One day in 2016, Derk Venema, a Dutch academic specialising in legal philosophy, was browsing the internet for examples of “philosophically interesting questions about religious freedom” to show his students. He came across the perfect case: a “Pastafarian”, or self-designated member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), was challenging the authorities for rejecting his driving licence photograph, in which he wore a colander on his head.
Venema took a few students to watch the case before the local Chamber of Commerce. “It was one of the most hilarious things I have ever witnessed,” he says. Mathé Coolen, the applicant, “played his role excellently. Even the Commissioner was having a tough time not laughing.” But when he spoke to Coolen afterwards, Venema realised that he was “also very serious about the underlying questions, the questions about when and how administrative bodies get to decide what is a religion and what is not, and who gets to enjoy religious privileges and who doesn’t.”
One of the students who accompanied Venema on his trip was Mienke de Wilde. She was so impressed by the case that she decided to become a Pastafarian herself. The next time she applied for a driving licence, she submitted a photo of herself wearing a colander. Her application was rejected. She appealed, claiming that Pastafarianism was a religion and her right to manifest it was protected under the European Convention on Human Rights. Venema took on her case and Coolen’s; ultimately, it was de Wilde’s alone that went all the way to the Dutch Administrative Court and then the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The court handed down judgment on 9 November last year. But before examining their conclusions, it is worth taking a step back to the origins of this strange “religion”.
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
In 2005, the Kansas School Board was considering whether to teach the theory of intelligent design alongside evolution. Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate from Oregon, wrote a now famous letter in which he claimed to believe that a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” created the world, and demanded that his theory be given equal time with the other two. He also claimed that “global warming . . . and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s.”
Henderson had written the letter as satire. In doing so, however, he unexpectedly generated a meme. The internet was in its early days of cavalier freedom. Facebook had been founded the previous year and Twitter would be the next; chain emails were still a thing. At the same time, “New Atheism” was on the rise. Sam Harris had published The End of Faith in 2004, and contributions by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens would soon follow. (Dennett later featured in the FSM documentary I, Pastafari.) It was fashionable among the godless youth to put “Jedi” as their religion on the UK census; 176,632 people did so in 2011. Parody was the flavour of the day. Pastafarianism went viral, and publishers rushed to sign Henderson up for a book contract.
The result was The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, published by Villard less than six months before Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The Gospel according to Henderson is a picaresque series of pseudo-scientific rants, accompanied by diagrams and mock-formal logic, on topics from “the need for alternative theories” to “a history of heretics”. It is clearly designed to parody the attempts of evangelical Christians to co-opt science into supporting their literalist interpretation of the Bible.
As a work of literature or philosophy, the Gospel has its limitations. In the words of Kathleen McEvoy, an Australian judge: “At best the texts present ordinary moral admonitions and mundane articulations of principles of conduct present in the texts of most other established religions.” Henderson himself, drawing a comparison with traditional scriptures, wrote that “this book will stand up to any of the others – at least in terms of strict plausibility if not literary finesse and retributive beheadings and disembowelments.” The book reportedly sold over 100,000 copies.
Meanwhile, the memes of Pastafarianism have multiplied. A crucial moment in the Church’s history came in 2011 in Austria, when Niko Alm was permitted to wear a colander in his driving licence photo – although only after a visit from a public health officer to check that he was sane. The police, who issued the licence, stated that “the photo was not approved on religious grounds. The only criterion for photos in driving licence applications is that the whole face must be visible.”
This deftly sidestepped the underlying issue – but Alm’s success led to a string of similar attempts around the world, including de Wilde’s. Different authorities have responded in their own ways. In some places, often the more religious ones, the colander has been permitted, from the Czech Republic to Utah; in Poland, the Church of the FSM has been allowed to register as an official religion. In Belgium and Ireland, the colander has not made it through. In England in 2015, the DVLA rejected a colander photo by Ian Harris, described by the Mail Online as “an eccentric man”, because headgear was only “permissible on religious or medical grounds”. In Adelaide, Australia, Guy Albon had his guns confiscated after he submitted a colander photo for his licence, out of fears for his “mental competency”. More seriously, the Pastafarian Mikhail Iosilevich was issued his licence in Russia – but was later arrested on the political charge of “cooperating with an undesirable organisation”. In May, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay civil damages roughly equivalent to £1500.
