Aimee Semple McPherson
It’s 1915, and Aimee Semple McPherson is living miserably as a homemaker in Providence, Rhode Island. The more obsessively she tries to master the tasks of an Edwardian housewife, the more violent her neurotic outbreaks are, until finally, after a protracted illness that results in a hysterectomy, or which results in near-death as she’s being wheeled backward through swinging hospital doors in a creaking gurney, she submits to the voice of God—which had been whispering during all those hours of dusting and polishing for her to go preach. Now will you go?
And so she leaves, in the company of her mother and her two kids, travelling all over the East Coast, inviting the public into the roomy canvas revival tents to listen to her sermons, and to be moved to speak in tongues, to writhe on the floor, to receive God’s healing power through her hands. She preaches to integrated audiences, holds court in Southern black towns, arranges for a local Mississippi newspaper to photograph her daughter getting baptized by a black minister. After a few years, she takes her roadshows west. She stuffs her kids and mother into a hulking Packard and starts driving. She is the first woman to cross the country without the accompaniment of a man, and she paints messages on the car doors: JESUS IS COMING SOON – GET READY or WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY? By the time she arrives in Hollywood, she’s a celebrity.
It’s 1924, and as the stage lights dim in Angelus Temple, and the crowd roars following the end of an illustrated sermon—full cast, full orchestra—Aimee Semple McPherson dips behind the heavy gold curtain into the harsh lights backstage. The fluorescents bring her thick theatrical makeup and acetone-hardened hair into high relief and she begins pulling pins from her signature updo, one by one, gripping them between her teeth. She is dressed as a cop. She is dressed as a pilot. She is dressed as a beautiful milkmaid. A gauntlet of temple assistants flank her with brow towels and glasses of water, but she pushes through them, down the corridors, out the back entrance to a side street, where Charlie Chaplin sits in an idling car waiting for her to join him.
They sit in the backseat with the windows down while her throngs of congregants filter into the streets of Los Angeles’ Echo Park. Aimee gently prods Charlie, as she always takes the opportunity to do, on the issue of his salvation, and when he waves her off, they move on to the true purpose of their meeting: He watched her illustrated sermon this evening and delivers to her now, upon request, a lengthy critique of the set and the choreography. McPherson nods, face drawn, scribbling notes on the back of an old issue of her magazine Bridal Call. After that, they laugh and trade tales from their strange weeks, two people famous and private, in the evening shadow of the first American megachurch.
It’s the summer of 1926 and, for the first time in God knows how long, McPherson takes the day off. She and her secretary Emma Schaeffer pack a picnic for Venice Beach, bring the children, spread the gingham blanket, and then McPherson strips to her bright green swim clothes and shoots straight for the water. Her secretary dozes under an umbrella. When she awakes, Aimee has not returned to shore. The sun is setting. Aimee! How much time has passed? She spends the rest of the day combing the beach with police: Aimee! Aimee! but by nightfall McPherson is presumed to have drowned.
The coast guard searches for a body but comes up short. Some of McPherson’s congregants take it upon themselves to continue the comb, and two of them die from exposure in the process. In the coming weeks, thousands of her followers will stand at the water’s edge, holding candlelight vigils, singing hymns. Despite all that, the LA press almost immediately assumes it is a hoax. Ransom letters and reported sightings of McPherson and temple employee Kenneth Ormiston make their way up the California coast.
Five weeks later, McPherson staggers into a Mexican border town with an elaborate story about kidnapping, torture, and ransom at the hands of two bandits and one Mexicali Rose, who held her in an adobe shack in the desert, from which she escaped by her wits and with the help of a rusted soup can. Then she collapses.
She is rushed to a hospital in Douglas, Arizona, but no one she speaks to in Douglas believes her. She’s dehydrated and sunburned and frizzy, as from an hour too long on a beach, and her clothes are clean, her shoes a little scuffed at best. Authorities are dispatched over the border immediately but are unable to find an adobe shack that fits her description. No suspects emerge. But it doesn’t matter. Hospital photographs of a sleepy and suntanned McPherson tucked into hospital sheets splash across papers. There she is, surrounded by her mother and two children; there she is with her hair done up, reading the Bible in bed.
When she returns to LA, thirty thousand people are waiting for her at the train station.
