The Peoples of the Post
Internet religions, scripture in a post-literate society, and the rebel Jews of Peru
On a winding road outside the village of Milpoc in November 1944, Segundo Eloy Villanueva’s father was murdered. His body was found slumped by a tree, with a bullet in his chest, his face disfigured by knife wounds, and a coin left in his mouth.
The murder was no mystery: Villanueva had been arguing with his neighbor Filadelfio Chávez for months, and one of his field hands all but confessed to helping move the body. Despite the open-and-shut nature of the case, a judge summarily dismissed all charges. Villanueva’s wife told anybody who would listen that the judge had asked her for a bribe in exchange for guilty verdict, and she had refused to give it. Instead of receiving justice, the Villanueva family fell into poverty: they sold their lands, deeded to the family centuries ago by the Spanish crown; they moved in with the elderly parents of Villanueva’s wife; and the family, descended from noble conquistadores, was reduced to selling straw hats in the city square.
Young Segundo did what any honorable, twenty-one year-old Peruvian man of honor would do, and vowed to avenge his father’s death. Lacking a weapon fit for the task, he rifled through an old family chest, hoping to find a dagger or pistol. Instead, he found a Bible.
This was not as ordinary as it seems. For one thing, very few Peruvian Catholics in the 1940s actually kept Bibles at home. Most Peruvians were illiterate, after all. But even if one could read, like Segundo, this was a Catholic country before the Second Vatican Council. The only version of the Bible authorized by the Holy See was the Latin Vulgate of Saint Jerome, and all Church services were conducted exclusively in the ancient language of Rome. Only Protestants, a hated minority in Peru, had Spanish Bibles.
But here was a complete copy of the book, in modern Spanish, sitting at the bottom of the trunk of Segundo’s great-grandfather. Putting aside his rage, he picked up the book. For the first time in his life, Segundo read the Old Testament, starting from Genesis.
It would not be the last time: decades later, long after Segundo had put aside revenge and turned to God, Segundo and his congregants were so well-versed in the Bible that one of his students won a national Bible quiz. The prize, a free trip to Israel, was especially fortuitous: this would give Segundo’s student a chance to appeal, on behalf of Segundo’s congregation, directly to the government of Israel.
The problem, as the student would try to explain in his broken, schoolbook Hebrew, was that Segundo Villanueva and his little congregation of Peruvian mestizos were not Catholics, as they had been baptized, or even Christian. They were actually Jews. Having studied the Bible extensively, Segundo and his followers had discovered that Orthodox Judaism was the one true faith. They wished to move from their Amazonian compound, where they had been keeping the Biblical commandments—all 613 of them, among the jaguars and piranhas—and join their kin in Israel.
Although Segundo’s little jungle synagogue reads like a Borges short story, he and his band of Peruanim,1 as they are known in Israel, is real, and told in Graciela Mochkofsky’s The Prophet of the Andes. What struck me, as I devoured the book in two days, was that the journey of Segundo, his extended family, and dozens of congregants happened because of a book. Without that book, he may very well have fulfilled his plan for revenge and spent his days rotting in prison, ministered by Catholic priests chanting over him in Latin.
But instead, Segundo found a modern Spanish Bible in his great-grandfather’s truck, he read it very, very closely, and that made all the difference. The Bible took him on a long spiritual journey from Catholicism to mainline Protestantism to the Seventh Day Adventists to full-on, Orthodox Judaism. Every step in this path started with an inconsistency between what was written in Segundo’s Bible and what his churches told him. At every step, he trusted the book over the interpretations of the priests. Through his intelligence, charisma, and faith, Segundo formed a community of dozens, living like Biblical patriarchs in the middle of the rainforest, having been rejected by the Catholics, Protestants, and Jews of Peru.2
Whether or not Segundo’s interpretations of scripture are accurate or correct is above my pay grade, but if nothing else, his life story is a testament to the power of books and reading. And despite Segundo’s rejection of Protestantism, his life might be the best example of sola scriptura since, well, Martin Luther. His faith was both intense and intensely literate, based on reading the printed word with care and patience.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all, as the Islamic phrase has it, “people of the Book.” This is true in the obvious sense that all three are Abrahamic faiths that overlap substantially in their beliefs and history, but it also catches something rather weird about these three faiths: very few religions depend on such a small, well-defined, carefully-studied collection of scriptures as the Abrahamic faiths, and even fewer define their scriptures as the literal, direct word of God.
And if all three faiths are religions of the book, then Protestant Christianity is, as so many historians point out, a religion of the printing press. The scholar of religion Tara Isabelle Burton writes:
The technology that gave us the ability to sit with a text in the privacy of our own home and internalize and interpret its message for ourselves gave us at once a profound sense of agency and a retraction of the boundaries of the public sphere. Protestantism is, perhaps, the ultimate religion of the printed book.
Because the culture and traditions of the United States come from the Protestant Reformation, this print-based faith has also been our model for thinking about all other religions, and the blueprint for most upstart religions. Much like starting a presidential campaign, founding a religion requires you to publish a book: The Church of the Latter-Day Saints has The Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist has Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Scientologists have Dianetics.
