Peace, Love and Messiah-making
Colin Dickey's history of cult culture in California
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“Peace, Love and Messiah-making,” Colin Dickey. Stranger’s Guide: California.
Some 15 miles inland from Oakland—nestled in tawny foothills above unremarkable suburban sprawl—is a compound that’s home to a sex cult whose members live in purple buildings and get around in purple cars. In town, cult members are thus known as the “Purple People”; the group prefers its official designation, Lafayette Morehouse, whose inspiration comes from the nearby affluent suburb named after the Revolutionary War hero. Lafayette Morehouse describes itself as an “intentional community” focused on a “successful experiment in pleasurable group living for over 50 years,” and the place still offers sex-positivity seminars and welcomes new recruits to join its lifestyle. Best known for a 1976 demonstration in which a female member supposedly underwent a continuous, three-hour orgasm, Lafayette Morehouse has also been dogged for decades by charges of financial impropriety and coercion. After going undercover as a potential recruit, Rolling Stone reporter Robin Green revealed in 1971 that founder Victor Baranco’s grift involved mainly buying distressed properties and enticing wayward youth from Haight-Ashbury to renovate them so he could sell the places at a profit—while charging members hefty fees for sex-positivity seminars. It’s an age-old California story: lost souls, sex cults and house flipping.
It seems implausible that a monochromatic sex cult could be found a short walk from Banana Republic and Peet’s Coffee and other standard suburban establishments in downtown Walnut Creek, but then, in the past century, California’s geography has become suffused with cults. Such groups are not unique to California, of course, and yet, as sociologist Henry Dohrman suggested in his 1958 study of Mankind United, “something in its balmy Western clime seems to encourage this deviant species of religious expression to sprout forth.” These range from Mount Shasta, where ex-UFO cult priestess Sister Thedra (née Dorothy Martin) founded the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, to Death Valley, where Carlos Castañeda’s harem of “witches” disappeared after his death in 1998. Cults spring up not just in the Golden State’s wildernesses, but also its cities and suburbs: from the garishly colored citadels of Scientology that dot Los Angeles to innocuous-looking McMansions like the one in Rancho Santa Fe, outside San Diego, where on March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate.
Cults came to California not long after the state was founded in 1850. There was Emily “Mother” Preston, who in 1876 built a commune on the Russian River around her putative curing powers and divine revelations. At its height, the Northern California community had 200 souls, a school, a post office, a general store and a train station. For decades, adherents learned the “Religion of Inspiration” and helped Mother Preston build her mail-order snake oil empire, selling everything from “fasting paste” to “vagina balls” to an iodine-based liniment that caused painful, lasting scars and caused at least one adherent to go blind.
But the Preston commune was ahead of its time. Through most of the nineteenth century, religious enthusiasm and bizarre rituals were centered primarily in the East and Midwest. Upstate New York was so famous for its religious revivalism that it became known as the Burned-Over District. Only in the early twentieth century did the West start to see cults in great numbers: Guy Ballard’s “I AM” movement descended on Mount Shasta in the 1930s, around the same time as Arthur Bell’s Mankind United movement promised disaffected Californians a sense of purpose and belonging through collectivist communes and conspiracy theories. By the 1970s, California had become synonymous with cults, the decade bookended by the LaBianca-Tate murders in Hollywood and the mass murder and suicide at Jonestown, an offshoot of San Francisco’s People’s Temple. At the end of the decade, a third of the nation’s cults were based in the Golden State.
Some were homegrown, but many of the state’s most infamous cults were founded elsewhere: the People’s Temple began in Indiana, then moved to California in 1965, seeking to take advantage, like so many cults, of all that California had to offer, from its open spaces and open-mindedness to its sunshine and sense of possibility (and, frankly, to escape the 46 racist climate of Indiana). These gurus and messiahs came for souls. Charles Franklin McHugh, who wandered in the Arizona desert for 40 days before he had a revelation and changed his name to “Lightning Amen,” set up a shop in Hemet, California and proclaimed himself the Messiah returned to Earth. Members of the “Christ Family,” as Amen called his tribe, all legally changed their surnames to “Christ.” Abstemious pot smokers who foreswore all animal products worshipped him as the Messiah returned to Earth. The Christ Family lumbered on in the background until the mid-1980s, when their Messiah was convicted for the possession and sale of meth, and multiple cult members were convicted for growing close to a million dollars worth of pot on the Hemet compound.