Angelus Temple opened its doors in 1923 as the headquarters of McPherson’s new denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. With its giant cream-colored dome, 180-degree mezzanine, and hulking Grecian pillars, Angelus commanded the landscape of Echo Park like some Californian Acropolis. The seating capacity was fifty-three hundred, and on a three-service day, it filled all three times. It was, upon breaking ground, the largest construction project in North America, and critics joked that it put the “cost” in Pentecost—but McPherson was just being realistic about her crowd-drawing powers. She’d spent the last several years holding standing-room-only revivals up and down the East Coast. She needed an enormous space. And that space needed twenty-five exits in order to prevent bottlenecking after services.
Inside that great coliseum of a building, McPherson preached, conducted faith-healing services, and produced morality plays in a voice at once husky, patristic, clipped, and musical. Sometimes she entered the sanctuary on a motorbike, once she chartered a plane to disseminate pamphlets for a Balboa Park revival, and once she administered a faith healing to a lion at the zoo. Her strategies were varied, and her public persona shifted, too. Earlier in her career, she wore her thick brown hair in a signature updo and a modest white servant’s dress made of heavy muslin topped by a navy cape, but by the mid-1920s she was hot and stylish, with the glistening blond finger-curls of a flapper, high heels poking out from under form-fitting clerical robes emblazoned with a glittering cross, her arms spread as wide as a Marvel superhero trying to save the whole city.
Her congregation, at times running fifteen thousand strong, included old people, young people, brown, white, and black, poor and rich, and was equipped with a nursery, so even the newest of mothers could participate in the summoning of the Holy Ghost. Her services were among the most integrated spaces of 1920s and 1930s California, and it is said that she was the single most photographed person of her time.
This prewar period was marked by the nascent division of modernism and fundamentalism within the church—which is still very much the paradigm of religious discourse we live in today—and without meaning to, or maybe meaning to, McPherson embodied these divisions. She was at once a vocal social conservative, leading (for instance) powerful campaigns in a gorilla suit to require the instruction of Genesis in all California science classrooms, but she had also created one of the few American churches to ordain women, which was orchestrated through the temple’s seminary program, LIFE Bible College. She was seen as both extremely hot and extremely maternal. She was against dancing, smoking, and movie-going, but in the months following her kidnapping and the ensuing court spectacle, the flappers were among her greatest allies. She was hardline on issues of sexual purity and marriage, though she was also a single mother of two—a sort of patron saint for any woman ever widowed, abandoned, or divorced, of which she had been all three.
In fact, McPherson’s outreach to unwed mothers and pregnant teenagers was largely unparalleled by any religious organization at the time. As historian Matthew Avery Sutton writes in Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, she claimed to be able to spot those desperate young women in the temple crowds: the flush of their cheeks, their sad, dark eyes. She’d find them afterward, let them cry in her arms. If she couldn’t mediate reconciliation with their families (which, Sutton notes, on several occasions, she was personally able to do), the girls moved into the two-story church parsonage where McPherson lived. After the birth, McPherson would matchmake them with widows from the congregation who could take care of the infants while these new mothers became their own breadwinners. Offstage, Sutton says, she also “helped women struggling with issues of rape, incest, and physical abuse.” When the Big Sister League of LA asked McPherson to speak at the opening of their new women’s shelter, she cemented her presence there by saying that “there were some things a woman preacher could do better than a man could,” and that was that. Where just ten years earlier in Edwardian America, a woman occupying similar celebrity might have reverted to the old Victorian “cult of true womanhood” thing, McPherson instead offered an open door—a shrug, a wink. Your guess is as good as mine, she seemed to say. There are just some things a woman preacher can do better than a man.
Woman preacher or man preacher—what is a preacher? Why not a minister or a pastor? “Pastor” comes from the Old French pastur (“shepherd”), or the Latin pastor (same idea), which in nineteenth-century American English becomes the person who “shepherds” a church community, inspired, of course, by Jesus’ insistent use of the metaphors of lamb and sheep. Beyond the pastures, “pastor” enters the lexical register of the benevolent patriarch, leader, teacher, facilitator, interpreter, but one who is ultimately non-hierarchal. The pastor is one among the fellow congregants, a congregant themselves, and only symbolic of God’s interaction in the world. But preacher? Latin’s predicare, “to proclaim; to say,” goes through a couple of iterations until we see its twelfth-century French use, preachen, meaning “to give a sermon, to preach.” “Preacher” enters American English in a big way in nineteenth-century black, Southern, and Methodist theology, evoking a cleric who brings to the pulpit mysticism, zeal, passion, drama, prophecy—functioning more as medium than as teacher. And so unlike a pastor—a lamb among lambs—the preacher is hierarchical, represents their church, and is separate from their congregants. In the Latin Bible we see the word used in the context of ecstatically proclaiming the “good news”—not to the congregation, but outward. Preaching reaches out, above and beyond the choir.