Is Pastafarianism a religion?
Wearing the colander can be interpreted as a protest against the legal exemptions and privileges readily granted to adherents of all the major world religions. The Dutch authorities, like the DVLA, would have permitted a turban, skull cap or nun’s veil in ID photos as long as the face remained clear. De Wilde’s case is the first and, so far, the only time that the European Court has considered whether Pastafarianism is a “religion or belief” worthy of protection in human rights law.
The result of de Wilde’s challenge, however, was the same in both Holland and Strasbourg: rejection. On the evidence, the Dutch courts found, and the European judges accepted, that she genuinely did wear a colander at all times when outside. (A black plastic colander which she likens to a “bowler hat” and wears at a rakish angle; she has a different one for cooking pasta.) But they could not accept that her beliefs constituted a “religion”.
De Wilde argued that her beliefs were protected under Article 9 of the Convention on Human Rights, which states that, subject to various limitations:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”
A regional court refused de Wilde’s appeal on the grounds that wearing the colander was not mandatory in Pastafarianism. This argument was rejected on further appeal by the Administrative Jurisdiction of the Council of State, Holland’s highest appeal court, because the case law of the ECtHR had previously held that the manifestation of a religion does not have to be mandatory to be protected.
Instead, both the Administrative Court and the ECtHR rejected the claim that Pastafarianism could amount to a religion. Consequently, however much de Wilde wore her colander, it did not count as a religious act. The thorny path by which they reached this conclusion reveals the difficulties that arise when courts of law are asked to decide metaphysical questions.
“If you read an anthology on the concept of religion, you get hundreds of different definitions,” says Paul Cliteur, Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at Leiden University. These go back to Cicero in the first century BC, who defined religion as “reverence for the gods”. It is unsurprising, Cliteur argues, that “a bunch of judges assembled in the European Court” should find it a tough nut to crack: “they are not religious scholars, they are not philosophers, they are not involved.”
Through its case law, the ECtHR has developed a test for “religion or belief” under Article 9: to qualify, the relevant belief must have obtained “a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance”. In de Wilde’s case, the judges quoted the reasoning of the Dutch Administrative Court, and then briefly reiterated it, to conclude that Pastafarianism failed to meet the requisite standards of “seriousness and cohesion”. The movement was designed to “parody” established religions in order to criticise the “influence and privileged position afforded to [them] . . . in some contemporary societies”; as such, it could not be a religion itself. Or, as the Dutch court put it, the “satirical element” was “so dominant” that the European Court’s test could not be met.
In the court’s view, Pastafarianism was not serious; examples were drawn from Henderson’s Gospel, including his “Eight I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts”, which parodied the Ten Commandments. Nor was it sufficiently cohesive; the court took as its example the pirates-and-global-warming theory. The court was equally dismissive of de Wilde’s argument that her own “individual version” of Pastafarianism could be serious and cohesive, even if the movement as a whole was not; her explanations, it held, were too “general and abstract”.
There is clearly force in the view that a humorous parody of something cannot itself be that thing. If the law is required to define concepts like “religion or belief”, then there must be limiting cases. Henderson’s monster started as a sarcastic attack on the teaching of creationism. Its claims are outrageous and entirely unbelievable: that is the point. Wearing a colander or a pirate hat for an ID photo is ridiculous. The purpose of doing so is to question the idea that some forms of headgear are allowed, but not others, on the basis of unprovable dogma.
Freedom of religion, or freedom of thought?
