The Church of Kurt Cobain was an American Christian church founded in 1996 in Portland, Oregon, and whose patron was Kurt Cobain, the lead singer and guitarist of American rock band Nirvana, who committed suicide in April 1994.
The church held a rally on May 28, 1996, to inaugurate their place of worship and the founders claimed that their purpose was to pay homage to Cobain who they referred to as a "Saint" and also to the Generation X who they felt had been ignored by the Baby boomer focused-world.[4]
A September 1996 article by Spin stated that the Kurt Cobain Church had been a media hoax.[5] In a July 2021 article by Alan Cross in A Journal of Musical Things, he claimed that the Church of Kurt Cobain while having Dillon as its reverend and having a big recruitment drive in 1996, was in fact a stunt created by an art director named Jerry Ketel and that the purpose of it was to make a statement against celebrity culture and society's fascination with drug abuse and suicide. Cross believed that Ketel had fooled some big media outlets into thinking that it was real.[6]