McPherson’s ministry was always outwardly oriented, despite the magnitude of her interiors. When she moved to LA and found the plot of land where her temple would eventually be built, according to biographer Daniel Mark Epstein, she approached the FOR SALE sign and scribbled upon it a building “in the shape of a megaphone.” For those crowds of people huddled outside the temple who hadn’t arrived in time to nab one of the fifty-three hundred seats, she’d installed loudspeakers facing the sidewalk. A year later, she bought a radio license and began broadcasting sermons, lectures, choral music, children’s stories, and faith-healing services from a state-of-the-art studio on the top floor of the temple, so that the reach of her message was practically limitless.
But this was all strange, you have to understand. The Pentecostal movement was still new then, a somewhat quiet but charismatic fringe of the American Protestant church. Pentecostalism identifies itself as “the heir of a continuous tradition, from the initial Pentecost to now,” that day that the apostles, Mary Magdalen chief among them, went into the streets and, possessed by the Holy Spirit, began beseeching passersby in tongues to accept Jesus the messiah and all of the other implications that go along with that: God is not who you thought He was; miracles occur every day; healing happens in the blink of an eye; try to speak and you will speak God’s language; close your eyes and listen to God’s voice, you can hear it; God will literally give you protection from rattlesnakes, from cyanide, from jagged rocks. And though, in the 1920s, women made up the bulk of Pentecostal missionaries, a woman cleric was rare. Plus home-radio sets were not yet commonplace, in LA or anywhere, and who’d ever even heard of a megachurch before?
Of course, McPherson’s novelty often eclipsed her theology. While she was at the time perhaps the most visible American religious figure to date, historian Nathan Saunders notes that “The newspapers did not give credence to McPherson’s words in the same way that they did those of [Harry] Fosdick and [Billy] Sunday,” the other celebrity preachers of the time. “The early articles rarely reported the content of her sermons.” Moreover, Sunday and Fosdick were often referred to in the press with the distinctions of “Rev.” and “Dr.” respectively, though neither held a degree. And McPherson, having received a variety of ordinations, was given only the title “Sister”—Sister Aimee. But she liked it that way.
It was through the radio, on those long drives in the Mountain West, that I first heard about Aimee Semple McPherson. I’d finally learned to drive, at twenty-four years old, and for the first time since I was a kid, I started listening to the radio. I was living in southeastern Wyoming, where signals were intermittent and journeys were long, so pop songs and the BBC World Service and the staticky boom of radio evangelists were close companions through the miles and miles of sagebrush prairie between one town and the next. One afternoon I caught the tail end of an interview with Kathy Lee Gifford, who’d just released a Broadway musical about McPherson called Scandalous. But McPherson was so famously in control of her own image that all attempts to retell her story are redundant. At midcareer, she produced her own autobiographical Broadway vaudeville act, which received mixed reviews and ran for only three weeks. If she couldn’t do it, I don’t know why anyone else thought they could.
Gifford’s show flopped shortly after its debut. Scandalous was lost on its twenty-first-century public because they’d grown used to stories—much more grisly ones—of the fallen religious elite. And anyway, if secular audience members were familiar with McPherson at all, they already knew her as part of the cabinet of American curiosities, her sensational life story fixed for nearly a century as the woman whose neon name glowed twice the size of her denomination’s on the front of her Echo Park temple, a charlatan who built a castle on the banks of Lake Elsinore, and who, one afternoon in 1926, after being missing for five weeks and presumed dead, wandered out of the Mexican desert in her Sunday best.
In Laramie I briefly found myself at a church that spent six weeks—that’s six services—on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, wherein, in one part, he espouses that “wives submit to their husbands, as husbands submit to the church.” (The following epistle, just by the way, addresses slaves and masters using a similar analogy. We did not address that one in Laramie, nor has it been addressed in any church I’ve ever been in.) This church congregated in a storefront to the side of a dusty thoroughfare at the edge of town. It fancied itself more open and cutting-edge than that old fire-and-brimstone variety and was well aware that many of its members had fled one mainline church or another. That was why they were going to take the time to unpack this difficult dictum. What if we read the text closely, over and over again, rather than revert to the same rote takeaway like in the past?
