Silliness: The Underrated Ingredient in Lasting Religions
Episode script. Originally published 2026-08-15 at https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/silliness-the-underrated-ingredient
Happy Weekend, Based Campers! Today we’re dishing up a special deep-dive episode on the strange, colorful, and surprisingly durable world of new religious movements. Spoiler alert, but we’re pulling from information that’s going to run in our next Tract episode in which we investigate the survival rate of new religions, which has a companion page on the Techno-Puritan website. The analysis for that episode includes a census of newly-created religions and, knowing we wouldn’t have time to discuss them in the tract episode, we couldn’t help but explore them in a bonus episode.
Drawing from a sweeping research project examining religions founded from the 1700s to today, we explore why some belief systems endure while others disappear—focusing especially on the role of written doctrine, institutions, community, fertility, ritual, and, perhaps unexpectedly, silliness.
From Cyrus Teed’s hollow-earth Koreshan Unity in Florida to Brazil’s extravagantly costumed Valley of the Dawn and the extraterrestrial visions of California’s Unarius Academy of Science, this episode looks beyond mockery to ask what these movements reveal about belonging, imagination, charisma, and the human drive to build meaning together.