Aimee Semple McPherson, the Vanishing Evangelist: Faith, Fame, and Her Alleged Kidnapping

Before the Hillsong scandal, before the prayer apps fronted by A-listers, there was Aimee Semple McPherson. The evangelist was a one-of-one figure for her time—a harbinger of what was to come in today’s influencer-saturated world, where celebrity idolatry is a cornerstone of certain faiths. In this excerpt from Sister, Sinner, a potent trinity—of Hollywood, power, and spirituality—gives rise to the resurrection of McPherson.

Just after lunch on a warm afternoon in May 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson escaped her church for the beach. After just seven years in Los Angeles, Aimee had become the most recognizable woman in a city that was already specializing in fame. Behind her, was the church she had built with her mother, Minnie. The Angelus Temple rose from the sidewalk like the Roman Colosseum—circular, pillared, and vast. Known by locals as “the Million Dollar Temple,” it was one of the largest churches built in the history of the world, constructed with the same lavish splendor as the new movie palaces being erected around the city.

Seating almost six thousand people, the groundbreaking mega-church hosted what the papers called the greatest show in town. Camels, lions, and even a motorcycle had made their way across the planks of her stage. As young children, both Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe were visitors with their families. And Hollywood stars of the era, such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, would attend for the spectacle of it all.

Aimee had built the church through force of will and a supernatural sense of destiny, raising the funds during years of itinerant tent revivals around the nation, each dollar given to her in what she called “love offerings.” The building stood as a monument to her: the pioneer of a new global religion. Aimee was a Pentecostal–a once-fringe religious movement that had begun in downtown Los Angeles and emphasized a direct connection to Jesus, speaking in tongues and faith healing. A populist, Aimee preached against the teaching of evolution and frequently appeared with William Jennings Bryan, who had risen to fame during the Scopes Monkey trial in Tennessee that had divided the nation, pitting believers in creationism against Darwin’s emerging science of evolution. She had an incredible sense of how to use her own image to connect to the public–she was on the cutting edge of the latest technology as she looked for every means to promote her gospel. Aimee’s influence can be seen today in many of our iconic public figures—both the infamous and the faithful, from Billy Graham and Oprah to Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian—larger-than-life personalities who have crafted spectacular personal narratives to influence and lecture us from their self-erected pulpits. Aimee was doing all of this a century ago—to create and sell the most riveting story: her own.

The day was pleasant, calm, sunny, sixty-eight degrees. As the sun blazed down, Aimee focused on her Bible, working on her sermon for the next Sunday. She scrawled down the title, “Light and Darkness,” in her notebook and sat with the words. “It had been that way since the beginning,” she wrote. “The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.” Wasn’t the world made of opposites and contradictions? Wasn’t she?

Aimee set down her notes on the towel and made her way back to the water. She left behind her Bible and a purse containing $200 in neatly rolled bills (more than $3,500 today). She began to swim again, this time away from the shore, toward the horizon. Emma made the call, fetched the juice and box of candy that Aimee had requested, and returned to the baking sand to wait.

As the sun lowered, Emma paced the shoreline. She still couldn’t spot Aimee. Anxiously, she asked two boys coming out of the water if they’d seen the evangelist, describing the bright green of her suit, the brown shade of her bathing cap. She found a lifeguard and told him that the most important woman in the world was missing. The guard responded, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference to us, the name of a person; one life is just as precious to us as another.” Still, he quickly gathered a group of lifeguards, and they made their way into the ocean. Someone set out in a small rowboat. Emma began to cry. She begged the hotel manager to help her. The waves pounded the shore. All the swimmers had left the ocean.

At 4:20 p.m., the manager called the police.

