In 2005, journalist Oliver Benjamin founded the Church of the Latter-Day Dude in order to promote Dudeism, the religion he derived from understanding Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic 1998 film “The Big Lebowski” as a holy text and its protagonist The Dude as our role model.
What’s become notable about the “church” is that it offers free ordinations to anyone who requests one at their website. There are hundreds of thousands now.
Just fill out the form and then you become an “ordained Dudeist priest.” Now you can perform weddings. Congratulations.
Yesterday, I finally decided to get ordained:
What finally convinced me to join the church and begin adocating its teachings after more than two decades of resisting?
I read their literature written by Benjamin and Dwayne Eutsey and found it to be compatible with my own personal Dudeist practice:
I have generally resisted engaging too much with organized Dudeism since as a religion it’s often cast as simply Daoism with a stoner vibe.
Meanwhile, I’m very overtly still Christian and more aligned with the Western Esoteric traditions rather than Eastern mysticism.
However, the Church of the Latter Day Dude is clearly syncretic not just in its satirical branding but in its stated theology.
From “The Lebowski Liturgy,” point 34 “You’re goddamn right we’re living in the past,” page 38:
“But in a movie in which the Dude is dressed like a Biblical Jesus and upholds the Nazarene’s moral code; in which there actually is a debased character called ‘The Jesus’; in which Persian carpets, Babylonian ziggurats, Hebrew traditions, and the Canaanite landscape of Los Angeles play so prominently, it’s hard not to see this not only as a means to ‘wrap ’er all up’ but to ‘wrap up’ the last ‘3,000 years of beautiful tradition’ as well.”
From point 35 of the Liturgy, “The whole concept abates,” page 39:
In many ways, the Dude is like the original Jesus, who briefly got his day in the sun and then was buried and resurrected as someone rather different. Though there are several pretenders to the throne, the Dude is the only “true Jesus” in the film. Donny’s sacrificial death places him high in the running, and the Jesus has the name and the Latin pedigree, but it is only the Dude who embodies the reformist attitude that the Church never allowed to come to full flower. While St. Paul and the Council of Nicea refashioned the sage of the sagebrush as a god, the Dude’s humanistic spirit slouched down through the ages, westward the wagons, through new Bethlehems, ultimately ending up on Venice Beach waiting to be reborn.
In other words: Dudeism is a form of reformist, mystical Christianity compatible with my own decades-long practice.
The Dude is a Christ figure.
In Dude We Trust.
Attempting to live like The Dude, when done properly, is akin to trying to live like Jesus.
What Would Jesus Do?
What Would The Dude Do?
I have become an oddball, unapologetic blend of both in my own life so I may as well join the church. If anyone needs me to marry them then let me know, I’m happy to do so.
Upon joining the church officially, I soon came to learn more about its education wing too.
Like many religions, the Dudeists have founded and launched their own teaching college which provides degrees with the same ecumenicism as their ordinations. Type in your name, email, and basic info, select the degree you want and the field of study and there you go.
I’ve often felt like I let my parents down by not yet earning a Master’s or a Ph.D. like they did. They’ve certainly nudged me over the years, but my answer was always the same: if I’m going to take the years and the probable debt to earn the degree, then how is that investment then going to meaningfully change my career path and financial status? I get a master’s or Ph.D. in this on top of my English and political science degrees so I could then do what?
They could never really come up with an answer.
Well, now I’ve found the answer. And it’s one for you too:
Abide University and Institute
I decided to complete my Master’s and Doctor of Divinity last night.
I started and completed my Ph.D. before breakfast this morning.
Here are my diplomas and the fields of expertise they certify in the order I received them for my hard work:
Doctor of Divinity in Abidance Counseling
Master of Arts in Comedic Science
Doctor of Philosophy in Lebowski Studies
Thus, I am now:
Rev. Dr. David Michael Swindle, Ph.D., D.Div.
How cool is that?
