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Sister Aimee Semple McPherson: Eat Your Heart Out, Pat Robertson, You Dick!

Anybody here ever catch the PBS series American Experience? Awesome series of documentaries ranging on every U.S. historical phenomenon under the sun. The episode that recently caught my eye was on the Grand Dame of Pentecostal preaching, Aimee Semple McPherson, a household name in her day, and a name too overlooked in the present.

If you are a pop-culture fan and have never heard of Sister Aimee before, she is a necessary piece of education to your pop-culture repertoire. In 1923 she founded The Angelus Temple in Los Angeles -the city where she based most of her career- and her self described teachings known as “The Foursquare Gospel.” Up until her death in 1944, she was the prime mover in the Nation’s religious movement/industry.

You can lay the praise, or the blame, for Sister Aimee bringing Evangelical sermons from the road show to a bigtime nationwide extravaganza spread through the radio airways. Perhaps my lifelong fascination with pro wrestling is partly why I’m so fascinated with this chick; when Freddie Mercury passed away in 1991, a member of the rock community (I’m going crazy trying to remember who it was!!!) eulogized Freddie as “Wrestlemania.” He noted Freddie wasn’t just a wrestler in Wrestlemania; that he was all the wrestlers, the ring, the lighting, the music, all wrapped into one.

Well, the same could be said about Aimee Semple McPherson, but turned up a notch! In addition to the above-mentioned Wrestlemania properties, she was also the promoter, the chief star, and the master publicist. Love her or hate her -I personally find myself somewhere in the middle!- Aimee Semple McPherson was the “It” girl in the non-movie industry. She was the first preacher to build a megachurch that looked more like an opera house than a house of worship, and threw showmanship into her sermons like nobody before her. From riding onto stage on a motorcycle dressed as a traffic cop and preaching in the style of a lawman, to producing full length religious operas, this babe was a wild child!

And what would a big time preacher be without a sweet dose of scandal? In May of 1926, Sister Aimee went swimming in a SoCal ocean, and vanished! She was presumed drowned, and her presumed demise made front pages like no celebrity before or since. Miraculously, she turned up wandering in a local desert, looking a tad tired; Sister Aimee claimed she had been kidnapped.

There was a lot of doubt cast upon her kidnapping claim. For one, she looked a little immaculate for someone who had been wandering through the desert after being holed up in a tiny shack. Two, the officers who found her said that anybody who had roamed the desert for as long as she claimed always reached for water and slugged it down without a pause; Sister Aimee took ladylike sips!

It is suspected that her disappearance was actually a rendezvous up to the city of Carmel with her radio producer Kenneth Ormiston, with who many in her church suspected of being her lover. This theory was neither proven nor disproved.

What I found most interesting about American Experience’s take on the Aimee Semple McPherson story was that they lean toward looking at her in a sympathetic light. This is understandable, because even a “preacher cynic” like me can see that she did a lot of ballsy and noble moves that could have hurt her in the day, especially refusing to segregate the church from any race or ethnicity, and her positive activism working with Mexican immigrants. It is said that she even convinced some Ku Klux Klan members to burn their hoods and robes after they drank in her sermons.

American Experience was, at times, a bit too sympathetic. They touch upon the theatrics used during faith healings, but for some reason hold back on questioning their validity. When touching upon the scandal surrounding her disappearance, the documentary rebuffs Aimee’s kidnapping claim, but I don’t recall them using any description like “hoax.” It felt as if they are portraying her as a victim of her own demons, and hesitate to call her on her shortcomings.

American Experience is hardly the lone wolf in this respect. Recent biographies and NPR radio pieces I’ve read and heard on McPherson seem to soften their stance on this pioneering force the more time passes. The best analytical biography I have read on Aimee Semple McPherson is an early 1970s book called Storming Heaven by Lately Thomas. It has been over fifteen years that I’ve read this work, but I am about to dust it off and give it another read. Thomas neither worships nor condemns Aimee Semple McPherson, and he does the best job I’ve ever encountered in presenting the endless complexities of this amazing woman.

I believe Storming Heaven is still fairly easy to obtain at a reasonable price on sites like Abebooks.com . This book is worth going out of your way to read, even if the subject of wild preachers never grabbed you before. Trust me on this one!