This could have been an interesting exercise in the new evangelical church plant movement (which, again, is the creation of new, highly localized, demographic-specific churches for, say, bohemian artists in Brooklyn or college students in Laramie, “planted” by larger church organizations), but I had seen it done so many times before—and it was the same this time. Six weeks of trying to find euphemisms for the word “submit” but which always came back to the same thing: In general, wives, listen to your husband. Your job is important, too, but God wants order, and this is the order He established, but here’s a nicer way of saying it. Amen.
The last time I went to that church, in an experimental alternative to the sermon, the pastor installed six couples on the low carpeted stage to discuss how this “message” plays out in their marriages. One woman said she felt like the first mate on a ship where her husband is captain—and she’s so thankful that he’s a godly man. A different husband said that, during the years he was working full-time to support his family (as the scripture instructed), he was on the brink of insanity, but God gave him the strength to carry on. Another wife said that as a feminist she really doesn’t know how to reconcile Paul’s passage, and then she kind of shrugged and looked at the pastor.
The issue at this church was that they obviously did not know what to say about Paul’s letter, other than the rote translation. They lacked the intellectual rigor of ecumenical continuity to truly bring new meaning to it. And by beating it like a dead horse over those slow six weeks, they made an already seemingly oppressive dictum even worse—oppressive and bland, as though it served only as a simple organizational rule to live by. If instead the pastor had just said the mystery of God compels you to submit to your husband, it would have been awful, though more intellectually honest, because that is, after all, what they were saying. And I would have walked out anyway, as I’ve walked out of so many other congregations before. (I thought of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, founder of the 1970s Church Universal and Triumphant and the ad hoc fallout shelter movement, who remembers sitting in church as an adult, crinkling her nose at the various pastors and how “Jesus would explain to me that they had not yet been given the full teaching.”)
It was always the certainty of those church plants that frightened me, though I did appreciate their uncertain and ever-changing approach to the liturgy—one of the rare gifts of a lack of ecumenical continuity. At the church plant in Laramie, they approached the Eucharist in a deeply communal way, placing a fresh loaf of bread at the pulpit, presided over by no one, which each member approached—three or four people at a time, usually all strangers—and ripped off hunks, dipped them in wine, and said to each other up close, “The bread of life, the blood of Christ.” And I remember there, as at other communion tables, the feeling of a breeze passing my cheek, and it always made me want to know what it would have been like to follow that feeling further, down the path of tongues.
As I began listening to the radio again, I remembered the media mavens of my childhood, overheard in the backseats of babysitters’ cars or in darkened hallways adjacent to living rooms: Dr. Laura Schlessinger ripping her clients new ones with the moral strictness of Jewish law; Ann Coulter’s fierce claims about the nation’s irresponsible impoverished, the “bogus” science of evolution, and how “Jesus died for my sins, and that’s that”; Tammy Faye Bakker’s insistence that God wants you to prosper, and that any material lack is a consequence of some spiritual deficiency; Oprah’s bottomless empathy and outrage, her smiling face on the cover of her self-titled magazine; and nationally syndicated radio personality Delilah, who, though Evangelical in spirit, neither moralizes nor condescends to her callers, and whose tagline is simply “Love someone.” Like a sage older sister offering you a wine cooler and a prayer pamphlet, she consoles the broken hearts, the failed marriages, and the estranged daughters with just a few words about how her caller should forget the deadbeat man, the tyrannical father, and take comfort in knowing the embrace of a vague and generous God. And as proof, she offers you a song: Donna Lewis’s “I Love You” or the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” Unlike the others, Delilah never placed herself on a pedestal. Her three failed marriages and complicated adoptions of ten children were the currency of her vocation.
So I thought of her, and all of them who were all still there, on the radio or on TV, as I drove and drove all around Wyoming, back and forth to the Denver Airport and to the strip malls of Cheyenne and the thrift stores of Fort Collins and the ghost towns of Albany County and the trails of Vedauwoo National Park. There was a restaurant about twenty minutes from Laramie, standing solo in the barren stretch of the old Lincoln Highway where the smoking laws of the county didn’t reach, and I’d go there to eat a burger and write. On my way I skipped through the stations and listened to news shows and voices of instruction.
I thought, too, of the great falls of the religious elite I’d witnessed in my own lifetime. As a child of the 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed that almost every single megachurch preacher and celebrity televangelist had been brought down by some kind of monetary or sexual scandal. The morally complicated life of megachurches and religious organizations is embedded in their very structure: With the blessing of the free market, they can grow with impunity, becoming—much to the chagrin of their Protestant ancestors—powerful religious oligarchies. Moreover, their tax-exempt status has been the pulsing green heart of many a scandal. American megachurches, and many faith-based media organizations, accumulate millions of dollars in revenue every year and are not required to make the same disclosures as, say, charities are on tax-exempt cash, resulting, sometimes, in astronomically rich leaders.
