Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare

Join Joseph Laycock and Jennifer Graber, two award-winning scholars of American Religion, open a discussion of Joshua Paddison’s latest book, Unholy Sensations.

The project takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term “cult” has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation. 

Joshua Paddison’s research focuses on race, ethnicity, and religion in nineteenth-century America, especially in the North American West. His book American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California was published by the University of California Press in 2012. The book examines contestations over the place of Native Americans and Chinese Americans from the Civil War to the 1890s, demonstrating the centrality of religion in racial formation and the importance of the West in the story of Reconstruction. Joshua Paddison’s  second book, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare, explores an international 1890s sex scandal that surrounded the Brotherhood of the New Life, a multi-racial spiritualist community in northern California that became the prototype for the "cult" in the popular imagination.  Joshua Paddison has published widely, and his writings can be found in top tier journals in fields linked to the American West, urban studies, religious history, the Civil War, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

Jennifer Graber is Professor of Religious Studies and Faculty Affiliate of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on Native American religions, religion and violence, and inter-religious encounters in American prisons and on the American frontier. She is the author of The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Dr. Graber holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University (2006).

Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He holds a MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University. He has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history. He is also a co-editor for the journal Nova Religio. He currently serves on the Programming Committee for the American Academy of Religion. 

Joseph Laycock helped to create the new major in religious studies at Texas State and currently serves as program coordinator. Laycock has advocated for pedagogy that promotes religious literacy, critical thinking, writing, and research skills that students can apply in many different career paths.