Pentecostalism, Politics, and Popular Culture: The Case of Aimee Siemple McPherson

If one wishes for a biographical case study that maximizes entertainment value while intersecting with major issues in 1920s and 1930s cultural history, one can scarcely do better than the revivalist preacher, media celebrity, and religious empire-builder Aimee Semple McPherson. McPherson was a key player in the early years of the global Pentecostal movement, the rise of radio, the boom years of Los Angeles, and the tradition of right-wing populism that today is a building block of the Republican Party. She was one of the top U.S. religious leaders of the century, and possibly the most influential of these who was a woman. Moreover, her fame is a largely a result of her entertainment value in a culture of celebrity—both her mastery of spectacle and her entanglement in high-profile sex scandals. Her theatrical productions, called illustrated sermons, drew on an endless supply of props: a huge cardboard gorilla symbolizing Darwinists, a live camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle, a signature costume in which she dressed as a milkmaid, and other outfits such as policewoman’s uniform complete with motorcycle. She conducted massive faith healings, entered floats in the Tournament of Roses Parade, staged publicity stunts with the Ku Klux Klan, built a radio presence that brought her voice into homes throughout the country, and performed vaudeville routines on Broadway. Tabloids trumpeted stories about her facelift, travels, and willingness to pose in a nightgown during the honeymoon of her third marriage (which soon crashed and burned in the public eye). Most notoriously, she disappeared from a California beach only to reappear weeks later, exactly three days after her funeral, telling a story of her heroic escape from Mexican kidnappers—a story unconvincing to most people since the evidence pointed to an affair with a married former employee. In an era of Hollywood celebrity, she was as famous as its biggest stars; in an era of few female ministers, she was one of the best-known preachers in the country.

Few issues are in greater need of scholarly attention than the internal complexity of Pentecostalism, especially as this relates to the middle ground between two stereotypes of U.S. religion: on one side, an image of dominance by a Christian majority conceived as predominantly, if not monolithically, conservative and authoritarian, and on the other side a vision of triumphant secularism—possibly tempered by a few religious liberals sliding down a slippery slope from “normal” religion toward secularism. Moderate Christians are the largest block of U.S. religious people, but they often drop out of analyses as exceptions that prove the above rule. Alternatively, they appear as just one more name (rarely the one deemed most interesting) amid long lists of pluralist choices in models of a Christian center failing to hold and giving way to pluralism—which conservative Christians see as little more than another way to speak about secularism.

The fascination and frustration of Sutton’s book is that it offers a fine-grained and well-written case study that illuminates part of the messy middle ground that complicates this common wisdom, yet ultimately it fails to escape the gravity of a framework defined by the above images. Much of McPherson’s story, especially her interaction with consumer culture and gender issues, exists in tension with stereotypes about evangelicals of her era. Although she was not a moderate by most measures, she dramatizes the plasticity of Pentecostal practice, and she set precedents for later developments that complicate monolithic understandings of the evangelical world. For example, it is hard to fully understand Tammy Faye Bakker or the rise of megachurches without considering her. Leaders of the so-called “Jesus People” emerged from her network, before influencing phenomena as diverse as the film Jesus Christ Superstar, the Promise Keepers, and Bob Dylan’s music.¹

So far so good, but Sutton frames his argument with the idea that McPherson’s career...