Jim Whittington of Fountain of Life ministries embezzled nearly a million dollars from an old lady; Marilyn Hickey’s fundraisers, promising blessings from God, obtained money that was used for personal vacations and lavish homes. Then there’s Jimmy Swaggart, who was repeatedly caught with prostitutes, after a life spent sputtering, red-faced, about the evils of sexual deviance. Even after his infamous televised sobbing confession, he was caught again—and again and, I think, again. Eddie Long was accused by at least five women and two men of intimidating them into sexual relationships with him. Ted Haggard, after years of vehement campaigning against same-sex marriage, was publicly outed for having a sexual relationship with a male masseur—and then there was the meth. In the fallout of the Rwandan Genocide, Pat Robertson, host of The 700 Club, rallied for donations to go toward his charity organization Operation Blessing International in neighboring Zaire, where, not long before, Robertson had allegedly settled a diamond-mining contract with then dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. According to employees from OBI, the planes meant for relief supplies were used to transport equipment to Robertson’s mines.
And Paul Crouch, the man who started the Bakkers’ host station, received massive amounts of undocumented cash as “donations” for the Trinity Broadcasting Network and was implicated in the Bakkers’ eventual charges, which included every conceivable offense of American religious royalty—larceny, embezzlement, conspiracy, and rape—and finally ended in Jim Bakker’s imprisonment. While Jim was in prison, he read the Bible the whole way through—admittedly for the first time—and conceded that his “prosperity gospel” was in fact not substantiated by scripture.
The thing about all of these people is that, for the most part, their transgressions would have simply been those of any excessively rich person, or in some cases the transgressions of someone disturbed in any class, but because they’d thrown themselves into the public sphere as conservative and condemning moral leaders, as preachers, as channelers, whose efforts self-reportedly sided with God, they’d purchased the privilege of such exposure, positioned themselves for monumental crashes.
While Aimee Semple McPherson did lay a sort of blueprint for the American church that grows exponentially, there are tremendous ways that she differs from her heirs: She ran a ministry that fed more people in LA during the Depression than any other organization; she ran programs and spaces to house the homeless and assisted women leaving the sex trade; for God’s sake, she left trolley fare in a little lockbox under one of the temple’s pillar panels for whoever needed it at any time.
I drove and drove around Wyoming, and I heard a rebroadcast of On Being, where Krista Tippett interviewed professor of religious and African American studies Anthea Butler on McPherson’s legacy. Butler emphasizes that, above all, McPherson was running this giant ministry, operating a radio station, and building a megachurch during a time when the public didn’t know they wanted it, needed it, or what it even was. There was no mold, no model, no system that was prebuilt for success or corruption. Those other mega-preachers later were cashing in on something they knew the world wanted. They knew their audience, their outlets, their tax codes. And their scandals eviscerated their authority, whereas McPherson’s seemed to function as an inadvertent part of hers.
When Tippett pressed Butler about whether McPherson’s scandals undermined her legacy, Butler sighed and said:
If you think about the fact that you’ve done all this work, all this traveling, and you’re taking care of two little kids, and your mother is always around nagging you—you can read the story of her disappearance as salacious or terrible, or you could read it as, you know, this is someone who hadn’t had a break in how long? . . . I think that [assuming the scandals delegitimize her contribution] is an indictment against the rigor of religion, quite frankly . . . What becomes the issue is, how much are you supposed to give up of yourself to live for God? There’s all these great songs, you know, like “I Surrender All” or “Put Your All at the Altar.” People mean them. But no one bothers to think of a life like Aimee’s . . . There’s a point where you have to count the cost . . . Do you pull back when your family falls apart? . . . Or when you’ve been accused of running off with a married man? Do you pull back? Someone like Aimee says, “No, I will not pull back,” and you pay a personal price.
It’s 1925, and the temple lights are trained on Aimee Semple McPherson like kliegs. “It is very foolish to hesitate to trust God,” she says in her warm, scratchy voice, sounding more like Bella Abzug than Tammy Faye Bakker. She recounts a news story of a man who slips from the Los Angeles palisades and, eyeing the sharp rocks below, spends ten minutes hanging from his fingertips, until finally, his fingers cramping, he says, “God, help me” and lets go.
