How can I establish a stable and growing church where everyone is chaste (no sex)?

Question

UPDATE: I was informed that my English terminology was incorrect. I was using the term "celibate", instead of the intended and correct "chaste". The idea was "no sex", not "no marriage".

Earth had no shortage of religious movements that to some extent prized chastity.

But they were all either:

• Restricting chastity to a small subset of believers (Roman Catholicism)

• Restricting chastity to unmarried people (pretty much all Abrahamic religions, at least)

• Or, in rare cases where 100% of believers were required to be chaste, the religion died out quickly, for obvious game theoretical reasons.

How can I avoid that last case, and establish a religion which requires 100% total chastity of ALL its adherents, that is stable and won't die out like Shakers did, for lack of new believers being born and/or desertion of adherents to more sex-friendly faiths?

Conditions:

• Religion must arise on regular Earth

• Timeframe for arising and establishing is anywhere between 500BC to 1900AD

  • this means no cloning/test tube babies.

• I'm ok if it's brand new weird one; but some offshoot of Abrahamic ones is preferred if possible.

• Absolutely no supernatural divine intervention to help (for the purposes of this question, we will take an atheist view that a religion is merely a memetic cultural system, not based on anything supernatural "for realz").

  In other words, no "adherents magically get virgin births en masse", no "deity performs such miracles that 50% of Earth population believes and converts right away", no "mass hypnosis of 100K people".

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For the background:

Although the needs/situation are purely Earthly-reality-based, the background is not.

• I'm a member of an alien species, who can only sustain life by feeding off of the energy emitted by human adults who are chastity all their life

  • The energy is only liberated at the time of "natural" death ("natural" means, they can't be killed on purpose by a member of my species in this context. Any other cause of death is fine).

  • The energy accumulates very slowly, let's say enough for one daily meal for me in 1 year of a human's life.

  • Any sexual act (let's define that as penetrative genital sex) destroys many many year's worth of such energy supply accumulated in a human body.

  • Energy stops developing after "old age" - basically when humans become too old to desire sex, say 70?

  • To address one of the comments, this energy is 100% useless to Earthlings. Completely. Not enough "energy" to power a single lightbulb; human body can't process it, only destroy or create. I can't even demonstrate its existence to humans, really, except by dying from hunger.

• I am either naturally shaped like a human, 100% indistinguishable from one, or stuck in human form, doesn't matter.

• I have no special technology or abilities, except exceedingly sharp intellect, both IQ and EQ (which includes being great at rhethoric and demagoguery and thus extremely convincing and charismatic; as well as being smart enough that I can earn a decent but not unlimited amount of money in almost any human society)

  • This includes no special science/technology knowledge, so I can't start an industrial revolution in King Arthur's court. I'm an alien equivalent of an English or Drama major :) - I can talk fast and convincingly, about general things.

• Initially, I have access to a small (let's say couple hundred) members of my own species who are all 100% similar to me. I can raise new ones at will (cloning, spawning, whatever), but ONLY if there's enough "chastity energy" food supply to feed them.

  • As a reminder, 1 human in 1 year of life accumulates enough energy to feed 1 member of my species for 1 day. This means 6 humans aged 60 must die chaste, to feed one alien for 1 year.

• My overarching goal is to raise a fairly big # of members of my own species (how long they live is irrelevant - as long as at some point enough are alive at the same exact time). The reason is immaterial, but let's say ET can't call home on his own, but 1 million ETs brainwaves combined can call home.

  • Assume that I have no need to worry about hiding my 1M ETs. E.g. they can live in some hidden in-Earth base, don't need anything but be fed the special chastity energy so they don't die of hunger. Or every one of them can easily blend in with humans with no possibility of discovery.

• I decided that the only way to get my species a sufficient amount of food to raise their #s, is to codify chastity in a mass religion. Perhaps I'm wrong, but that's what my best analysis led to.

  • This means an "obvious" solution of starting a world war and killing off millions of human virgin young people soldiers is offlimits. Doesn't matter if it's because of my ethics, or because I practically see no way of making this work.

Answer 1

Have followers go to orphanages.

There are quite a lot of children without anyone to care for them, and, unfortunately, that number is growing all the time. Adoption is relatively easy; most people would probably pass the background checks to be eligible to adopt someone. In other words, the people in this religion leave the sex to other people, and take the offspring that are unwanted or no longer have parents.

Make it part of the central religious text that at least once every five or so years, a married couple must go an adopt a child. They will be rewarded in the afterlife if they adopt more.

This is, in part, how the Shakers grew. Children left on doorsteps were taken in.

Answer 2

The background you supplied does not imply full celibacy.

Instead following would apply:

Sex would be for the young, after which vows of celibacy would be made. This would be actually relatively normal, people do have a family and a profession and then retire to a monastery. This would allow few decades of accumulation without large impact on fertility. It isn't how many children you have, but how many you can raise that is important. And that is usually limited by economics.

Polygamy would be preferred with strong taboo against extra-marital sex. You can have most of the males be celibate without much impact on anything. (I suppose that people would turn some of the passion towards religion...) Having children and families would be restricted to men rich enough to provide for them properly. This would reduce hereditary poverty among the faithful and maybe even give selective pressure against traits that can cause poverty such as addictions.

New converts would be welcomed to the religion. It would be an inclusive religion. The question and many answers seem to forget that one percent of a multitude is more than a hundred percent of a few. So it probably more important to have lots of believers than it to have them celibate. There is little benefit from stressing celibacy beyond the point there it starts to impact conversion rate or fertility.

These should nicely increase the supply of long term celibates dying without compromising long term supply. It also does not require anything particularly unusual.

Answer 3

Create a sub-cult whose sole purpose is breeding.

If it only needs to 'present to the world' as a celibate faith, then the sub-cult could be an inner sanctum of deacons and matrons hidden from public view.

Otherwise, it would necessarily have to be played off as another religion, "symbiotic" in nature with the main church; whose adherents are tasked with breeding and surrendering (legally signing over) their children to the sub-cult... And the sub-cult in turn gives those children over as new adherents to the main church.

Answer 4

This is rather a nasty answer. But I see it as being the only practical one, based on your outlined criteria.

Develop a patriarchal, polygamous religion that neuters (castrates) say, 95% of your males.

You're not going to convince people to just be abstinent. It's simply not going to happen, people will have sex. They might keep it secret and hide it, but they'll still do it. The only way is to... well, remove the option entirely.

By leaving your female population untouched, and leaving some selected males as normal, you keep population growth intact. This does cut down your harvest to approximately 50% of the population, but overall you still end up with more (50% of a ten million is better than 90% of one million).

If you do the neutering early enough, you don't even need to care if those people leave your religion later, since you'll still be able to harvest them when they eventually die.

Answer 5

The Essenes were an early ascetic Jewish sect. As you would expect, they died out. But we can adapt their ideas.

Their philosophy was one of communal living, abstinence, and service. As suggested in this answer, expanding the idea of service to caring for the unwanted children of the world would serve your needs and fit in with the religion. Teaching and raising the young was and is a core value in Judaism too, so we can expect the Essenes or a group derived from them to have this value. (In Judaism, in fact, there are cases where you revere your teacher above your father.) Orphans provide for the replenishment that the Essenes lacked.

A community like this would understand raising young to be salvivic. They already believe in an afterlife, so you need to convince them that this, on top of everything else they're doing, is important for getting the eternity they want. So don't cast it as a requirement to adopt; cast it as an inherently meritorious act, and let members' self-interest take it from there.

You also need your religion to take a communal approach to raising children. It may not take a village to raise a child, but it's a lot easier, in a community where 5-10 kids per household are normal, if there is communal support. There are communities today where young children live not with their parents but in "children's houses" where the whole community shares responsibility; you'll want to instill that value in your group.

That addresses the group's stability, but how do you instill the value of celibacy? A few communities (some Essenes, Shakers, maybe others) did -- maybe not 100% because there will always be people who rebel or leave, but most. The Essenes and Shakers did it until they died out, after all, so I think your biggest problem is on the "died out" side, not the "willingness to go along with celibacy" side.

Further, groups with a strong communal orientation are better able to bring the weight of communal responses to bear on people. The Amish use shunning to good effect; this keeps most of their members in line without any force being used. You want your community to live "communally" -- lots and lots of interactions, very hard to keep a secret, and you very much care what the neighbors will think. A few will leave and their families will be very sad, but most will stay, grow (through adopted children), and pursue their shared values.

Answer 6

IMPOSSIBLE RE: CHILDREN

How you think about sex affects how you think about children.

If, like the Shakers, adherents see people as God's children, they begin to wonder why they can't have their own. If the movement makes a special effort to adopt rejected children, it would be very difficult to explain to those children why they shouldn't have a family of their own. You would really have to push the primacy of a spiritual family over a blood family, and even then, that's a hollow comfort.

If, as suggested above, you demonize the other sex, it follows that children will be demonized too. The parents have to sneak off, both hating themselves and the other; their child would be the product of an unholy union. The cult would have to just deal with it until the child reached a certain age, probably sexual maturity, at which point it would begin skulking around. Honestly, the premise is gross.

Few religions teach that sexual appetites are all bad. Sex solidifies bonds, strengthens love, makes babies, etc.. Sin comes in when sex is used recklessly. Most religions make chastity a personal commitment because giving up sex requires the strength of devotion. So your religion might be better suited as a modern evangelizing type church: since it won't inherit children, it needs to convince adults. They might give up sex, but they get XYZ.

Answer 7

If your goal is to get to about 1 million of your species, and 6 humans dying at age 60 can feed 1 of you for a year, then you'd need 6 million chaste humans living to age 60. As will be evident in the first point below, I'm going to adjust that number up to about 7.5 million. Obviously, you don't need these people all at once. And obviously this is not an exact number...you'd need several generations to get to the amount of energy you need for food. But you need children, as well as a fairly aggressive proselytizing campaign.

How to deal with having children

Unfortunately, you're gonna have to take a hit on the total chastity energy created by your followers. Basically, as soon as adolescents hit puberty and can safely carry a baby, they are candidates for breeding. This is going to be a little uncomfortable, based on modern standards, but during the timeframe you specified, it shouldn't be too out of the ordinary. (Note: in researching for this answer, I came across this disturbing list on Wikipedia. Not for the faint of heart.)

So, let's say at around age 14, girls start having babies if they are able, and should try to have babies until they are about 20. Polygamy will be enforced - one boy should try to father as many babies as he can. After 20, women will remain chaste until they die. For all intents and purposed, men will remain chaste their entire lives, except for some small percentage who will be chosen to be fathers. Thus, let's assume women will die with chastity energy at a level 40, and men with level 60. Average chastity energy = 50. Based on your conditions, we'd need to get to about 7.5 million followers to achieve 1 million fed aliens.

In our aggressive breeding program, let's assume we average about 4 healthy children per woman during the 6 year breeding period. Even though that's about half of the potential, I'm adjusting down. Still, this number might be a little high due to infant mortality rates, not being able to get pregnant right away, etc., but I'm not factoring these in for this example.

Using this population calculator, poorly designed as it may be, gives me somewhere around 275 years to reach critical mass, if we are growing only by reproduction. (If you're interested, I used 100 people starting, 275 years ago, 17 years between generations, 4 children per couple, 4 survive to produce more children.) This number is obviously reduced if you actively seek new converts. Okay, so the numbers get fuzzier and fuzzier the deeper we get into them, but I'm just going with a Fermi estimation at this point.

Keeping followers chaste

After the breeding program, monogamy is applied, men and women get married, and they are offered children to raise in a nuclear family. While the culture of the religion is a little bizarre up to this point, I'm just not convinced that the religion as a society could really succeed in a commune-type fashion. There's just not any good precedent for that.

Homosexuality here is not considered taboo in the least; in fact, part of the "marketing" of the religion would be that it is a haven for homosexuality. Gay and lesbian couples could raise children and have happy lives, all the while building up chastity energy, since sexual acts are limited only to penetrative genital intercourse. Church leaders wouldn't have to worry about these folks.

Based on the same caveat, heterosexual couples could still have sexual release, as masturbation would be accepted and even encouraged, as well as manual, oral, and anal intercourse. However, vaginal intercourse would obviously be strictly forbidden, and would be harshly punished. Depending on the overall culture of where your religion is operating, you can deal with these vagrants differently...but you should not kill them. That's just a waste of chastity energy and would not look very appealing to potential converts. Maybe you lock them up for life ("rehabiliation centers"), or you could excommunicate them. How you justify these extreme religious principles up to this point is beyond the scope of my answer...I believe other answers here do a pretty good job.

Answer 8

Artificial breeding program.

Ugh - sorry about this. They capture and kill heretic men. They capture female heretics and forcibly inseminate them with the semen via surgery so they remain virgins.

Then they raise the kids in the religion.

By warring against, and terrifying, non-believers they persuade them to join. Anyone who doesn't is fair game for the breeding program.

When all the non-believers have died out (if ever) they designate certain people as sacrifices and say it is an honour to take part in the program. They still use non-sexual insemination.

Answer 9

So, a stable and growing celibate religion... but, doesn't need to be dominant, thankfully...

Hmm... I'll have a cult that has a sex substitute as drugs or something... With those drugs being a euphoric libido killer...

Perhaps make it so it's got even more reasons for joining the cult, like it makes you stronger, smarter, etc.

Location... Africa or somewhere in the Americas, at a time where those locations didn't have a strong, cohesive, religious presence, so displacing the existing religions isn't hard...

Answer 10

The symbiotic arrangement above is the better way to do it - however staying within the constraints of the question there is only one real option:

Convert and upgrade some Mongol hordes. Even if you don't have advanced technology you must remember something to give them some advantages somewhere, even if it's just hot air balloons for scouting. You just need to get a sufficiently warlike bunch on board and give them enough of an edge to be able to conquer anyone around them.

Mandatory chastity belts for everyone (men and women). Train everyone as warriors. Demand a tax of children each year from all neighbours. Any that refuse kill all adults and take the children. Repeat until no-one refuses any more.

