Matthew Sutton on Aimee Semple McPherson -- A Review

Matthew Avery Sutton. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 351 pages.

As a teenager I joined the local Foursquare church after having a conversion experience in the context of a Foursquare sponsored Bible study group. Having grown up Episcopalian I didn’t know much about Aimee Semple McPherson – she wasn’t part of our religious education. So, on one occasion I pointed out the picture of Aimee in the front of the Foursquare hymnal that sat largely unused under our seats to my youth minister. When I asked about Aimee he told me that if Aimee were alive today she wouldn’t even be accepted into the church she founded. So, at least in that congregation the memory of Aimee Semple McPherson was not revered, or even named for that matter. During my six years of involvement in Foursquare I rarely heard her name, but for some reason I became intrigued by this woman who flaunted acceptable boundaries and not only became a noted evangelist but a celebrity as well.

Over the years I’ve made my pilgrimages to Angelus Temple and to her grave. I’ve read most of the books written about Aimee, even those that have been less than flattering in their portrayal, and I even wrote an article for Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies on her Restorationist theology (1992). When Matthew Sutton’s biography appeared, I knew I had to read it (even if he didn’t give a place of recognition to my article!).

If you’ve paid any attention to Aimee Semple McPherson (Sister Aimee to her followers) you know she is something of an enigma. Called a fraud by some, she was adored by others. As a woman preacher in a day when few if any denominations ordained women, her opponents were legion (both liberal and conservative). She was a Fundamentalist who wasn’t afraid of the modern world and its technology. Despite limited education she was a woman of intelligence and ingenuity, both of which she would need during an eventful life.

Left a widow with an infant daughter in China, she had to find her way back to the states. After a relatively brief marriage that produced her second child, a son who would succeed her as leader of the church she founded, ended in divorce she began again the ministry she believed herself destined for. The death of her first husband was a set back, but it did not quash that sense of calling. Her second husband wanted her to remain home and be a good housewife, but she couldn’t and he couldn’t follow after her. And so believing she could do no other than preach the gospel, this Pentecostal evangelist set off with her mother and two children across the country to Los Angeles. There she would found a church in the shadow of a Hollywood that would influence her ministry until her death. Though Scandal plagued and often in poor health, she remained a force to be reckoned with until her tragic death in 1944 at the age of fifty-four. Thus, this woman who was one of the first evangelists to preach on radio and to own her own radio station, used her force of personality and her openness to the use of drama and technology to garner huge crowds and build a religious empire. She was the pioneer of media savvy ministry that would offer her evangelistic descendants a model of success.

Although the basic elements of Aimee’s life story appear in Matthew Sutton’s book, including the requisite chapters on the Disappearance/Kidnapping and its aftermath, his focus is not on the personal but the public. It is her public life of interaction with the world of politics and culture that drives this story. For those looking for a more in depth look at the personal life of Aimee Semple McPherson, readers will want to also read one or both (I recommend both) of the two biographies that appeared in 1993. Edith Blumhoffer’s Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister, (Eerdmans, 1993) is a sympathetic study of Aimee written by a leading Pentecostal historian, while Daniel Mark Epstein’s wonderful Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993) is the product of a journalist’s hand and it offers the most balanced and sympathetic portrayal of her life that I’ve yet read. Sutton acknowledges his dependence on these two books that were published now more than a decade in the past and seeks to build upon them.

This is a book that has been published at an exceedingly appropriate moment. With the Religious Right having exerted a powerful presence in American politics over the past two decades, Matthew Sutton offers us a look at a forerunner of the contemporary movement. Like her descendants in the modern movement to claim America for Jesus, she understood that charisma, a flair for the dramatic, and technology could be a winnable combination in a celebrity driven age. In many ways her later day descendants lack her determination and ability to grab the attention of all in the community.

What is interesting about this story, as Matthew Sutton carefully tells it, is that this paragon of Americanism was by birth a Canadian. Despite her birth she became the spokesperson for an almost idolatrous version of American nationalism. Whether or not the term theocrat fits, and Sutton is careful never to use the word, she believed that Christianity and America were essentially synonymous. While some of the issues of her day were different from those of today, she saw herself as a prophet of redemption, seeking to bring America back to its Christian foundations. She was an anti-Communist, a Prohibitionist, and an Anti-Evolutionist (some things never change), who after 1925 and the death of Williams Jennings Bryan was the voice of a populism that appealed to many in America.