“And he landed an inch and three-quarters from the rocks. An inch and three-quarters!” She thrusts her arm straight above her, the flared sleeves of her robe cascading to her elbow. She ticks off the miraculous visions of Ezekiel, the healings of Acts, the healings she has seen, that she has carried out with the power of the Holy Spirit: “I’ve seen tubercular bones, filled with pus and pockets, healed so that they leapt from their wheeling chairs, leapt from their crutches.” And she’s no Calvinist. Away with that “child of God” crap: “It is not enough to be born again. You need to grow in God . . . Don’t be a baby. Grow up to be men and women, filled with the Holy Spirit!” Faith without works is dead—“Put your faith into action!” Without works, faith is like “a bird without a wing.”
She grabs a girl. She grabs an old woman. She grabs a lion at the zoo. She lays her manicured hand on the leg, the eye, the heart. She enjoins the crowd for prayers, for cries. In Pentecostal fashion, she implores congregants to make noise: “Come on now—that’s a Methodist ‘amen.’ I was raised Methodist, so no—let’s hear a reeeallll HolyGhostPentecostal amen!” And the girl, the old woman, the lion—they all stand up.
It’s the summer of 1926, and she’s returned to LA after her hospitalization in Arizona. Almost immediately, she is charged with perjury. The story of her disappearance is a lurid, front-page media scandal: EVANGELIST’S KIDNAP HOAX EXPOSED! Two witnesses accuse her of hiring them to fabricate evidence, and other witnesses prove that temple employee Kenneth Ormiston disappeared the same day McPherson did, that he checked into a variety of pretty little coastal hotels under false names and was later seen with McPherson in his Chrysler at a cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea and on a cliffside picnic off of Highway 1. Meanwhile, no evidence of the kidnappers’ existence surfaces. McPherson is subpoenaed and the press goes wild. She is outraged by the accusations and asks her congregation for forty-eight hours of fasting and prayer on her behalf, and during this time she is still preaching, is actually weaving the courtroom events into her sermons. She faints in public several times, is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and on one occasion is carried into court on an upholstered chair. But she arrives, always alert, at the pulpit on Sundays.
The prosecution builds their case primarily around the allegations of a single witness, who turns out to be a “lunatic,” and the case is dismissed. McPherson sets off on a Vindication Tour, preceded by a lavish victory celebration at the temple. In Vanishing Evangelist, Lately Thomas describes the party as being so loud with cheers and hallelujahs that McPherson was unable to speak for the first fifteen minutes, after which she delivered a farewell message on “the Lord’s conquest of his enemies, the ascendency of love over hate,” as exemplified in her own triumph:
The whole structure of this case against me was built like the Tower of Babel, rotten from the bottom. Each block, built one upon the other, reached just so high, and then, like the Tower of Babel, God looked down and confused the tongues of the builders. Each told a different story. One confused the other, and thus it has ended, leaving standing only the true facts told by me.
In this statement, Aimee Semple McPherson aligns herself with the Old Testament God, a priest of the Lord, a preacher, a channeler. When she sets off on the train that will take her from city to city, where she will spread news of her innocence, she shakes hands with everybody and blows kisses and throws flowers and candy to a crowd of thousands.
But then there were other things to follow: a botched marriage and divorce; she accepts donations from the KKK and then admonishes them; her accountants accuse her of cooking the books. Having once lived in a small house next door to the temple, McPherson returns from the Vindication Tour with plans to build a Byzantine stucco mansion at Lake Elsinore in an attempt to get away from the limelight. The mansion, when realized, is full of latticed ceilings, furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, mirrored alcoves, palatial bedrooms, and underground passages. And it’s while she is living there that she and her mother, her unwavering wing-woman for decades, get twin facelifts and break into a fistfight, after which they’d never speak again; and it is where McPherson’s own daughter, having come of age, sues the Foursquare church’s attorney for slander and gives up her position as heir.
But the church would go on, and the radio would go on, and Aimee would go on, continuing to travel, continuing to save souls, scandalous Evangelist or not.
It’s 1932, and she’s standing before a dark curtain on a Hearst Metrotone News soundstage. Her hair glistens in blond finger curls against the fluffy bright white fur trimming of an open jacket. Under that is a multicolored striped top with a V-neck—and she knows this outfit will come at a cost, that she has changed her style. She is about to take a voyage to the Holy Land but has been invited to say a bit about Prohibition before her departure.