And you can have those cool titles also, just by taking 10 minutes to fill out a few internet forms. The longest part of the process is simply deciding which of the many fields of study you wish to select as most appropriate to your areas of interest:
I deliberately picked “Abidance Counseling,” “Comedic Science,” and “Lebowski Studies” as my fields of choice because those are actually what I would know and do if this were a “real” university where people actually went to classes. Instead, my professors in earning these degrees the last quarter century were Joel and Ethan Coen and all the myriad of named influences on their films. My field work was living here in Southern Callifornia since 2010 and encountering real life versions of seemingly every character in the film, including the closest I’ve ever encountered of The Dude — who lives 25 minutes down the highway from me in Morongo Valley.
All these years, I have genuinely studied Lebowski, even writing a screenplay inspired by it over a decade ago. I’ve studied comedy as a science, treating George Carlin like Albert Einstein, coming to understand why some comedians succeed and others fail.
But most importantly and most sincerely: “Abidance counseling” is something I actually do. I just did it this week when talking with Cody Taymore again on his livestream:
“Abidance counseling” — to take a joke absurdly seriously as we “meta-modernists” are known to do — means simply to provide friendly counsel and emotional support as The Dude (or as Jesus) would.
In reality, people need friends like The Dude. And we can give them to them by “playing The Dude.”
Don’t just watch The Dude. Be The Dude.
When we are Dudeist or we are Christians — or Judeo-Christian Dudeist as I have become — we are relating to others in a state of love, compassion, honesty, empathy, joy, good humor, a bit of elevated THC, and sincerity.
This is all absurd.
I even asked Copilot to make an absurd blending of the Dudeist symbol with the Cross and Star of David. It did quite well:
But there is something you see all the time online and in the real world that is even more absurd than all this satirizing of academia and organized religion: people who present their doctorate or their title or their professional credentials in some clearly dishonest way in order to deceive ignorant people.
They do it multiple ways, to varying degrees of insidiousness.
In professional journalism we have a rule when it comes to the “Dr.” title: it only goes to medical doctors. If a man or woman merely has earned a Ph.D in English literature then they do not get the Dr. in a newspaper.
The reason for this is pretty simple: it’s not right to use the cultural prestige of medical doctors to inflate your image and prestige so that incurious people take you more seriously than they should. For maximum clarity, in everyday use outside of academic literature, “Dr.” should remain reserved for medical doctors.
I’ll give you some examples of these deceptions.
The most egregious and dangerous in recent years has been “Dr.” Naomi Wolf:
During the pandemic, Wolf made yet another of her signature chameleon career shifts, and reinvented herself as an anti-vaccine crusdader.
So all of a sudden it became time to pull out her Doctorate in… English Literature which she earned in 2015… for “research” which would ultimately destroy her career in one of the most humiliating research failures of the 21st century, leading her as far away from academia as one could imagine (Substack and my former Publication FrontPageMag.)
At least Wolf acquired a doctorate of some sort, even it she is misleading people about it.
Here’s “Dr.” Taylor Francois, another Substacker I came across in my investigation into AI plagiarism and who blocked me when I asked about why she had chosen to disable Pangram AI scanning and noted the questionable nature of her alleged doctorate:
Of course, I couldn’t find any evidence of what her doctorate was supposedly in or where she “earned” it.
This also happens in the religion space on Substack where an unrelated degree in one subject is laundered to suggest it provides authority in something totally unrelated.
Just this morning I found that another Substacker I’d encountered in my AI plagiarism investigation had decided to block me rather than address one of my points. I expected him to do this as I’ve had discussions just like this with Christians just like him for nearly 30 years:
Who is this Dr. Tyler Rauwolf? Why was he growing an email list sharing Bible reading ideas? And what was his doctorate in?
One would assume, that if someone says they are a doctor and they are running a Bible study blog then they probably have a doctorate in religious studies or something?
