The United Church of Bacon

The United Church of Bacon
Type	Parody
Orientation	Atheist
Scripture	9 Bacon Commandments
Bacon Prophet	John Whiteside
Region	Worldwide
Headquarters	Las Vegas
Founder	John Whiteside
Origin	2010 Las Vegas
Members	12,000+
Tax status	None
Other name(s)	Baconism
Official website	unitedchurchofbacon.org

The United Church of Bacon is an atheist parody church whose main goals are social progress and raising money for other charities, founded in 2010, by atheist John Whiteside and a group of friends. The church offers all kinds of traditional religious services including weddings, baptisms and funerals. Its founder chose a strange name for the church, and its belief in Bacon, as a social critique that all churches have strange beliefs, seen from the outside. The church opposes special privileges to religions on the grounds that religious people are somehow superior to inferior people for having strange beliefs. The church promotes separation of church and state, science education and critical thinking, and an end to discrimination against atheists. The official symbol of the organization is a piece of bacon on a pair of praying hands with sun in the background.

Founding

The Church of Bacon was founded during a meeting at Penn Jillette's house in 2010, to fight discrimination against atheists. The official launch was at The Amaz!ng Meeting, in 2012. They believe in practical atheism and ignore the existence of gods and chose a funny bacon name with an argument that bacon is demonstrably real whereas god is imperceptible by the eye. The Church's mission statement is "Hail Bacon, full of grease, the Lard is with thee.”

Tenets

The chief criterion for joining is that members must love the smell of bacon, which can be turkey bacon or vegetarian bacon. Officiants are known as friars.

The main code are the 9 bacon commandments:

1. Be skeptical
2. Respect boundaries
3. Normalise atheists
4. Normalise religion
5. Have fun
6. Be good
7. Be generous
8. Praise bacon
9. Protest Bias in the Law

The 9th commandment was originally "Pay Taxes", but was later changed.

Wells Fargo protests

In April 2014, Whiteside went to a Wells Fargo branch in Las Vegas to have a document making Chris Dyer an officiant of the church notarized for his church. Wells Fargo supposedly refused to recognise his signing authority and he left angry. He was later able to get the document notarized at another branch. He has since organized several protests of the branch and started an online petition. Wells Fargo denies the claims.