Her eyes almost never look at the camera; they are skating around the ceiling. She tells the parable of the great lecturer, the preacher, who is a hypocrite, and she begins to girlishly fiddle with her shawl. “He said, ‘Dump all your booze in the river . . . now let us go drink from the river.’” She laughs. “And with that one bit, he did away with it all!” But she’s looking down now, looking away from the camera as she says, faster, stumbling through her words, “And that’s the way perhaps with us over here in America, we teach it but so often those who make the laws do not quite live up to them . . .” At this, she literally looks straight down, down at her feet. And then without even a beat of time, she finishes with, “I wish you could all have the joy of going with us this Easter tide to the Holy Land where we shall visit on Easter Day the tomb of our risen Lord!” Then it goes black.
After Sweeney and I left Emmaus Road, we popped into Trinity Lutheran Church, which was part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Lutheran services felt almost as liturgically conservative as Catholics’, yet theologically liberal, and helmed by slightly more touchy-feely Scandinavians. I was into it. The ELCA was the result of a 1988 merger of the more progressive Lutheran organizations, some of whom had started ordaining women. The Missouri and Wisconsin Synods hardened their conservativism and decided not to merge. The fissures furthered in 2009 when the ELCA started to officiate gay marriages.
The day we went to Trinity Lutheran, the church’s intern, Seth—a strapping blond Nordic man our age—gave a sermon on the problematic shame of divorce within Christian churches. Afterward, there was an Oktoberfest luncheon in the rectory, and Seth and his wife Jen approached us with a six pack of unmarked beers they’d recently brewed at home, and we shared them over pasta salad and potatoes. The majority of the congregation was elderly. Jen was a nurse at the local hospital, and Seth was completing his yearlong internship for seminary in Iowa. He and Sweeney made plans to get together and study Greek later that week.
And they did get together, week after week, translating Greek and then Latin and then Hebrew. Sweeney, who was teaching World Literature at the University of Wyoming and at a nuclear missile base in Cheyenne, and who’d by that point received two fine arts degrees in poetry, was already shifting tracks and applying to PhD programs in theology. Seth and Jen became good friends of ours in the coming months. We’d sit on their deck during the brief season of Wyoming warmth, or at pubs during the many moons of deep High Plains freeze, or snowshoeing up Sheep Mountain, and talk about our lives, but also a lot about the church, too. Sometimes I’d get home late on a Saturday night and find Seth and Sweeney chain-smoking and playing poker in our study over a case of Old Milwaukee, and Seth would have to pull himself away because he had to preach come sunup.
But we did not agree on everything. While Seth was proud to be a part of the inclusive ELCA, he had stayed up late that night in 2009 to hear the ecumenical council’s determination on the sanctification of gay marriage and found himself disappointed with both sides of the debate—he thought the arguments weren’t theological enough, but more pragmatic. Strengthening institutions like gay marriage strengthens trust and stability within society, yes. Liberal humanism can say whatever it wants, but Seth thought liberal Christianity has to use the religion, its understanding of God and the scriptures, and not liberal humanism, to justify its attitudes toward gay marriage. We debated this often, and once, over burgers at the Crowbar, he offered Peter’s vision in Acts 10 as something the 2009 council could have used to uphold gay marriage and, in using, might have forced the Missouri synod to consider its own position: Peter is taking a rest on a long journey, and he goes up to his gentile host’s roof to pray. Smells waft upward from the gentile’s kitchen, and amid his prayer he gets hungry, and then Heaven opens up “like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’” No, way, Peter said, I’m not supposed to eat those things, and especially not with gentiles. But the voice spoke to him a second time, saying, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Do not call anything unclean that God has made pure. I think what is meant, or what Seth thought it meant, was: Here is God, a long time ago, saying it’s time to overturn those laws, the mitzvot, about shellfish and sex and everything else, upon the arrival of the messiah. Jesus is going to break all the old laws, and you must follow his lead. And Seth and many other churches and clerics have been spending the last thousand years trying to figure out how far that overturning actually reaches. To me, it seems it must go pretty fucking far—otherwise, what’s the point of a messiah?
Aimee Semple McPherson also found herself in a culture war and, whether consciously or not, she elided both sides. Her biggest goal was to bring people into the kingdom of God, to save souls, to “win” them by whatever means necessary. In a way, she offered resistance to reconcile paradox. Because in the Pentecostal tradition, God is still speaking, which is to say, change is always possible and imminent. That she didn’t want to concede to a camp of modernism or fundamentalism says to me that she recognized the divine possibilities that might be foreclosed on if she did. To force her into a box is to miss the whole point. She said:
If we want to be a soul winner, we will have to be a middle-of-the roader, glory to Jesus. Especially when we come into a citywide revival campaign, lots of us have our own ideas, theories, particular side line of doctrine. If you want to win souls in the greatest, widest sense of the word, drop everything for a little while, just fix your eyes upon Jesus, the crucified Lamb of God, bleeding, dying, hanging on the tree, saying, “Come unto Me all the ends of the earth and be ye saved.”
