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In the hands of the Ballards, Saint Germain’s teachings came across a lot like the prosperity gospel of New Thought, though couched in a mind-numbing dirge of cosmic language that could make its message seem foggy compared to the to-the-point writings of a Wallace D. Wattles or Ernest Holmes. For many readers, the over-the-top tone of the I AM “decrees”—Mighty Sacred Fire! Come forth and do your Perfect Work Now!—seemed to romanticize the appeal of old-fashioned New Thought. By the early 1930s, the Ballards embarked on an ambitious program of books, classes, and speaking appearances. In short order, they filled large auditoriums with pageants and services, often peopled with well-dressed and apparently well-to-do men and women.

Yet it soon became clear that the Ascended Masters of I AM and their messengers, Guy and Edna Ballard, had a different outlook from the beneficent brothers recounted by Blavatsky and Spalding. Following on from William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirt Legion, the Ballards combined their mysticism with a heavy dose of ultrapatriotism, vowing to eradicate “vicious forces” threatening America. And the organization went further still. Although I AM’s activities could be closely guarded, a religious scholar, David Stupple, undertook a field study of the I AM movement and found that it maintained racially segregated temples, even as late as 1975. Stupple discovered one Midwestern temple that actually relegated black congregants to an auxiliary hall to listen to live services via an audio hookup from the main white temple. He witnessed one I AM meeting descend into an argument over whether to include “Luther King and the Communist Conspiracy” on the organization’s list of “Black Magicians” whom the Ascended Masters would “blast and annihilate.”

Even though I AM was never anything like the hate machine of Pelley’s Silver Shirts, federal investigators began keeping an eye on it in the years leading up to World War II. The government was deeply suspicious of any sects with far-right ideology, fearful that such organizations might act as fifth-column sympathizers if Axis forces invaded the West Coast, where many of the nation’s mystical movements were grounded. The turn of the decade ended on a dismal note for I AM: Guy died in late December 1939, and the organization, caught in the same right-wing mop-up that imprisoned Pelley, faced federal charges of mail fraud in mid-1940. Time magazine responded almost gleefully with an August 5, 1940, headline, I AM in a Jam, reporting that the Ballards had pocketed more than $3 million from “deluded followers.”

From the start, the trial was tangled up in First Amendment issues, specifically when the judge instructed jurors to consider whether the Ballards held their religious beliefs sincerely. A flurry of appeals followed and in 1944 the case landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions but remanded the case to a lower court for retrial. In a historic dissent, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson argued that the high court should have dismissed the case outright and “have done with this business of judicially examining other people’s faiths.” Any attempt to explore the Ballards’ theology or how sincerely they held it, Jackson wrote, “is precisely the thing the Constitution put beyond the reach of the prosecutor, for the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

It was a decisive stroke for religious freedom, though not an all-out victory for I AM. The Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco once more convicted the Ballards, and in 1946 the Supreme Court heard the case for the last time—ultimately throwing out the indictments upon determining that women had been excluded from the grand jury selection. As the legal fires subsided, I AM quietly resumed its activity as a smaller, more suspicious organization, with a lower profile and an arm’s-length attitude toward