Lightning Amen’s organization took the form of an extreme version of Christianity, but in California, religious cults often explicitly rejected American Christianity, adopting increasingly esoteric mystical traditions, along with Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish influences. As one former follower of the Radha Soami in Los Angeles later described it, “To express our distrust, we needed a vocabulary that came from outside the world we doubted.”
The Messiahs who didn’t come for souls came for bodies. Charles Manson wasn’t the only one who gathered up young, suggestible women and manipulated them for sex. Originally called Teens for Christ, David Berg’s the Family International started as a seemingly garden variety hippie religious movement, with long-haired members playing acoustic guitars and preaching a simple existence. Berg birthed his movement out of a coffee shop in Huntington Beach, recruiting disillusioned young people to join his slowly growing movement. Gathering up souls through nationwide caravans, the movement established communes in California and began to flourish—even as Berg’s vision devolved to include a twisted kind of religious sex trafficking. Berg preached “sexual sharing” among his followers, advocated sex among people as young as 12 and was repeatedly accused of child molestation and incest.
The Family International was most notorious for a practice called “flirty fishing,” in which Berg urged women members to seduce men in order to convert them. One comic from the time shows a naked woman seducing a man while proclaiming “I am God’s love!” Beneath the image, a caption reads, “Sometimes we use sex as a tool or proof that we love them, but it’s not the main kind of love we’re trying to give them.” As Berg’s daughter Deborah would later state, “It was religious prostitution. I had to quit looking at the man as my father but as the leader of a worldwide movement that was destroying lives.” By 1983, the Family claimed over 10,000 members and included in its ranks future actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan, but as more converts left the fold, the organization was dogged by revelations of sexual abuse and coercion. After Berg’s death in 1994, it tried to continue on as a legitimate religious community, yet it could never escape his shadow.
People also came to California for money. In 1978, Oakland’s Clifton Jones took the name Hakeem Abdul Rasheed and welcomed converts to his Church of Hakeem, which promised wealth and happiness through the power of positive thinking. New members who paid into the church were promised a 400 percent return on their dues within three years, so long as they continued to harvest more souls for the cause. (Within a year, Jones had been convicted of fraud for running a pyramid scheme.) Jones’s revenue, of course, pales in comparison to the multibillion-dollar empire that is Scientology, whose assets include hundreds of properties on multiple continents. According to the late science fiction author Harlan Ellison, the business got its start at the Hydra Club of writers in New York City, when L. Ron Hubbard complained of being paid only a penny a word for his stories, and another writer, Lester Del Rey, told him, “What you really ought to do is create a religion because then it will be tax free.” There’s always good money to be made in salvation.
They keep coming, these gurus and hucksters, these messiahs and conmen, because of some notion of a California dream, for it has always been a land of seekers. Throughout most of its history, California has been composed of new arrivals; from the Gold Rush until the 2010 census, native-born Californians were outnumbered by those born elsewhere. It’s a state filled with people who left behind families, dying towns and dead-end jobs, chasing the promises of the latest boom: gold, real estate, Hollywood, Silicon Valley. It is precisely this kind of person cult leaders prey on: those who are unmoored from strong social and familial ties in a new, confusing environment; those who sought wealth and purpose in a new industry and found instead only disillusionment and rejection. Cults love a lonely person, someone new to a confusing, fast-paced urban environment that leaves them alienated and vulnerable.
It’s no coincidence that so many of these cults have names like Mankind United, Brotherhood of the New Life, the Fellowship of Friends, the Family International, the Source Family and, of course, the Manson Family. These are groups that promise kinship to the kinless, community to the disconnected, purpose for those adrift. Alongside vegan diets, free love and Buddhist chants, they promise new revelations and new fellowships—asking in exchange only money, sex and independence.
And so California’s story is one of wave after wave of strip mining the state for exploitable resources: from gold to water to real estate—it’s all about the next boom crop. If cults have become synonymous with California, it’s because bodies and souls are just another commodity to be exploited. In California, you can always get rich promising some new Eden, even if you end up delivering some new nightmare.