New Book Explores the Bay Area’s First Cult, Which Called Santa Rosa Home
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The first creepy cult to take root in California, about 25 years after statehood, had its origins in upstate New York in the 19th Century, which was a hotbed of religious zealotry and cults.
It was called the Brotherhood of the New Life, and it was led by Thomas Lake Harris, a Christian mystic and charismatic preacher who moved from New York to Sonoma County in part because of his interest in winemaking.
Harris established his utopian community in 1875 on 400 acres in the area of Fountaingrove, north of the town of Santa Rosa. As the Press Democrat recounts, Harris claimed to be a longtim celibate, but he was also clearly preoccupied by sex. His followers stayed in gender-separated dormitories on the Fountaingrove property, and there would come to be allegations of husbands and wives forced to have sex with other people, and coerced intergenerational sex.
Harris also claimed that God was bisexual — which could certainly be read as a projection and indicator about Harris’s own sexual desires — and that every living person had a celestial counterpart on Earth who was the only person they should have sexual relations with. Reportedly, Harris was the one who declared who should be matched with whom.
The story of the Brotherhood of the New Life is recounted in a new book, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal and California’s First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Paddison tells of the Brotherhood’s beginnings on the shore of Lake Erie, in a town called Brocton, NY, where Harris first established the group at a place he called Mountain Cove — a phonetic echo of Fountain Grove. It appears Paddison was run out of town, so to speak following a scandal involving a British writer and member of Parliament, as KQED explains, named Laurence Oliphant. Oliphant caused a scandal by leaving England to join the cult, but he later became disenchanted with harris, after moving his wife and mother to Brocton around 1873, and accused Harris of swindling them out of money — specifically his mother’s jewels, filing a lawsuit to get the money back.
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