Chances are, if you know the name Aimee Semple McPherson, it’s because you’ve heard the story of the scandal that ruined her reputation.
In 1926, she vanished from a beach in Los Angeles. After weeks of searching, her mother, believing her daughter was dead, scheduled a memorial service. But not long after the service, McPherson placed a call from a hospital in Douglas, Arizona, where she claimed she was recovering after a brutal kidnapping. In the weeks and months that followed, reporters looking into the case came to believe that McPherson had actually faked the kidnapping — possibly as a publicity stunt.
It’s a bizarre story under any circumstances, but it captured national attention at the time, because Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most famous religious figures in the country. She was the founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, one of the earliest and most influential Pentecostal movements. She built a massive temple that’s widely considered the first megachurch, and her ministry reached tens of thousands of followers every week thanks to her gospel radio show on KFSG, a station she herself founded.
Claire Hoffman is a journalist who’s been fascinated by McPherson ever since she learned her story in divinity school, and she’s the author of a new book called “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson."
Hoffman’s goal with the book was to tell the full story of Aimee Semple McPherson — to create a portrait that acknowledges her deceptions, but also her unique talents.
Hoffman joined The Show to discuss and listen to some archival audio from one of Aimee Semple McPherson’s sermons on KFSG.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: This, I believe, is from 1924. It's a sermon that starts off with, she says to her congregants, this is a story about a live wire, and then she starts telling this story about how somebody in her congregation came up to her on the street and gave her a gift, and the gift was an electric blanket, which I guess was a pretty big deal at the time.
And the story is about the first night she decided to spend sleeping with the electric blanket, and at some point in the middle of the night she wakes up because she has kicked the cord of the electric blanket out of the wall, and so that's where the clip picks up.
[CLIP PLAYS]
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: What she's doing there could feel kind of normal to today's audience, but I think this was kind of her signature, where she would take an everyday thing, a funny story, a weird event, and she would build it into her sermon and connect it to the gospel, and connect it to God.
So that that was really her power is to make kind of the normal everyday working class existence feel prophetic and urgent and meaningful. And, and I hear her doing that there with the electric wire, but you know I mean she famously rode a motorcycle onto her stage after she got a speeding ticket and did a a sermon on being arrested for speeding, but don't be arrested for speeding through life, you know, I mean, this was her thing. It was unusual back then. And now I think it's something, you know, you see everybody do if you just open your phone.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, we've been talking so far about how Aimee was such a master of media and a master of spectacle, which, you know, could be interpreted as a tendency towards manipulation, and I'm, I know that's not absent from this narrative, but one of the things I heard you say once about your interest in Aimee and figures like her, you said, quote, “I believe in belief.” Can you talk a little bit about what you understand about the nature of Amy's faith?
HOFFMAN: You know, I mean, I come to it as somebody who's studied religion academically, but I also am somebody who grew up in a faith community, so to speak, so I didn't grow up Christian, I grew up in the Transcendental Meditation movement and it was at the time in the 1980s in rural Iowa, kind of an isolated community with a really strong belief system and we really lived according to the values of our guru, and there were some pretty wild beliefs at that time. I mean, we believe that meditation that made you levitate would generate world peace. I mean, that was sort of the core of our existence there.
And that was, that was reality. Like, I lived that reality for years and years. And that experience has made me really respect the power of belief and the ability of belief to generate experiences. And so, yeah, with Aimee, you know, her story includes a lot about faith healing and speaking in tongues, and feeling the power of the Holy Spirit, and none of those are things that I've experienced, but I respect that other people have.
And there's endless accounts of people having really powerful experiences, and I don't feel like I have such a strong grip on reality that I would deny that existence, if that makes sense.
DINGMAN: That does make sense, that does make sense, and it seems to me that it would inform another thing I heard you say once that Aimee is someone who is deserving of both scrutiny and empathy.
HOFFMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think the scrutiny just seems so obvious to me. You know, like, and she, she just, in terms of my empathy for Aimee, I, I'm just so impressed in a lot of ways by what she and her mother were able to achieve. You know, her mother had her as a teenager. You know, I mean, they were working class poor people, and her mother just had this sense that her daughter was prophecy by God and chosen, and, you know, that she would carry out the Lord's work.
And that conviction and belief in her daughter meant that, you know, her daughter did incredible things, you know, I mean, before coming to Los Angeles, Aimee lived as a missionary in China. She traveled across the United States as an itinerant preacher.
After a time, those travels were with her mother, you know, who served sort of as a manager to her and a nanny, an accountant, maybe a bodyguard, just these two women, you know, I mean, when they first started this, you know, women didn't, hadn't won the right to vote yet, you know, a lot of states they couldn't hold property, but, you know, together they bought a lot of land in Los Angeles. They built this giant temple which was known as the Million Dollar Temple. They, they, they gained a national and international following and it's just, it's, it's breathtaking.
DINGMAM: How gendered was the perception of her? Did people think like, you know, I, I can't believe this woman is achieving all of this stuff, or did people just see her as a religious phenomenon, a spiritual guide?
HOFFMAN: I think that to her followers, she was somebody who they saw as having a direct connection to God, you know, that she was Sister Aimee. So she in some ways almost was like a god on earth. She was revered.
And to her critics, you know, a lot of them either thought she was annoying or dangerous, you know, I mean, there were ministers around Los Angeles who hated her because she basically was stealing all their congregants, like her, her church was the most popular. There were sort of the power brokers in Los Angeles who didn't like, you know, the way that she would talk about politics on the radio and sway the electorate. I think she was often dismissed by her critics as sort of something silly.
People would come to see her sort of almost out of like a freak show interest, you know, like, “oh, I, I wanna see what it looks like to see a woman preaching at the front of a church,” you know. But once they got there, they were often really drawn in. She was apparently just incredibly charismatic and powerful and had an ability to really Connect with people where they were, so she didn't shy away from that, that didn't bother her, people's, at least initially, their negative opinion of her, so she was fine to take those people who came in to see her as a joke, and, and she hoped to convert them.
DINGMAN: Is there anybody now who you see in the culture, who reminds you of Aimee and who maybe owes a bit of their legacy and influence to her.
HOFFMAN: Think about Elizabeth Holmes, you know, so again, somebody who used like their charisma and power kind of made themselves the brand and people really bought in. And then it wasn't quite true.
But then you feel like the pushback for women is just enormous. They become jokes in this way that, you know, it's like, can you name anybody from Enron who, you know, became like a scourge, you know? But somehow Elizabeth Holmes is like, you know, just the, the worst person in the world. And I'm not, I'm certainly not defending her. But I'm just saying I think the cost for women who make mistakes is very high. And that's sort of the argument with this book is like. You know, she did make a mistake, but was the cost, you know, like it it was too much, I would say.
