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".
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.