I met an old man named Ron one evening in the back room of Laramie’s Roughed Up Duck. The “room” was little more than clapboard and a corrugated tin roof, and during the long months of below-zero weather, it held a hot woodstove. You could smoke there. (I cannot conceal the ways in which the spaces I spend my time are organized around access to smoking.) Ron overheard me telling someone about Aimee Semple McPherson’s purported drowning and he said, “I’ve just never been able to imagine how it would feel to drown.” He crinkled a smile and continued as naturally as if we’d been talking all night. He told me that, once, while fur trapping in Northern Minnesota, he almost died, not from drowning but of hypothermia. He told the whole story: his broken compass, the three-mile walk home, up to the point when that glorious and lethal warmth washed over him. He paused and said, “Now that’s a goddamned good way to go.”
I asked him how he ended up in Wyoming, and he said, in tone and timing fit for radio, “Well, let me tell you a little about myself.” He told me about his marriage to a beautiful woman named Claire, how they’d owned a little bar in Kansas for a while and then moved out to California to help a friend build houses, until Claire got cancer and her parents, too, and she asked to go home to Wyoming. “I buried all three of them,” he said. He then told me a story about when he enlisted in Vietnam, his older brother got jealous and enlisted, too, but then died in a car accident in Minnesota the day before he shipped out. “Just like that, my older brother, gone in a flash.” He talked about being in helicopters in Vietnam. He talked about an old girlfriend named Rose who drove her car into a tree. Before he left, he said, “But I’m a toughie. I’m a toughie. I’ve got a good friend. His name is Jesus.”
I saw Ron time and time again in the back room of the Roughed Up Duck over the next couple of years, and the stories were always the same—whether he told them to me or some girl sitting next to me. The stories were so scripted, so paced, so well timed, he’d clearly told them to a million girls in a million bars, just like this, and every time I heard him say, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about myself . . . ,” this thought came rushing through my mind: You’re telling the wrong stories. We’re telling the wrong stories. What did this mean? And who’s telling the story? These stories defined his life: constellated, hardened, the only visible stepping stones that led to the present moment in the back room of the Roughed Up Duck.
And now I have told you the same story about Aimee Semple McPherson that everyone has told before. I’m telling the wrong story. Where do you want to spend eternity? What if what’s interesting about McPherson are not the lurid scandals but the real and quite regular person, the strange bird who existed in that interstitial silence, who gave her life away, who stopped at nothing to win souls? What if Aimee Semple McPherson wasn’t the woman who emerged one afternoon from the Mexican desert or who died of a barbiturate overdose on revival tour or who was beautiful or widowed or a charlatan, but rather the woman who left out the back door with Charlie Chaplin, or the woman who set out on the road with her mother and children in tow, one hand on the wheel and the other riding waves out the open window?
It’s not a matter of pretending she was normal; she was not. I can’t dismiss the spectacle as simply the public’s failure to notice her “real” feats—the spectacle was her currency, it was part of the real, and it was deliberate. It was true and staged, and the sheer force of her conviction made her virtually indestructible.
Have you ever felt indestructible? That ringing freedom from inhibitions, when perhaps you’re sitting next to an open passenger window against the roaring highway wind, feeling, if only for a moment, that you’ve figured everything out? How do you behave? You touch the cheeks of your adoring fans and throw your head back laughing. You wear an angel’s gown over high-heeled shoes and a bedazzled cross bigger than the one above the pulpit. You preach in Hollywood, in the segregated South, from the boot of your big black car while you’re tearing across the country. You open your towering lakeside mansion to every pregnant girl in Los Angeles who asks, because you’re “everybody’s sister.”
And two, three times a night you sweat under stadium lights and bellow the gospel truth to the music of a hundred brass instruments and the cries of your devotees. You help anyone who asks. You feed them bread through the Depression, pose for more photos than any movie star, and of course your private life is made strange by all of this. You get facelifts. You go to China. You become a pill head. You punch your mother in the nose. You start your own radio station without any programming prepared. You stage your own death to spend a week with the man you love. You don’t think it through. You don’t have to.