But just as the internet is ushering us into a post-Gutenberg era, Burton is interested in what our internet-based, post-printing religious lives will look like. What happens to the People of the Book when most people don’t read books anymore? Who are the Segundos of the internet age? I wondered about these questions as I read Burton’s recent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, quoted above.
Burton’s big idea comes from a problem religious demographers have noticed for decades: while traditional religious affiliation has rapidly declined in the last few decades, the proportion of outright atheists has stayed stubbornly low. More and more American believers are becoming what Burton calls “Remixed,” picking and choosing the components of their spirituality from whatever takes their fancy. “Today’s Remixed,” she writes,
reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences. They demand to rewrite their own scripts about how the universe, and human beings, operate. Shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative internet and consumer capitalism, today’s Remixed don’t want to receive doctrine, to assent automatically to a creed. They want to choose—and, more often than not, purchase—the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them. They prioritize institutional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.
What remixed religion looks like, in the short term, is in the jaw-dropping survey Burton cites that shows a majority of self-professed Christians admit to believing in astrology, reincarnation, and psychics, even though each belief is very clearly denounced in the Bible.
In the long term, it means more and more Americans will be SBNRs—spiritual but not religious—professing to a kind of mushy, personal belief in God or communism or kami, mixing meditation and toxin cleanses and reiki and Christmas and Harry Potter fandom and BDSM as they see fit. Much of her book is dedicated to exploring these eclectic, new religious forces in American life, from witches on Instagram to incels on Reddit.3
Most of these were bizarre fringe beliefs until a few decades ago. There were only a few thousand practicing witches and neopagans in the United States before the year 2000, but now there are, by most estimates, a few million. Middle-class white people working in large corporations were not meditating in the 1980s, but Google buys every employee a subscription to the Headspace meditation app. Astrology was peak Age of Aquarius corniness, and then Instagram made it into a $2 billion business.
It’s not an accident that almost all of these new religious movements have taken off in the last two decades. They are, as Burton calls them, “religions of the internet.” All beliefs are welcome in the ideological marketplace of social media, and no belief is so weird or marginal that it can’t find a niche. Americans, it turns out, wanted a lot more than what was on offer in church or at the synagogue.4
And the thing about these new religions, from a literary standpoint, is that none of them have any scripture. Sure, Wiccans and Flat Earthers write plenty of books, but almost none of these new religious movements are united around a divine text or a prophetic voice. There is no bible for astrology, no sutra for SoulCycle, but only a vortex of posts, promotional materials, and comments. Even fandoms, which are explicitly united around their devotion to Harry Potter or Star Wars, have a tendency to lash out against the original creators.
In almost every case, new religious movements have an element of discovery, collaboration, and remixing built in. They are made one comment, one TikTok, and one retweet a time. This makes remixed religion look more like folk religion, the kind of casual, ever-evolving networks of loosely-associated beliefs that most people in most places followed for most of human history. That is to say, they were passed down orally, from contact to contact, with no fixed form or liturgy. We think of the strict, hierarchical, books-based view of religion—Christians believe this, Hindus believe that, and here are the books that spell it out—as old, but in the large sweep of human history, it is actually very new.
Remixed religions take us back to oral culture. New believers are not people of the book, but people of the post. Burton is careful to avoid passing judgment on most of her subjects, taking a scholarly approach. This seems like a healthy stance. Then again, whatever benefits might come from remixed religion will inevitably come with costs.
As I’ve written before, Protestant education made America’s revolutionary generation the most literate society the world had ever seen, a place where it was normal for women to read and a tailor could also be a great philosopher who was also a bestselling author. We used to read as though our souls depended on it. What will salvation by posting alone look like? I have my fears.
I’ve tried to imagine how Segundo Villanueva would have fared in the age of remixed religion. On the surface, it seems like he would thrive: instead of trekking three days to reach a bookstore that might have an Old Testament for sale, or eavesdropping outside of synagogues to learn the tunes to old Hebrew hymns, he might find them in a minute of online searching now, connecting with all kinds of resources on how to successfully convert to Judaism.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Segundo devoting his entire life to a single book and a single faith, making hard and heavy sacrifices to serve them, when easier, catchier religious ideas, more flattering to his pride and desire to belong, parade past his screen with every swipe. The darkest irony behind the “remixed” religions is that no matter how eclectic and obscure they get, most remixed believers seem to be the same person, their self-chosen beliefs doing almost nothing to challenge them. But Segundo Villanueva, the man of one book and one faith—he was one of a kind.
More colloquially, they are also known in English as the “Inca Jews,” but I fweird just typing that.
The Jewish community of Lima was, for the most part, more annoyed than enamored of Segundo’s sect. Most of them were secular, middle-class liberals who barely kept kosher, so they weren’t exactly rushing in to welcome a self-taught ultra-orthodox yokel from the hill country.
Out of necessity, Burton maintains a very liberal definition of religion: if it offers a sense of community and purpose, makes metaphysical claims about the universe, has clear moral precepts, and a way to distinguish the in-group from the rest of the population, it’s a religion.
Burton actually has a whole, fascinating chapter about how America has always been hospitable to fringe religious beliefs. The idea that everybody, everywhere was in church all the time actually turns out to be pretty recent, dating back to the 1940s and peaking by the 1970s. As it turns out, the Silent Generation just really liked going to church more than their parents or children.