‘Scripture’is a term used to refer to the sacred writings of religious groups, for example the Bible in Christianity, the Qur’an in Islam and the Vedas in Hinduism. The etymology of scripture derives from the Latin scriptura, the past participle stem of scribere,‘to write’. 2 This may have had particular significance in past societies where only the most important, authoritative narratives were written down; in an age of mass literacy such as the twentyfirst century, potentially all writings are scripture. From the mid-twentieth century Western culture experienced a sharp increase in new religious movements (NRMs), some of which were generated within the West, while others were imported from the other cultures, chiefly the East (India, Tibet, and Japan in particular). Most of these new religions possessed scriptures, generally the writings of founders (for example, Sun Myung Moon’s Divine Principle for the Unification Church, and Dianetics and other books by L. Ron Hubbard, within the Church of Scientology). This paper investigates how Robert A. Heinlein’s bestselling science fiction novel, Stranger in an Strange Land (1961, reissued ‘uncut’in 1991), became the foundational scripture of the Church of All Worlds (CAW), a Gaia-oriented Pagan religion founded in 1962 by two American college students, Tim Zell (b. 1942) and (Richard) Lance Christie (b. 1944) who met at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, and became fast friends.