AHC: Make Manichaeism survive to present day

When studying Zoroastrianism a few years ago, I also learned something about Manichaeism. It was a mix of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism founded by the prophet Mani in the 3rd century, who claimed to b. Mani had some success in the Sassanid court, since Shapur I showed enough interest that Mani named one of his religious texts after him, the Shapuragan. Mani was killed by the Zoroastrian priest Kirdir, who also persecuted many other religions at the time.

Due to its Gnostic origins, Manichaeism considered the physical world to be evil. There was a division between "hearers", who were effectively laity, and the "elect", who abstained from sex and other fleshly temptations. The church had a highly organized structure with many different priestly ranks.

Manichaeism eventually spread throughout the Old World. St. Augustine was a Manichee "hearer" before he converted to Christianity, and later wrote polemics against Manichaeism. Most empires from Rome to China persecuted it, and the last Manichee probably died in western China in the 15th century. However, the Uighurs were once Manichees before converting to Islam.

How would you make this once-widespread religion survive in an alternate history? Why wasn't it as resilient as the major religions today?
 
and the last Manichee probably died in western China in the 15th century. However, the Uighurs were once Manichees before converting to Islam.

How would you make this once-widespread religion survive in an alternate history?
One of the Uighur Manichaeans succeeds in converting Genghis Khan?
 
The problem with Gnostic cults is that they don't fare well outside elit believers. The strength of mainstream religions is that they consider each of them as equals without ranking them inside (inner ranks that fit usually social hierarchy).

It did survived, as other similar cults, on Silk Roads (while survival up to XVth century is hard to really trust. Accusation of manicheism was maintained well after actual manicheism died out); but was still in the shadow of more dominant religions : Turkic peoples eventually converted to Islam because manicheism couldn't be really imposed and that it didn't was an imperial religion.

The only relativly safe way I could see manicheism being an actual maintained religion (meaning it have to be dominant at least somewhere) is to radically separate itself from, Buddhism, Christianism and Zoroastrism, meaning that it couldn't be considered as an heresy anymore (something that would only facilitate persecutions).

Going trough a process not dissimilar to Christianism differenciating itself from Judaism, and with a relativly safe territorial base (either in Central Asia or Arabia, far enough from dominant powers), it may survive.
 
I like the Genghis Khan idea! :)

LSCatilina's response makes a lot of sense to me. The sources I read suggested something similar, now that I think about it. I suppose it would need to differentiate itself, rather than the attempts to disguise it as Buddhism as in OTL.

As a side note, do English speakers in other countries call it "Christianism", as Catilina did in his post? I know it works like that in Spanish: "el cristianismo".
 
As a side note, do English speakers in other countries call it "Christianism", as Catilina did in his post? I know it works like that in Spanish: "el cristianismo".

It's more or less explain on the Armenian Genocide.

This word does not operate strictly within the etymology of the suffix "-ism" which means "doctrine, theory, system of principles" (the other meanings are not applicable to religions) whereas the suffix "-ity" means just "state, quality or condition".

In other Latin-based languages such as Castilian, Catalan, Galician, French, Occitan, Italian, etc., the suffix "-ity" (-idad, -té, -ità) means Christians as a group, their geographical distribution even their cultural identity, what in English is called Christendom.
 
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