Los Angeles has been receiving and generating religious movements for a century, and the reasons usually given, a population of newcomers with no inherited congregation and an industry built on publicity, are probably right.
Paramahansa Yogananda arrived from Bengal and founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in the city in 1920, teaching kriya yoga to American audiences and leaving a lakeside shrine and an autobiography that has never gone out of print. Aimee Semple McPherson opened the Angelus Temple in 1923, preached illustrated sermons to five thousand at a time, ran one of the first religious radio stations in the country, founded the Foursquare Church, and disappeared for five weeks in 1926 in an episode never satisfactorily explained. The Church of Scientology established its principal presence in the city in the 1950s and has been closely associated with the entertainment industry since.
Later arrivals reflect immigration rather than invention. The Hsi Lai Temple in the eastern suburbs, opened in 1988 by a Taiwanese order, is among the largest Buddhist complexes in the western hemisphere. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, consecrated in 2002, serves an archdiocese of several million, overwhelmingly Latino, which is the largest in the United States and which in 2007 settled the biggest clergy abuse claim in the country to that date.