California has a long-running reputation for harboring alternative religious communities. In Golden States, Eileen Luhr applies some analytical rigor to explain a phenomenon often chalked up to lazy cultural clichés. She focuses on five case studies: Katherine Tingley’s Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society in San Diego; Paramahansa Yogananda’s Los Angeles–based Self-Realization Fellowship; Dr. Bronner’s Soap Company, also based in Los Angeles; the Seventh Day Adventist community of Loma Linda in the Inland Empire; and the beach town of Encinitas, north of San Diego. Each subject appealed to the upwardly mobile White migrants who settled into suburban communities in droves during the twentieth century. Collectively, Luhr argues, they reflected and extended a broader set of cultural forces that reshaped California and the wider world.
Luhr situates her subjects at the confluence of several historical trends. These include, first, the spread of spiritual practices that eschewed traditional ritual and doctrine for...
University of California Press