Yet there are difficulties with the courts’ reasoning if Pastafarianism is compared with other belief systems – and, like all parody, it is designed to be compared. Seriousness, for one, is not as straightforward a criterion as it appears. Take Mormonism, says Venema: it’s “hilarious”. Indeed, to non-believers, the Book of Mormon reads like a parody of the Bible. If Pastafarianism is zany, it reflects the zaniness of established religions. As Henderson writes, “every time an ‘official’ ruling is made against our Church it illustrates how absurd the whole idea is of the state defining what is a legitimate religious organisation.”
The European Court’s reasoning also betrays the extent to which, in judicial considerations of Article 9, the paradigm case is religion, and other beliefs are only extensions of that. The court concluded that Pastafarianism “seeks the same privileges for itself [as for established religions] with a view to propagating its message.” That is what it would do if it were a “real” religion, or a sham religion trying to gain money from its supporters. Yet De Wilde told me that she would be happy to remove the colander for her ID photo, as long as others did. “We just want to be treated equally.”
There are many undercurrents in the Dutch courts’ resistance to Pastafarianism. One, argues Venema, is the civil servant’s instinctive fear of mockery. “We even discovered that there was a lot of communication by city administrations with the Ministry for the Interior. They were advised to deny all these applications by people who wore spaghetti strainers on their heads.” As a result of this and the Dutch judgments, says de Wilde, the authorities have effectively discouraged any more Pastafarians from applying.
A similar attitude was evinced by a Québécois judge in another Pastafarian case in 2015. In the judge’s view, the applicant, Isabelle Narayana, who wanted to wear a pirate hat in her ID photo, was treating “in a banal manner the fundamental rights and liberties protected by the [Canadian human rights] charters, to the point of rendering them insignificant.” He said her claim was “an immense farce that aims to mock religions”.
Tanya Watkins, self-appointed Captain of the Church of the FSM in Australia, met with similar treatment when she applied to register it as a religious organisation. The judge, Kathleen McEvoy, considered that the scriptures of Pastafarianism were “parodic texts, developed and expressed for the purpose of mocking and satirising established religions, holding them up to ridicule and suggesting they are worthless and meaningless”. She even lambasted them for being “racist”, “sexist” and likely to be “offensive or insulting” to (real) religions.
The implication of such judgments is that there is something nefarious about mocking religions in this way – perhaps due to a sense, in secular countries like Australia, the Netherlands and the UK, that protecting religious exceptionalism is a way of protecting minorities. Yet it is a sad state of affairs when the courts shrink from engaging with the question at the heart of the matter: whether the starting point in human rights law should be religion – cogent, serious and important – or whether it should be the freedom to think, believe or withhold belief, and act. If the latter (the secular starting-point), then there would be no need for courts to build a hierarchy of beliefs, or to stop Pastafarians from wearing colanders because they were not serious enough.
For de Wilde, the point of fighting her case, and being deprived of a driving licence for five years in the process, is to achieve “equality”. In her view, Pastafarianism is “not less real than other religions”. Watkins agrees: “it has all of the same elements any other religion has,” and the same inconsistency in its followers’ interpretations.
Depending on your perspective, Pastafarians are either the most undogmatic believers in history, or unbelievers who will go to extreme lengths to protest against religious exceptionalism. “In a certain sense,” says Cliteur, “and I speak as an atheist, Pastafarianism is the ideal religion. If all humanity were Pastafarians – people with a sense of humour and a relaxed attitude towards their religious convictions – that would be a tremendous improvement.”
Venema, despite his devotion to the Pastafarian cause, has not become an adherent. “I have never considered joining any groups or organisations that are founded on a specific idea,” he explains. “As a philosopher, I want to be free to think and express anything I want . . . Which I could still do as a Pastafarian, of course.” There you have it: a religion with no requirements, which is still too restrictive for a freethinking philosopher.
Perhaps it is also a question of taste, and of the symbols people use to express themselves; colanders and cutlasses are not everyone’s cup of tea. Not that Pastafarians are required to wear them.
This piece is from the New Humanist autumn 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