Today’s Religious Right is very one dimensional, but what struck me in reading Sutton’s account was her complexity of views. Though she was a rabid anti-Communist who feared organized labor she was also an avid supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. Despite her commitment to FDR she had voted for Hoover in 1928 and supported a Republican for Governor when Upton Sinclair with whom she had worked on poverty issues ran for governor, largely because of his alleged Socialist affiliations. On race issues she was a mixed bag – welcoming the Klan into Angelus Temple while reaching out to Blacks and Latinos. She was a suffragist and supporter of women’s rights in the church and in the broader society – a majority of the ministers and evangelists trained and sent out by Life Bible College were women.

There is a tinge of the Social Gospel here in Aimee’s thought, but I think that it is more of an inheritance of her mother’s involvement with the Salvation Army than any influence of Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel movement, which drove her outreach to the poor of Los Angeles. This outreach is best seen in the commissary established in 1927 on the eve of the Depression. It was open 24/7 and it became more important to the survival of the poor of Los Angeles as the Depression wore on. When the Los Angeles County Supervisors ruled that only Californians of three-year residency could receive help from the local Community Chest as a way of limiting immigration into the LA area, she refused and remained committed to serving all who would come to her church for help. Although she could be xenophobic, she could also stand in the gap for the immigrant community. The biggest stain on her record was the xenophobic response to the Japanese community of California during World War II.

In many ways Sutton’s title promises more than it delivers. Although the epilogue does point to her contemporary successors, he doesn’t draw clear lines of descent. That being said, he does explore in depth the development of a Christianist ideology that came to maturity in the last decade of her life, a period covered by the two chapters that deal explicitly with her attempts to wed Christian faith and American nationalism. During the early years of her ministry in LA she sought to downplay her Pentecostalism, but after the Disappearance, she reengaged with her Pentecostal roots. Then she began to explore the “Christian heritage” of this her adopted national home. By the mid-1930s Aimee became increasingly involved in attempts to claim a Christian heritage for the nation, with the theme becoming central to the messages presented in sermons, radio addresses, and speeches across the land. But again, while today’s supporters of a Christian America have largely allied themselves with one party, Aimee didn’t limit herself in that way. She backed a Republican governor but committed herself to supporting FDR and stayed a supporter through the rest of her life. She saw him as a man of God called by God to lead a Christian nation.

Her eschatology – dispensationalist premillennialism – could have led her to embrace quietism; she didn’t follow the path of many other Fundamentalists, especially after the supposed retreat from social engagement after the 1925 Scopes trial. She believed in the quick return of Christ and took great hope in the return of Jews to Palestine, but she also believed that she had a mandate to reform society and reclaim America for God. Spiritual revival, she believed was the key to economic revival.

When war broke out in 1941 Aimee crossed the remaining lines that kept church and state apart. In sermons she committed herself and her church to the service of the country. Having had pacifist sentiments earlier in her life (especially in the early 1930s) she abandoned them and moved to have her denomination strike earlier protections of conscience and support of conscientious objectors in her church. With a war that took on for her cosmic dimensions, you were either with the war effort or you were not with God. Faced with tyranny abroad, she viewed the United States as the “hammer of God.” She also began to engage in a xenophobia that supported the worst measures against the Japanese. Additionally she became a great saleswoman for the government’s war bonds. In her mind, “the flag of America and the Church stand for the same thing” and they will stand or fall together (p. 266).

She died of an apparent accidental overdose of sleeping pills on September 27, 1944 in Oakland, California. Her funeral drew thousands and brought a mix of responses. The Christian Century dismissed her as a fraud, but Sutton believes that she helped transform Pentecostalism, making it the fast growing faith that has taken the world by storm since. She gave voice to a strain of evangelicalism that seemed ready to go underground in the 1920s, and which came to full bloom in recent decades. If you consider that Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, Oliver North, and the unnamed and now disgraced Ted Haggard are all Pentecostals and leading lights of the Religious Right, should serve as sufficient evidence of Aimee’s long term influence, even if no direct link is found in the book.

While I would have liked to have seen some of the social/cultural themes drawn out further, Sutton has done an excellent job of reminding us that politically shrewd evangelicals have made use of celebrity and technology not only to spread the gospel but to influence politics for quite a long time. Could it be possible that without Aimee there would be no Religious Right? And, that she was a woman leading a conservative political movement is all the more incredible. Thus, we have before us a very important book worthy of close attention by anyone interested in theocratic tendencies. As an added treat Sutton provides detailed notes and three sets of photographs.

Note: A more focused review of this book is to be submitted to The Progressive Christian (the journal that was able to provide me with this copy) for publication. I would encourage you to check out this excellent journal as well as the book under review.