SISTER, SINNER: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman
Laced with romance, tragedy, courtroom drama and an alleged kidnapping, the story of the famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson gripped the nation a century ago.
In “Sister, Sinner,” an engrossing new biography of McPherson, the journalist Claire Hoffman traces the spectacular life and career of a preacher who started a Christian movement that has spread across the globe and arguably shapes United States politics today.
Drawing crowds by the thousands in Los Angeles, McPherson was considered one of the 20th century’s first celebrities, opening the nation’s largest church in 1923. Three years later, wearing an emerald-green bathing suit, she swam away from the Pacific Ocean shore and disappeared.
While McPherson went missing, the media printed theories about kidnapping or even an affair. Her followers kept a vigil.
In June 1926, about a month after her disappearance, she walked out of the Mexican desert and announced that she had been captured, tortured and threatened with sexual slavery. Later she was put on trial, accused of faking the kidnapping.
To this day, McPherson’s story fascinates scholars, journalists, film and TV makers and theater producers. (“Scandalous,” a 2012 Broadway musical about McPherson’s life, was coproduced by Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education in President Trump’s first term.) Responding to reader obsession during McPherson’s heyday, The New York Times published almost 75 articles about her during the year of her disappearance.
With academic degrees in both religion and journalism, Hoffman notes her “lifelong fascination with the relationship between heaven and earth, and the intermediaries we choose to interpret those realms for us.” Her first book, a memoir, explored her upbringing in the Transcendental Meditation Movement. “Given my childhood, I was fascinated by the way spiritual experiences translated into power,” she writes.
McPherson’s glamorous life began modestly, on a Canadian farm, but she found her calling in Los Angeles, the place of personal reinvention. Pentecostalism, which was just getting off the ground as a movement within evangelical Christianity, has historically been known for such charismatic practices as speaking in tongues. McPherson successfully repackaged Pentecostalism for a mostly mainstream, white audience.
Unlike other preachers of her day who emphasized that the world was on the brink of doom, McPherson emphasized a loving personal relationship with God, not one of judgment but one of closeness and grace.
“She was the Goldilocks alternative — not too hot, not too cold,” Hoffman writes. “The just-right message on Jesus.”
McPherson blended Hollywood flair with old-time religion to bring biblical dramas to life, using live animals, special lighting and even a motorcycle. There’s no shortage of eye-opening details on display here: After preaching to her flock, Hoffman writes, McPherson would cool down with an ice cream sundae while sitting with her pet spider monkey.
Through donations, McPherson built Angelus Temple, which Hoffman calls America’s first megachurch. It still serves as the headquarters of the eight-million member denomination now known as Foursquare Church.
Many Christian leaders didn’t welcome McPherson in her day. “The faith healing, the speaking in tongues, the fundamentalism, the sheer spectacle of her services, her fame, the love offerings, her gender — it was all unseemly to them,” Hoffman writes. Confronted with damning headlines, McPherson would allege religious persecution.
Hoffman describes herself as the first researcher given access to the full court records of McPherson’s grand jury investigation. However, in her note on sources, she writes that Los Angeles County has lost all but 20 pages; the Foursquare Church has the only known complete copy, but has refused to share it. (Within weeks of a judge’s expected ruling to send McPherson to trial, the charges were abruptly dismissed; a second anticipated trial fell apart, too.)
If navigating source material was tricky, the book’s strength comes from Hoffman’s vivid storytelling. McPherson’s mother, Minnie, comes across as a Kris Jenner figure, both mom and manager. And Hoffman persuasively shows how harnessing technology helped McPherson moved what once was considered fringe into the mainstream.
But “Sister, Sinner” could have gone further in helping us understand why McPherson, who died from an overdose of sedatives in 1944, still matters today. A helpful companion is “Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America,” by the historian Matthew Avery Sutton. His 2007 book essentially predicted Christian support for Trump; Pentecostal and charismatic leaders have been some of his most faithful supporters, including the Florida pastor Paula White-Cain, who was recently appointed to lead the White House Faith Office.
Since the 1920s, Sutton has argued, conservative Christians have been willing to excuse the moral shortcomings of politicians whose goals align with their own. Pastors lauded President Warren G. Harding, who had extramarital affairs. McPherson preached a funeral oration on “Harding, the Christian President.”
She wasn’t simply a powerful religious celebrity who broke the stained-glass ceilings of her day. She paved the way for conservative Christian leaders to move themselves into the nation’s inner circles of power.
SISTER, SINNER: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson | By Claire Hoffman | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 384 pp. | $32
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