This publication is a form of ministry, right?
It turns out that Tyler’s doctorate is in… organic chemistry.
According to this interview with Voyage Tampa in December of 2025, Tyler says “I played on — and actually helped pioneer — the very first men’s lacrosse team at Illinois Wesleyan University. After my first year, I stepped away from the sport to pursue organic chemistry research, which eventually led me to Boston University for a PhD in Organic Chemistry.”
He then shifted to a preoccupation with fitness and launched his coaching business. Telling Voyage Tampa that “So in October 2019, I launched my coaching business part-time while finishing my PhD. Back then I could only handle about 4–5 clients at a time because of the demands of grad school. But when I graduated in May 2022, I moved to Florida, took the business full-time, and never looked back. Since then, I’ve grown what started as ‘The Fit Chemist LLC’ into what’s now The Physique Lab™ — a faith-centered coaching company that’s helped over 127 people transform their lives. Our mission is simple: help busy men build the health, discipline, and confidence to become the physical and spiritual leaders God has called them to be. I love helping men reclaim their bodies, deepen their faith, and lead their families with strength and purpose.”
Here is a video showcasing his Godly work:
Is this what our Lord and Savior had in Matthew 16:25 when he instruted his followers to “take up his cross and follow me,” that we must lose our lives to find Him? Putting up “Before and After” photos of men’s bodies?
He is a jock lacrosse bro who is taking his Ph.D. in organic chemistry to present himself as both a health expert on YouTube and a Bible expert on Substack. Yet when I question him on basic theological ideas, he crumples like a leaf and leaps to the block button as I knew he would, as so many of them do when exposed.
There are plenty of other ways people do this in ways that are more overt than others.
The traditional one of, of course, is Noam Chomsky parlaying his linguistics reputation into a political advocacy career. Without the seeming credibility of his linguistics “breakthroughs” (now collapsing under new research, har, har har…) then serious people would have ignored his deceitful foreign policy analyses.
The satirical 1970s inverse of Chomsky is, of course, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who infamously acquired his doctorate from a mail-order “university,” the equivalent then of Abide University, as an open and obvious joke..
It’s also worth taking a moment to honor one of the greatest creative doctors Southern California ever produced, the great artist, entrepreneur, and cannabis High Priest Dr. Dre:
Oh, I’m sorry, was this seeming diversion to call out a few bullshit merchants not in line with the lovey dovey Jesus and Lebowski vibe?
Well, calling out evil and bullshit is part of loving people too. Jesus cast out demons. Jesus told truths and gave moral commands which infuriated people.
And so too throughout the Coen brother’s masterpiece, The Dude often pisses off people by saying the inconvenient, thus so should we all.
Trying to use credentials to fluff yourself up in order to deceive the ignoant is both wrong and absurd.
The absurdity is the sheer ease of the deception ultimately crumbling apart.
And across academia that is beginning to happen more broadly. Students are submitted assignments written with AI, and professors are using AI to grade them. More and more today, the credentialist nature of higher education has become more apparent. Students just want the degree so they can then advance to getting the job. Education is beside the point, simply being able to move on to wealth and prestige is what matters.
Academia is crumbling to ash and blowing out into the wind.
But who really deserves prestige in our human species? It’s usually not people who feel the need to flaunt their titles or who have even taken years to earn degrees. It’s people who are engaging in the Abidance counseling.
Go get your degree at Abide University, join the Dudeist church (you can do so in supplement to your current church, man) and then simply engage in Abidance counseling. Show those hurting some love, compassion, and pass them that fucking joint.
If you were high while you read this article, then you will likely appreciate these too:
The 10 Biggest Mistakes People Make When They Start Smoking Weed
Last month, in my satirical article “How I Persuaded Sam Altman to Shut Down Sora and Resign from OpenAI,” I opened by making some points meant entirely sincerely:
And especially this comedic masterpiece, my own Lebowski so far:
