1/3 Cults Become A World Religion | Crazy Stats To Save Your People

NOTE: This episode has a companion guide with graphs, links, and stats—don’t miss it! https://technopuritan.com/new-religions/

What if most new religions don’t fail — and the ones that follow a few simple rules have a 93% survival rate and over 50% chance of becoming major world religions?

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone dig into original research on new religious movements founded since the 1700s. When you filter for groups with a unique metaphysical framework + a real written (or recorded) corpus, the numbers are already surprisingly high. Add an explicitly pro-natalist framing and something beyond ordinary materialist reality, and the success rate becomes almost absurd.

They break down:

* Why humanist/secular projects almost always die

* Why “silliness” actually protects a religion

* Why probable scams have some of the best survival rates

* Succession systems that work (and the ones that kill movements)

* Hard vs soft religion and fertility

* What this means for anyone trying to build a durable culture or tradition today — including their own techno-puritan project

If you’re interested in cultural survival, fertility, intentional community, or just love weird religious history, this one’s for you.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m e- extra excited to be here with you today. This is probably gonna be one of my favorite episodes to do, one of the most interesting that I have researched, because I conducted a lot of original research for this episode and found something really, really fascinating.

[00:00:14] So if we’re just going to jump to the punch, if you just go into the academic literature and say, of new religions, cults, whatever you wanna call them, what percent of them survive? They’ll say one in 1,000 or one in 100,000, right?

[00:00:30] Octavian: Yeah.

[00:00:30] Malcolm Collins: Yes. But if you actually look at those studies, what they’re generally looking at is, like, somebody got mad at their local pastor and started, like, a small schism or something like that.

[00:00:39] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:00:40] Malcolm Collins: If instead you narrow it down to only books with a unique... Or not books, but, like, ways of seeing things with a unique metaphysical framing and a full written corpus this would be, techno-puritanism would be an example, like, Mormonism would be an example, Scientology would be an example. The Nation of Islam would be an example.

[00:01:00] When you narrow it down to that, if you look at ones founded around the world from the 1700s till today, over a third of them end up surviving at least 100 years, and at some point having over 100,000 members.

[00:01:18] Simone Collins: That’s... N-

[00:01:19] uh.

[00:01:19] Malcolm Collins: no. Now, if we narrow down the list further, so I’m gonna put two more coffee outs on here that are gonna make it even crazier.

[00:01:26] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:27] Malcolm Collins: Take out all of the ones that are I’m gonna say, like, humanist. Like, techno-puritanism would not fall into this by any measure of the, But, but you know what I’m talking about. Those weird humanist religions that were founded in, like, the 1920s and then became a craze for a bit.

[00:01:41] If you take those out and you take out any that do not have an explicitly pro-natalist framing, right? Like, it- Oh ... they, they grow through conversion rather than kids.

[00:01:51] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:01:51] Malcolm Collins: You now get a 93% survival rate, and over a 53% rate of becoming a major world religion. And-

[00:02:03] Simone Collins: Does this include, like, all the weird...

[00:02:05] Like, would it include NXIVM? Would it include the one with the, the woman who died after taking tons of colloidal silver that HBO did a documentary about?

[00:02:14] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so it would not include her, and we’ll go over what it excludes explicitly. Okay. So first you have to have a unique metaphysical framework with a written corpus.

[00:02:23] Oh. She didn’t have a wr- written corpus. She didn’t have, like- Mm.

[00:02:26] Simone Collins: So cult of personality, basically, do not-

[00:02:28] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, cults of personality, off the table. Okay. Anything that’s clearly just schizophrenic ramblings. This would be like Cubism or whatever- Yeah. A

[00:02:37] Simone Collins: man-

[00:02:38] Malcolm Collins: The world is a cube and there are two sides to a cube.

[00:02:41] Cube-based logic. Yes. It, so it cuts out that, it cuts out cults of personality and it cuts out mild schisms. So like if you’re like a, you, you largely believe what the organization would believe, but you have some minor quibbles but you’ve written a lot on those minor quibbles, it cuts those out.

[00:03:00] Simone Collins: Hmm ...

[00:03:01] Malcolm Collins: but like that’s a very weird thing that the growth of new religious movements is dependent on their authorship and not on some of, of like, like the the, the core... What, what’s the word I’m looking for here? The core bottleneck happens before the point of authorship. Mm. And when I did this, I did a secondary thing that was very interesting.

[00:03:25] So note here when I say I’m cutting out schizophrenic ramblings, I am not cutting out, in this list, one of the things we looked at was silliness. And you’ll actually find that silliness correlates with survivorship.

[00:03:40] Simone Collins: Huh ...

[00:03:40] Malcolm Collins: so what I mean

[00:03:41] Simone Collins: by this is- So if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster had managed to put together some coherent biblical, or not, like a religious text or something, a worldview, it could have actually done quite well.

[00:03:53] Malcolm Collins: Unlikely because it falls into the one category where they always die.

[00:03:57] Simone Collins: Oh, it’s not pronatalist.

[00:03:58] Malcolm Collins: No. Anything that, that’s [00:04:00] explicitly atheistic, as I said, like any of those humanist projects- Oh, yes. Okay, okay ... or anything like that, every single one of them has died. Hmm. Now, note there have been a number of times where people have intentionally engineered religious systems.

[00:04:15] Every single one of those became a major world religion. Hmm. So we’ll get into this. It’s crazy. I put together a companion doc. In the last companion doc that I gave you guys, I said, “Don’t go to it because that’s like way too AIE,” or like, you know, it’s... I fixed that. I fixed that in the last one. I fixed that in this one.

[00:04:31] Now if you’re ever doing research using Fable or something like that, you know, to do like deep research, ‘cause it does deep research, but it’s terrible at writing- Yeah ... you can use the RFAB API, which will go back over it and check it for how AI it looks, and then rewrite it until it doesn’t look that way anymore.

[00:04:47] And so now if you go to this companion doc, it reads like a human wrote it which is just a fantastic product to have. And also because it’s checking using an AI checking engine- Ah ... like if you were doing homework with this or something-

[00:05:00] Oh,

[00:05:01] God ... a detection system wouldn’t catch it. I’m just saying that’s...

[00:05:05] I, I like to design tools. I like to