“What matters the trail, so long as the goal is reached?” Aimee Semple McPherson asked Sunset magazine, but she solved it all her life. During the raucous 1920s, when churches held fast to tradition, Sister Aimee stole the show with sermons that were illustrated by drawings that rendered the pulpit more a theater than a sanctuary. She preached, but most of all, she acted, in boxing gloves to fight “Kid Satan” or motorcycling off as a police motorcycle to signal the perils of contemporary speed.
Her Sunday evenings at Angelus Temple were, in her words, “sermons in which the lesson of the text is driven home through the eye as well as the ear.” Aimee’s fusion of religion and show was novel. The Angelus Temple, which was dedicated in 1923, was not a church it was a vibrant, independent city with a 14-piece orchestra, a hundred-member choir, and a publishing company. Over 7,000 individuals attended each week, looking for spiritual comfort as well as a performance equal to anything found in Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin visited, and young Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon attended services as youngsters. Even Aimee’s detractors couldn’t help themselves; they nickname her the “P. T. Barnum of Christianity.” But her influence didn’t remain on stage. Aimee was a media mogul decades before the term even existed. In 1922, she became the first woman to preach on the radio, calling it “talking into that great receiver talking somehow as I had seldom talked before. The room with its electrical apparatus was forgotten…and I prayed and preached and prayed again and did most everything but take up the collection.” She soon discovered radio addressed a heck of a lot more souls than revival tents, and within a year, she built her own station, KFSG. She instructed her audiences, “these are the days of invention! The days when the impossible has become possible! …the most miraculous conveyance for the Message has come the radio!” Her shows transformed radio. Families tuned in to hear sermons, faith healing, children’s shows, and even live divine operas.
Aimee invited her radio listeners to kneel and place their hands on their sets and ask them to be healed and joined by the radio waves. She bridged religion and entertainment and paved the way for the televangelists who came along after her—Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Emmy-award-winning television sermons, the height of Billy Graham’s crusades on television, and the prosperity gospel of Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker. Aimee’s life was not all innovation and influence, however. In May 1926, during the height of her fame, she swam into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared. Los Angeles city plunged into mass grief; 40,000 citizens gathered on the beach, praying for her safe return. Two searchers were killed. The country was fascinated for 36 days by rumor—had she been kidnapped, murdered, or covertly in the arms of a lover? When at last she appeared, staggering from the Mexican desert in a white wedding dress, her story of kidnapping and rescue further dimmed the mystery.
The affair swept the country off its feet, dominating headlines everywhere in the country and solidifying her place as a celebrity whose life was as sensational as her sermons. Despite grand jury probes and public doubts, her popularity never abated, and the church she started—the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel—is a going concern with millions of adherents worldwide. Aimee’s life was also a bold chapter in women’s ministry. At a time when women had only just gained the vote, she established a megachurch, operated a radio station, and led a denomination. Women made up fourteen of her 21 deacons, and she trained a generation of women evangelists at her Bible college. Her ascension was mirrored in the struggles and successes of other pioneering women of faith—from Ella Niswonger, the first woman ordained with full clergy status in 1889, to today’s pastors and bishops who still encounter opposition and double standards. Putting it into her own words, Najla Kassab, the president of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, asserted, “It is an act of injustice not allowing women to preach. Women are needed; they enrich the church in many ways.” Aimee’s legacy is intertwined in the fabric of American religious and media history.
She predicted the Electronic Church, where mass communication and religion were one and the same. Her illustrated sermons and radio shows brought religion to the masses, making it instant, immediate, and inescapable. And with each sex scandal or collapse, she just kept on going, demonstrating that invention, persistence, and a dash of vaudeville could redefine how a nation perceived the divine.
