In November 2021the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter: the Court), for the first time in its history, decided a case concerning a so-called parody religion: De Wilde v the Netherlands.1The applicant was a ‘Pastafarian’, a follower of the ‘Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’. The Court rejected her application because it did not consider Pastafarianism a serious view, and therefore not a religion or belief within the meaning of Article 9. As is well-known, a sufficient level of ‘seriousness’ is one of a quartet of requirements for religion or belief–the other three are ‘cogency’, ‘cohesion’, and ‘importance’ –that the Court has used inthe four decadessinceCampbell and Cosans v the United Kingdom.2Apart from the odd case note,3De Wildehas not elicited much commentary fromStrasbourg watchers. This is surprising. The case deserves to attract more attention than it has. The Court has always been vague as to the precise meaning and scope of the Campbell and Cosans requirements, but in De Wilde it sheds, or appears to shed, newlight on the meaning of not one, but two of these. First, the Court seems to endorse a demanding conception of ‘cohesion’, according to which the applicant’s view must exhibit substantive internal coherence in order to qualify as religion or belief. Second, De Wilde marks the first time that the Court says anything about the requirement of seriousness. What it say sis, alas, both scant and cryptic. One of the aims of this article is to make sense of the Court’s reasoning and its implications. A further aim isto use the occasion of the De Wilde decision to examine the wider Article 9 case-law in search of clues as to the meaning and scope of the other two requirements –cogency and cohesion –, and the manner in which the four requirements relate to one another. Although such clues are few and scattered, and although other writers have already provided useful accounts of said case-law, it is, I think, possible to broaden the current understanding of what the Court means by the phrase ‘views that attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.