As niche and subversive a notion as CultPunk may be, it has some fairly recent cultural progenitors, if you look hard enough. One was the “Church Punk” aesthetic of the Canadian visionary artist and poet ManWoman, who sought to reclaim the ancient emblem of the sun wheel/swastika from association with Nazi atrocity and who wrote, circa 1995:
I continuously dreamed of skulls — I’d be riding on a skull motorcycle, driving a skull car, living in a skull house. Because these experiences of mine were previews of death — what we will all see when Mr. Death taps us on the shoulder. The skulls express the ego death of the transcendental state where we cease to be located in a body and feel at one with the bliss of the Eternal. Mr. Death came dancing thru my dreams, he’s first cousin to Mr. Peanut. He became a costume for Hallowe’en one year. I take him to art show openings, to parades. He’s on a T-shirt — he’s cool, he’s debonair! I want him to greet the guests at my funeral. In my painting Welcome Home, Mr. Death urges us to transcend the ego and experience eternal love so we can enjoy richer lives. I stole Mr. Death’s dance step from Fred Astaire who had just died.
The old-fashioned religious icons of yesterday no longer reach the contemporary heart. I call my alternative Church Punk.
See also this 2015 blog post speculating about the potentials of Churchpunk as a literary genre:
If I’m going to do my homework, one of the things I’m going to have to do is look at cases where people have purposely created religions for some functionalist task. This comes to my question, at last: does anyone know of cases where someone made a religion to achieve some independent end?
I am not particularly interested in cases where there is a present cult leader upon whom the religion is dependent. This does not really strike me as a separate object or technology in itself; the religion is not its own entity there. For the same reason I’m not as interested in Scientology, even if it is more obviously the sort of thing I’m asking about: it is still maintained by a shadowy organization without which it would probably wither.
Nor am I particularly interested in cases where the person who made the religion seems to have done so as a response to some truth they believe they have discovered rather than as an instrument to achieve an end. Perhaps I am wrong, but my impression of Raëlism is that Claude Vorilhon, aka Raël, believes what he’s preaching at least to some degree; at any rate, it is unclear whether Raëlism will survive Vorilhon.
Nor am I interested in religion-like things which do not stand up to most well-considered definitions of religion, like parody religions (which do not produce an “air of facticity”) or social movements which have many religion-like traits but not enough to quite meet a definition.
The ideal case, if it exists, is a religion which someone has made with the express purpose of making a religion rather than articulating a truth, and then that religion became independent of its creator. The creator’s motives could be selfish (make money, attract women) or altruistic (protect the environment by convincing people it is sacred).