The word cult conjures a specific image—a charismatic leader with Rasputin-like eyes that has a hypnotic hold over his helpless followers. It is precisely this archetype that Joshua Paddison examines in Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California’s First Cult Scare. Paddison argues that the modern idea of the mesmerizing cult leader was created in the 1890s, in the midst of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, through a scandal between spiritual leader Thomas Lake Harris and his accuser, Alzire Chevaillier. The sensationalized story of Harris’s hypnotic power over his devoted flock of primarily wealthy white women ran in newspapers from San Francisco to London throughout 1891 and 1892.
Unholy Sensations centers on two complex figures whose collision sparked a media firestorm. Harris, who began his spiritual journey as a teenager in Utica, New York, during the Second Great Awakening, represents the era’s religious experimentation and the lasting importance of the Burned-Over District on alternative religion. In 1875, Harris’s Brotherhood of New Life spiritual commune moved from the shores of Lake Erie to California. Paddison portrays Harris as a charismatic and unconventional spiritual teacher who borrowed elements from Calvinism, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, and other faiths and philosophies, often making enemies of leaders within these traditions “when he claimed to have brought their ideas to perfection” (6).
Chevaillier emerges as an equally complex character: a suffragist, asylum reform advocate, and magazine editor who embodied the Social Gospel’s reform-minded, middle-class white woman. Her spiritual journey traversed the Episcopal Church to Christian Science, to her own version of metaphysical “mind cures” (33). She was drawn to Harris’s teachings and traveled to California to study under his guidance. Her summer with the Brotherhood, however, left her unconvinced of Harris’s spiritual authority.
The turning point came when an aggrieved Swedenborgian, seeking to discredit Harris and his teachings, provided Chevaillier with documents that allegedly exposed Harris’s dark secrets. Chevaillier, never one to remain silent against injustice, launched a public crusade against Harris. She alleged that the Brotherhood engaged in communal baths (they did) and emphasized the presence of Asian men in these experiences, and she accused Harris of hypnotizing young white women into sexual relationships and forced abortions, even though he demanded celibacy for himself and his followers. Notably, Chevaillier admitted she never personally witnessed any impropriety; she merely reported what the documents allegedly revealed.
Paddison excels at weighing the disturbing claims against Harris, and the imbalance of power that Harris created within the Brotherhood, while also chronicling how this scandal spread through a press that was increasingly relying on sensational stories to sell papers. Newsrooms eagerly amplified the tale of the mesmerizing leader and his purported harem of women. The coverage leaned into Orientalist tropes, depicting Harris as a fakir whose mysterious Eastern influences corrupted innocent white women. The presence of Japanese followers in Harris’s community became, in the press’s hands, evidence of exotic depravity rather than international fellowship. Paddison situates this scandal within the broader context of the so-called white slavery panic: the widespread fear that young white women were being seduced, drugged, or hypnotized into prostitution. These anxieties about female vulnerability found a perfect target in Harris’s unconventional community. The combination of alternative religious practice, communal living, racial mixing, and allegations of sexual manipulation embodied everything that white Americans feared about the rapid social changes sweeping the country.
Paddison’s argument that the Harris scandal represents the prototype for modern cult scares and fundamentally reshaped the meaning of the word cult itself is a significant contribution. Before this episode, the term primarily referred to systems of religious worship or veneration. The Harris scandal, with its lurid combination of hypnotic control, racial anxiety, and vulnerable women, transformed cult into a term denoting dangerous religious manipulation, a meaning that persists today. Every subsequent panic from Jonestown to NXIVM follows patterns established in this forgotten California scandal.
One of the most intriguing elements of the book involves Harris’s eventual heir, Kanaye Nagasawa, and the other Japanese men who joined Harris’s movement. Born in 1852 in Japan, Nagasawa grew up in a wealthy samurai family. When he was thirteen years old, the shogunate government selected him to be part of a secret mission to Great Britain to learn about Western military strategy, politics, and technology. After the fall of the shogunate, Nagasawa and the other young men found themselves out of money and brought into Harris’s orbit through British Member of Parliament Laurence Oliphant, first going to New York and then moving with the Brotherhood to California. Nagasawa remained with Harris for the rest of his life, running the Fountaingrove winery and becoming like an adopted son to Harris. Nagasawa eventually inherited the Fountaingrove estate, a valuable property by the twentieth century. However, racist state laws preventing Japanese people from owning land—and chicanery by a trusted white lawyer—swindled Nagasawa’s heirs out of their legal inheritance after his death.
Nagasawa is one of the book’s most interesting figures, which makes his absence from the middle of the narrative more noticeable. Once he joins the Brotherhood, he largely vanishes until the final pages. Given the era’s intense yellow peril hysteria, more exploration of how his experience intersected with white Brotherhood followers would have strengthened the book. The presence of Japanese men in the community clearly fueled the scandal’s racialized dimensions, yet we get little sense of his own experience or perspective on the controversy.
Unholy Sensations is a quick, engaging read that demonstrates how social anxieties, the rise of sensational journalism, and immigration/migration to California came together in this single episode. It would be a great book for a graduate seminar as it analyzes the crossroads of many late-nineteenth-century phenomena. Paddison’s accessible narrative defines the origins of contemporary anxieties about cults, while demonstrating how nineteenth-century fears about race, gender, sexuality, and religion shape our current boundaries of acceptable spirituality.
