No institution owns who you are.

I didn't set out to start a church. I set out to get married.

Our officiant needed to be “licensed.” My wife felt the weight of that — you're supposed to do it right, so we did. I found someone with a certificate, we checked the box, and it worked. But somewhere in that process I noticed what we'd actually done: unquestioningly jumped through a hoop that existed mostly because everyone assumes it has to exist.

So I looked into it. “Licensed” meant a random piece of paper. Anyone can get one. None of that was surprising. I already knew religion was a structure humans built. What I saw was an opportunity: to run an experiment, and to send a message that blurs some lines that probably deserve blurring.

No one can tell you who to be. Every generation rewrites what “right” means — what was deviant becomes acceptable, what was sacred becomes embarrassing, what was criminal becomes unremarkable. If there were a universal moral truth, you'd expect some convergence by now. What we have instead is humans applying their own judgment, in their own era, and calling it eternal.

That idea felt especially sharp when I thought about the Pride movement. For decades, gay people were told by religious institutions that who they were was illegitimate. They were the rebels in that story. So what if there was a church that just started from their side of the argument — the side that says you don't need permission?

Full disclosure: this is a mischievous experiment that also happens to be sincere. The statements of belief are real. The irreverence is also real. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to seem more serious or less serious than I am.

The ordination itself is legitimate. Courts have repeatedly upheld online ordinations — Universal Life Church v. United States (E.D. Cal. 1974) established federal recognition; state courts from New York to California have affirmed that marriages performed by online-ordained ministers are legally valid. It's been challenged, and it's held up. Laws vary by state — always check your local requirements.

We're not interested in ideological purity from any direction. The far right spent decades using religion to police identity. More recently, some corners of the left developed their own version of that — different vocabulary, same impulse to define who's in and who's out. True tolerance is boring and consistent, not exciting and selective.

We're also not against traditional spirituality. The core precepts of the world's major religions — compassion, humility, treating others well — genuinely make the world better. The problem is what happens when institutions capture those teachings and start using them to control people.

You give us $20. We ordain you. You get a legitimate certificate you can bring to your county clerk to officiate weddings. Under the First Amendment, our church is as valid as any other. We're not pretending to have divine authority. But then, nobody actually has divine authority — they just claim to.

So yes, there's irony here. You're joining a church that openly acknowledges humans invented churches. The real question we're testing is whether something honest, irreverent, and genuinely non-judgmental can sustain itself. No nonprofit false solemnity. The experiment is the point.