By dawn the next day, five thousand people crowded the sands of Venice Beach. Two airplanes flew overhead, scanning the coast. A dozen rowboats bobbed in the waves, with divers probing the depths. Farther out, motorboats used grappling hooks to rake the deeper reaches of the ocean. Police boats cast seine nets through the waves. There was speculation that Aimee’s body could have been pushed by the currents under Lick Pier, where a roller coaster had fallen into the ocean two years before, creating a gnarled metal trap for swimmers. A squadron of police and U.S. Coast Guard members scoured the ocean from Venice to Topanga Canyon.

Riot police were called to stand guard in front of the Ocean View Hotel. The devoted formed prayer circles, sang hymns, and passed around binoculars.

Read the Book HereOrder on Amazon Order on Bookshop

The chaos intensified; a twenty-six-year-old diver died of hypothermia after his equipment failed him in the cold ocean depths. A woman, a disciple, floundered into the ocean, saying she wanted to meet the evangelist in death. She quickly did. The crowds grew during the week, and by the weekend, according to some newspaper counts, twenty thousand people had amassed on the shoreline, praying for a miracle.

Thirty-six days later, a woman in a sparkling white dress stumbled out of the desert and begged for a telephone. Rushed across the border to an American hospital, the woman declared herself Aimee Semple McPherson. To the doctor, nurses, and police who gathered around her, Aimee recounted her bizarre and frightening story of being kidnapped from the crowded beach in Venice over a month earlier. She said she had been abducted, to be sold as a slave in Mexico. She gave a harrowing account of events that sounded straight out of the black-and-white Hollywood movies she had disavowed for years. She described how she had reappeared six hundred miles away from Venice, escaping through the window of the shack she’d been held in and trekking through a desert whose daytime temperature hovered above a hundred degrees.

In the coming days and months—and for the remaining years of her life—she would tell the exact same miraculous and terrifying story. Aimee begged the people standing around her to call Los Angeles immediately. They didn’t seem to realize the gravity of the situation, she said. The threat wasn’t over—she’d overheard her captors outline plans to kidnap other famous people, celebrities just like her. They had named Mary Pickford. Aimee was also afraid that her teenage daughter, Roberta, might be in danger.

The telephone lines between Angelus Temple and the Calumet Hospital in Arizona were connected at 7:30 a.m.

In a hushed voice, Minnie asked questions and then listened to verify that the woman on the other end was her daughter. Family history and the name of a long-dead pet pigeon were asked for and provided. When Minnie hung up the phone, her disbelief had melted away. She began to weep. “Praise God, It’s Aimee!” she called out to those standing in the room. Quickly, word spread beyond the temple: Sister was alive!

As Aimee sat propped up in her hospital bed, eating a poached egg, oatmeal, and an orange, the press war of the decade commenced. The editor of the Douglas Daily Dispatch arrived at the hospital and verified officially that it was indeed the lady evangelist—he had seen her preach in Denver a few years before. Over the wire service, he filed the biggest scoop of his career: Aimee Semple McPherson had returned to life.

Aimee’s disappearance had made national news, but her resurrection made global headlines. In the coming days, the press hordes would spend an estimated five thousand dollars calling their editors in newsrooms around the country, issuing updates, large and small, about the miraculous resurrection of the lady evangelist. Western Union set up eight extra telegraph operators to work around the clock as reporters churned out ninety-five thousand words with the Douglas dateline. After she finished breakfast, Aimee asked the nurse for a curling iron. Soon reporters and cameramen started to pour into the hospital. “Let the reporters in!” Aimee exclaimed. “I just can’t refuse to tell them my story. They will tell it to hundreds of thousands.”

The first photos of Aimee that morning show her smiling wanly, in a cotton nightgown with lace around the shoulders. She is wearing no jewelry, except a thin watch around her wrist—a gift from her mother. Her thick hair falls in gentle waves around her face, the morning light washing over her. There is something so intimate in these photos—the way Aimee gazes into the camera, relaxed and open. As the reporters gathered around her bed, Aimee said she would gladly tell her story. All she asked was that she not be interrupted.

Excerpted from Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson by Claire Hoffman. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 22, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Claire Hoffman. All rights reserved.