Church of Fear

This is the TV version of Christoph Schlingensief’s Church of Fear – a Fluxus-Oratorio by Christoph Schlingensief in the course of the Ruhr-Triennale 2008.

There has always been potential for the emergence of churches and religious confessions; to a large extent, systems of belief are created through ailment and frustration, through traditional fabricators of fear. Director and performance artist Christoph Schlingensief plans a four-part year-long project to celebrate the foundation of the Church of Fear on March 20, 2003. Armed with pervasive terms such as Weltanschauung, sectarianism and religious confession, its nine initiators decided to proclaim a community of non-believers that renounces the beliefs proffered by “public secret societies” in the worlds of politics, business and culture. The Church of Fear is openly suspicious of sermons from political sectarians, TV evangelists and global conspiracists; they stand accused of instrumentalizing weakness and pain, frustration and hysteria – of consumerizing fear. —http://www.schlingensief.com