In David James Duncan’s epic novel Sun House, Portland urban mystic Jervis McGrath creates (or at least names) the “churchless, priestless, popeless, moneyless street religion” that he calls Dumpster Catholicism:
“(…) I looked into our adoptive Mother (Church) not by reading what her own priests and historians said but by poking around in the Church dumpster filled with everything and everyone Mother Church tossed out. With no armies of pious Catholic scholars organizing it, that material is as fragmented and chaotic as a jillion-piece jigsaw puzzle. But I like jigsaw puzzles about the faiths, tribes, images, and teachings that the Church has chopped into puzzle pieces, condemned, and thrown away. The more I poked through the dumpster the more I felt our world itself is a puzzle that can’t be solved, in part because Mother Church has caused so many precious parts to go missing.”
“I just thought, ‘The fuck. The things the Church has tossed out would make for the coolest spiritual yard sale the Earth has ever seen!’ So I started conducting that sale, chatting to people I walked with about how the world puzzle felt more bearable, if not exactly solvable, when I started plugging in some of the beautiful missing puzzle pieces the Church has persecuted, sexually slimed, smothered in pious deceit, murdered, and dumpstered. It’s a thrill and a shock to the people I tell about the great truths, heroically kind individuals, huge swathes of the living world, huge numbers of tribes who loved and tended that world, that Mother Church has dumpstered.”
But as the years passed and people continued to enjoy Jervis’s dumpster ramblings, more and more of them declared themselves “Dumpster Catholic converts.” And since there is no priesthood or pope in charge of this faith, no canon to study, no vows to swear, and nothing material to be gained or lost by claiming to be a convert, Jervis is helpless to veto their declarations of faith. Thus has a churchless, priestless, popeless, moneyless street religion its founder vehemently claims not to have founded, continued to expand.
“The fuck!” Jervis mutters each time he catches wind of these expansions.