-hoo" or "big boo-hoo" (now archaic) was an obscure and mildly derisory 20th-century American slang term for "important person", similar to "muckety-muck" or "big shot"; it was used ironically by the Church.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Roger K. Green (April 11, 2013). "Psychedelic Citizenship and Re-enchantment: Affective Aesthetics as Political Instantiation". TELOScope. Telos Press. Retrieved June 16, 2016.
- ISBN 978-0199368136. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ "About the OKNeoAC". Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church website.
- ISBN 978-0802130624.
- ^ a b c Joseph Laycock (December 12, 2013). "Satanist Monument Shines Light on Christian Privilege". Religion Dispatches. Retrieved June 16, 2016.
- ^ ISBN 978-0960038800.
- ^ ISBN 978-0960038817.
- ^ Art Kleps (1971). "Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook". Neo-American Church. Retrieved October 28, 2022.
- ISBN 0-8061-2457-1.
- ^ Bates, Stephen (February 11, 2009). "Blessed Be the Newsmakers. A new business model for the press: Declare itself a religion". Slate.
- ^ Brief excerpts from the Boo-Hoo Bible and United States of America v. Judith H. Kuch
- ^ a b Mike Dorf (December 24, 2010). "Boo Hoo for the rest of us". Dorf on Law. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ISBN 9781400868841. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ a b "Membership". Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church website.
Further reading
- Newman, Joel S. (December 2015). "What is a Church? A Look at Tax Exemptions for the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church and the First Church of Cannabis". Lexis Federal Tax Journal Quarterly. LexisNexis. SSRN 2714965.