EvelynSterne: The House of David: Salvation, Scandal, and Survival in a Modern American Commune. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025; pp. 288.

In taking on a full scholarly study of the Israelite House of David, Evelyn Sterne set herself a monumental task. Established in 1902 in Fostoria, Ohio, and officially founded in Benton Harbor, Michigan in 1903 by Mary and Benjamin Purnell, the faith has received little of the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. In the public mind, the House of David is typically associated with two things: entertainment and scandal. In its early-mid twentieth-century heyday, its popular entertainment ventures included an amusement park, miniature trains, musical acts and barnstorming baseball teams. Celibate, millennialist, communally oriented and striking in their personal appearance with their long-haired bearded men and stylish, accomplished women, the colony found a place for itself in a small, conservative rural region partly by cultivating itself as an attraction. Sharply business-minded and hard-working, the colony generated considerable wealth through other ventures such as agriculture and logging. Through these efforts, the Purnells and their faithful brought both glamour and economic prosperity to the region. The fact that everyone who joined the colony was required to surrender all personal wealth and belongings elicited dissatisfaction among some of the membership. This tension, along with allegations of sexual misconduct directed at Benjamin Purnell and a political rift between Mary Purnell and the member who took over colony leadership after Benjamin's death, along with salacious international newspaper coverage, led to diminished numbers. Now split into two sects, both colonies quietly continued their industries and affairs through the 1960s until another wave of even more sensationalist media attention in the form of a new popular obsession with “sex cults” revivified the scandal. The park ceased operations in the early 1970s, and the now elderly membership withdrew entirely from the public. The perennial scandal, as well as the habit of the American media to fixate upon the lurid and dismiss minority religions as cults, with all the baggage the term entails, lived on, far superseding the reality. Until recently, religious scholars showed minimal interest in smaller, non-mainstream sects, regarding them if at all as short-lived enthusiasms led by charismatic charlatans. When Robert Fogarty published The Righteous Remnant, the first sustained academic study of the House of David in 1981, he did so as part of a nascent scholarly movement that regarded previously neglected or disregarded religious communities as historical precursors to the counterculture intentional communities and non-mainstream spiritual movements that were popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, legitimizing both as subjects for scholarly study. They drew similarities between the twentieth-century movements and historical American Christian communal societies such as the Shakers, the Oneida community, the Amana colony and others that proliferated during the Second Great Awakening. While Fogarty's framing the House of David within this larger context accomplished perhaps the first sympathetic and first serious scholarly treatment of the House of David, he unfortunately failed to seek the perspective of the colonists themselves, instead relying on heavily biased newspaper accounts and court records of a series of trials that, as successive historians have convincingly demonstrated, were less than objective. Nor did he account for the important differences between the nineteenth-century communal societies and one that took much of its mood from the American Jazz Age. Other treatments have since emerged that offer a more complex picture. Local historian Clare Adkin's Brother Benjamin (1990) and Julieanna Frost's study of Mary Purnell in The Worthy Virgins (2014) benefit from close work with colony members themselves. Henry Yaple's Descriptive Bibliography (2014) painstakingly catalogues and codifies several decades' worth of colony publications, revealing the complexity and depth of the Israelite religion, as well as historical shifts within the community itself. Religious historian Deborah Madden's insightful study (2017) places the House of David with an eighteenth-century millennial movement founded by the British prophet Joanna Southcott emphasizing the international scope and historical adaptability of the movement. Others, most recently PJ Dragseth, have investigated the legendary baseball teams (2021). Within the past several years, both the House of David and its offshoot, Mary's City of David, have begun the valuable work of preserving their own history, establishing archives for a rich trove of photographic and print material, and initiating member-driven outreach efforts to the local community and to interested scholars. Evelyn Sterne's The House of David, the most thorough and comprehensive scholarly investigation to date of this fascinating community, both builds carefully on the earlier scholarship and incorporates new archival material that the respective colonies have only recently made available to scholars. Sterne's careful inclusion of multiple perspectives, including the shifts in her own as her engagement deepens and more information becomes available, attests to the thoroughness and care of her approach. It is clear that her original intention was to update Robert Fogarty's work, “as significant new archival sources have emerged since its publication” (p. 4). Like Fogarty, she provides a concise history of the movement, establishing its origins in the political turmoil of seventeenth-century England, Jane Lead's Philadelphian Society, and later the eighteenth-century Christian Israelite movement led by Richard Brothers, and continued by a succession of prophets, or “messengers,” of which Mary and Benjamin Purnell represented the seventh and last. She notes all the ways the faith, which lacked an ordained clergy, typical rituals and sacraments, and did not observe the Sabbath, “did not fit a Protestant or Catholic model of what a religion should look like” (p. 11), and outlines the ways that some of the House of David's distinctive attributes: celibacy, vegetarianism, millennialism and sharing of property, had both a strong scriptural basis and fit well within “broader currents in American social and religious history” (p. 35). Building on Fogarty, she carefully distinguishes The House of David, an early twentieth-century movement that embraced technology, deployed secular business ventures and entertainments to advance its religious intentions, from the nineteenth-century agrarian communal societies to which scholars most frequently compare it. She points out that Eden Springs, the colony's famous amusement park, fit within larger early twentieth-century economic and demographic trends, and “tapped into a nationwide surge of interest in amusement parks” such as Coney Island, as well as calmer public spaces such as New York's Central Park (p. 69). Unlike Fogarty, she carefully places the salacious publicity that dogged the colony through the 1920s within the context of American popular culture of the time—particularly the media-driven appetite in the 1920s for sensationalistic and high-profile trials, including those of John Scopes and Sacco and Vanzetti (p. 169), and pulpy tales of sexual misbehaviour. Faithful as it is to the foundation laid by Fogarty, and careful as it is to incorporate more recent perspectives and offer a fuller, more nuanced picture that fully accounts for the complexity and intelligence of a fascinating community and its real significance for American religious scholarship, the book evinces some editorial issues. Rather than deploying more recent scholarship and newly unearthed archival materials to reframe or critique the very real problems of methodology and scope Fogarty's earlier work presents, she chooses instead to layer new information judiciously but uncritically on top of the old. While the decision by no means diminishes the importance of either her work or her predecessors, it makes for an uneven reading experience. Moreover, particularly in the early chapters, important information is too often supported with unsourced citations rendered in the passive voice. Sentences such as: “despite charges that the Purnells were greedy capitalists benefitting from unfair tax breaks, most observers viewed the House of David as a classic experiment in Christian communalism” (p. 64), that don't identify who is levelling the charges, who the observers are, and whether these criticisms come from the same source, could have benefited from a stronger editorial hand. When she takes up this material again in the second half of the book, however, she does so with precision and depth, carefully and rightfully describing the House of David as “an outsider faith that did not fit most Americans” definition of religion (p. 122), but reflected both in its successes and its struggles, demographic shifts, popular fixations and cultural anxieties that informed early twentieth-century America. Importantly, Sterne gives over her concluding chapter to the members themselves, offering them both voice and representation that is long overdue. Minor editorial issues aside, The House of David is an invaluable contribution to American religious studies. Her work, along with the continuing historical and archival work of the colonies themselves, crucially lays out a path for promising new scholarship on a fascinating topic.