Slap the chastity belts on the children and raise them as the next generation of warriors.

Answer 11

Make sex the reward of the truest believers and make them produce the offspring. Lets say the special 5% can participate.

You could even selectively breed the best humans for your tastes, the stupidest ones to make them easy to control. Or maybe the most beautiful ones(beauty ~= biological perfection)

And the rest would live in chaste.

Answer 12

Recruit your cult entirely from homosexuals.

Homosexuality is condemned by most cultures and religions in world history, so you shouldn't have trouble recruiting these outcasts and give them a new home among equal-minded people. Homosexuality does not appear to be genetic, so you should have a steady stream of new people to recruit from other cultures.

You didn't say if "penetrative genital sex" includes anal-sex between men or vaginal penetration with something other than a penis between women, but when it does you could demonize these practices as emulating the unholy acts the heterosexuals perform and instead encourage other, non-penetrative sexual practices like oral sex, frottage or mutual masturbation.

You might want to enforce separation between men and women to ensure that none of your followers start to question their sexual orientation and become straight.

Answer 13

You don't need "penetrative genital sex" to produce offspring.

You could collect semen from wet dreams, that the mal members of your religion have and let it flow into the vaginas of the female members of your religion.

So you can have procreation with out sex, not even masturbation.

Answer 14

You need three self-sustaining communities, very much like existing monasteries: only-male, only-female, breeding community.

Religion must avoid any comment about the existence of the other sex. Nothing about sexuality at all. Religion must enforce the idea that beyond the walls of the closed communities there is nothing but death.

Breeding community= a community with the only purpose of breeding. There is no specific mother, all children are raised by the community. As soon as possible (using childhood amnesia to your benefit) selected childs are send to his respective communities (they are enlighted). Other are keep for reproductive purposes.

No one from the breeding community CAN leave. When are no longer able to reproduce their are "enlighted" (killed, they are no longer useful)

People from the only-male/ only-female communities that show unusual strong sexual appetite are cast away to exile (killed, they are a problem for the community)

Senior chaste only-male / only-female members are promoted to "enlightment" (being feed to the alien overlords)

Aliens are the people who manage the trading of people between the communities (therefore, the only ones that known the existence of the three communities)

Answer 15

The "energy" you refer to is not anything like real physics. Either the universe is magical or you can't get away with more than one such feature. So make the sex-energy understood and used by the people too, and that is the same reason the group exists as why the alien is attracted to them. What would the adherents do with it that is worth it and understood by outsiders as a compelling reason to join before reaching puberty?

Answer 16

Divide and conquer: Demonize the opposite gender. Essentially, there can be two churches to the same religion; one for each gender [though they don't need to be publicly affiliated with one-another, and it's probably best they aren't]. Utilize all means at your disposal to drum up a dogma which segregates the genders from one another. Promote same-sex relationships and life-long partnerships. Then prohibit those relationships from sexual acts by creating the belief that those sexual acts will "lead to heterosexual impulses".

Add on to this the belief that the world already "suffers from Overpopulation". Instill within adherents the idea that they don't WANT to reproduce, while at the same time, having them raise orphans and adoptees with similar viewpoints.

Is it stable? I can't say for certain. It may draw in certain asexual individuals and same-sex couples, for sure. And whatever instability is left may be worked out via the legal guardianship/adoption of children.

Answer 17

To operate right on the edge of your definition, I would offer the following:

Sex is forbidden; pregnancy is a holy duty.

The Holy Eucharist, or whatever its equivalent is in the church, causes long-term libido suppression in men. However, sperm can still be harvested by various means (and don't make me start listing them - it's gross).

Women are impregnated in Church clinics, either by artificial insemination or, for the literalists, in vitro fertilization.

This allows a more-or-less conventional family structure and an expanding population, at the cost of the medical resources required. AI is cheap, so as long as it dominates the institution such costs would be minimal. Paternity is pretty much guaranteed, so there is no difficulty getting men to raise children who are not "theirs".

Since the libido suppression is fairly long-lasting, cheating isn't much of a problem, especially if communion is public. A man can miss only so many services before someone in the hierarchy notices.

The situation is tough on the women for at least two reasons. First, they have little control of their reproductive cycle, since the Church machinery not only requires them to reproduce but also becomes the agent to accomplish it. Second, with men comprehensively uninterested in sex, underlying frustration levels would be high. This, of course, is nothing new in this world (Catholics had to practice the rhythm method, for instance) but it would be worse in this case. "Fortunately" (for peculiar values of fortunate) the sexual/reproductive structure of the Church suggests that women are probably relatively powerless, so they won't raise too much of a fuss.

Alternatively, the libido suppression in men also applies to women. This requires a very sophisticated bit of chemistry, since messing with such drives might also interfere with the emotional bonding with infants - and their survival really requires that a parent cares about them.