If Harleys Can't Enter Heaven, We'll Ride Them to Hell

If Harleys Can't Enter Heaven, We'll Ride Them to Hell is a piece of graffiti elevated to sacred text by the Ordine Harleyita, a motorcycle circle that had recast itself as a group of nuns for tax purposes. The slogan turns exclusion from heaven into no reason to abandon the Harley: even damnation becomes another road on which to ride. Its comic bravado captures the group’s improbable fusion of religious language, biker allegiance, and resistance to convention.

The Slogan and Its Community

The phrase appears in the account of the Ordine Harleyita’s unconventional spirituality. The group retained its drinking, drug use, symbolic and actual violence, sexual practices, and hatred of authority; these were not described as disappearing when the members took on a religious identity. Instead, the narrative says their way of life was transformed by their love for Christ, whom Sister Vince, the Order’s theologian, called the First Motorcyclist. The wall slogan belongs to this same irreverent religious vocabulary: it imagines the Harley as an enduring companion even beyond the boundary between heaven and hell.

The Order’s purity is explicitly described as exceptional but antinomian. Against that paradox, the slogan is more than a joke about motorcycles and the afterlife. It gives the group’s rejection of authority a memorable, quasi-devotional form, making the machine a badge of allegiance that no celestial judgment can revoke.

Van Meter and the Proposed Alliance

Van Meter encountered the Ordine Harleyita during his persistent search for the Transcendent and was immediately struck by the spirituality he believed emanated from its members. He remained in contact with them and was willing to enlist them in Zoyd Wheeler’s project. Their headquarters in Walnut Creek also made them a practical possibility when the group was discussing how to equip recruited men, including a possible purchase of .22-caliber AKs that would require pickup and modification.

That prospect was not treated as straightforward. Van Meter raised the danger that the Harleyites might simply kill Zoyd Wheeler to solve their own problem, a possibility that could make the proposed approach easier for them. The slogan thus appears in a setting where the Order’s theatrical blend of sanctity and outlaw identity has practical consequences: its members are imagined both as potential allies and as a source of real danger.