Religions You May Not Have Heard Of

The Coconut Religion was established in Vietnam in the 1960s, and although it was also known by the seemingly harmless name of the Religion of Congeniality, the area's government deemed it highly suspicious and persecuted followers with a vengeance. At the head of the religion was the so-called Coconut Monk: Nguyen Thanh Nam was the son of a wealthy family who found his beliefs living in the shadow of the Seven Mountains.

He quickly became known for his religious practices: He survived solely on coconuts, encouraged others to perform acts of kindness, and meditated beneath imagery from other religions, including Christianity and Buddhism. Of the highest importance were ideas of peace — and at a time when tensions between North and South Vietnam were at their highest, it's easy to see how few in power would want to hear what he had to say.

Among those who studied with the Coconut Monk was John Steinbeck IV, who followed in the footsteps of his more famous father when he wrote about his experiences there. He wrote (via Tricycle), "[The Coconut Monk] was the true embodiment of the classic 'Don't Worry — Be Happy' posture that is eternally endearing and mystifying in a world gone mad." The monk's attempts at reaching out to authorities — including the government of Saigon — to encourage peace ended in 1990. He was killed in a fight between his followers and law enforcement, and afterward, those followers found themselves in court. Exactly what happened to them is shrouded in mystery.

[Image by Cserbell via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

John Ballou Newbrough may have continued being content as a dentist had he not found himself visited by an angel who dictated an entirely new version of the Bible to him. He published his Oahspe bible in 1882, and essentially, it taught that every prophet that had come before had preached the same universal truths. Once those words were passed on to man, they became corrupted... which, honestly, it's easy to see how that would happen.

Newbrough attracted a small group of followers, who headed into the remoteness of the American southwest to establish a commune where believers lived off the land and adopted orphans. Not a bad deal, right? Unfortunately, a series of misfortunes that included massive crop failures, disease outbreaks, and disagreements over doctrines meant that things never really took off. The Universal Faithists of Kosmon are still around, though, with a few hundred members and a temple in Brooklyn: They were profiled in The New York Times in 2018.

The Oahspe text (which isn't taken literally) is notable for having one of the first descriptions of an extraterrestrial spacecraft within its pages, and it also has some fascinating interpretations of other ideas. God, the Faithists believe, is an elected position temporarily given to a highly ascended soul — and any soul has a chance of getting to God-like heights if life is lived according to testaments that include abstaining from meat and being a generally good and thoughtful person.

Aleister Crowley is perhaps most famously associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but he left the order in 1900. Four years later, he was honeymooning in Cairo when he sat down and, in just a few days, wrote "The Book of Law" and outlined the principles and beliefs that would become his religion, Thelema.

Crowley claimed that the book wasn't his, precisely, but instead that an otherworldly entity named Aiwass had dictated it to him. From the book, Crowley plucked three verses that were going to form the backbone of his religion: chiefly, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." In other words, Crowley preached that it was up to each individual person to set and then follow their own ethical and moral guidelines. Dangerous? Tempting? Absolutely!

Crowley and his adherents practiced his religion at a communal home in Sicily before being kicked out by Benito Mussolini — and like many things, it sounded better in theory than it was in practice. Betty May's autobiography recounted seeing cats killed in ceremonies that included drinking their blood, while surrounded by murals that would make the illustrators of the "Kama Sutra" blush. Things really went sideways when one of their own died a bit mysteriously. The cause of his death is alternately given as complications from drinking cat's blood or a nasty case of typhoid from drinking from the abbey's polluted water source, but either way, it spelled the end of Crowley's Sicilian religious nightmare.

Tengrism is difficult to describe, as it's meant many things to many different people. As it's explained by the Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting, it's the religion of the nomadic people who have lived in the Asian steppe for centuries, and it's changed a lot over the years — particularly with the influence of Islamic missionaries.

Different groups believed different things, and because of the changes in theology, it's difficult to tell exactly what ancient nomadic beliefs looked like. It's generally thought that Tengrism is rooted in the idea that everyone and everything coexisted — as opposed to having humans on Earth and a deity up in heaven — and the spirits of ancient ancestors remained with their descendants. That made it accessible to everyone, instead of restricting the divine to priests. It also meant that everyone was responsible for living in a way that was respectful to the natural world and other life around them: Anyone who violated that wasn't condemned to hell, but would instead condemn their bloodline to a cursed existence.

Tengrism features a pantheon of spirits and demigods, and in charge of it all is Tengri, the sky. He's not only all-knowing, he's extremely tolerant, too: Tengrism could comfortably coexist alongside other religions, and not be bothered by sharing the room, as it were. Modern-day Tengrism is just as complicated, and while many Western people may not have heard of it, they have heard of one of the religion's most famous practitioners: Genghis Khan.

In 1930 — so the story goes — Guy Ballard (pictured, with wife Edna) was hiking on California's Mount Shasta when he was approached by a man who claimed to be the divine Saint Germain. He explained that he was an ascended Master of the I AM, and so, the I Am Activity was born, outlined in the pages of a text called "Unveiled Mysteries." In it, Ballard preached that wealth and energy went hand-in-hand, claiming that adherents would learn how to harness the divine energy that flowed through the universe, channeling that into personal gain and, ultimately, spiritual ascension.

Ballard — who claimed to be George Washington, reincarnated — headed the movement that asked followers to make the church their beneficiaries in all sorts of financial matters, which ended about as expected. After Ballard died nine years after his mountainside vision, his inner circle was accused of fraud. In the midst of claiming that they actually had done things that had averted national tragedy, Ballard's widow and I AM co-founder Edna didn't do herself any favors. According to the Los Angeles Times, she responded directly to an elderly woman who wanted her jewelry back: "If she'd brought as much love and blessing into the world as I have, she wouldn't be in this fix."

The movement took a bit of a less high-profile role as that all went down, but it's still around. By the 2000s, the I AM movement had morphed into a handful of different societies and had several hundred sanctuaries worldwide.

[Image by Vaivasvata via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's the sort of thing that pops up on a meme on Facebook, seems unlikely, gets all kinds of snarky comments, then gets scrolled past — but it's absolutely true: There is a religion where, in a remote corner of the world, Britain's Prince Philip was worshiped as a god. When Philip died in 2021, the BBC profiled the members of two villages on the island of Tanna, who had revered him as what anthropologist Kirk Huffman once explained as a "recycled descendant of a very powerful spirit or god that lives on one of their mountains."

It's also worth noting that not everyone believed, and at the time of his death, his worshipers had dwindled to just a few hundred people. The idea was that Philip's marriage to Elizabeth II was the fulfillment of a prophecy that said one of their own was going to head out overseas, marry into power, and work to bring world peace. How did Philip get assigned the starring role in this powerful narrative? No one actually knows, but it is known that it was already a thing when he first visited the islands in the 1970s.

When his son, the then-Prince Charles, visited in 2018 after an elaborate mourning period, the rumor was that they were going to replace Philip with Charles. During Charles' coronation, villagers hosted the Acting British High Commissioner Mike Watters during a day of ceremonial drinking, dancing, and celebration.