Having sent my dollars off to the PO Box back in the 80's to join this irreverent church, I was really intrigued to see their origin story. It was great to see Stang and Drummond out of character, talking about how they got started with their subversive sense of anti-authoritarian humor and their message to think for yourself. In addition to great interviews, there's a ton of grainy but fascinating archive footage. A lot of it is exactly what you might expect - bored white suburban teens and young adults, looking for a group to belong to, but in most cases not taking themselves too seriously.
As a social experiment which deftly leveraged pop culture, America's obsession with extreme cults and spurred on by Reagan and the excess of the 80's, it all makes sense up to a point. But the documentary (and the Church) seemed to fade a bit in the nineties with the rise of the Internet, and the implication that the good times under Clinton along with mainstream adoption of concepts like memes made the Church irrelevant. I would have thought events like Waco in '93 would have been directly relevant but apparently not according to Stang.
At this point, the documentary takes a political turn, focusing on Trump as the first subgenius president. It suddenly feels very heavy handed, denying the groups own history and acting as if the conspiracy culture that the church itself came from sprang up overnight in 2016. The words Trump Derangement Syndrome flash on the screen in this segment and that is an apt description of the last few minutes, especially watching it after Biden was elected. It feels like watching one of those eighties documentaries warning about Reagan starting a nuclear war. It's interesting but mostly irrelevant.
In the end, they show Stang still stuffing envelopes, making a buck here and there from people still fascinated by the church. The long joke is over and the Church is mostly income for a couple of old hippies who had some great ideas back in the day, but failed to adapt to the times.
