American Literary Supernaturalism

In 1923, Aimee Semple McPherson offered a new illustrated sermon titled “The Trial of the Modern Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ” at Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, arguably the nation’s first mega-church, which had opened its doors earlier that year and was already attracting thousands of visitors to each of its three daily services. Blending old-time religion with Hollywood-like spectacle, illustrated sermons were a large part of “Sister” Aimee’s appeal. A rising star in the Pentecostal movement that fanned out across the country following the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, McPherson—whom Sarah Comstock labeled “the prima donna of revivalism” in The Nation—would become even more widely known in subsequent years as a defender of traditional church teachings and values against what she and other evangelical leaders called modernism (qtd. in Sutton 74). Sister Aimee’s latest illustrated sermon cast this antimodernist crusade in particularly dramatic fashion—indeed, in the form of a courtroom drama. “In this sermon,” the historian Matthew Avery Sutton observes, “the evangelist played the role of prosecutor in a mock trial that focused on infiltration of modernism into American churches” (50). Large exhibits featuring biblical verses and quotations from prominent fundamentalist preachers (as well as Abraham Lincoln) were set off against other statements from leading professors of the day. “The jury’s job,” Sutton notes, “was to determine how such leading institutions of revivalism in previous centuries as Yale and Princeton currently stacked up next to the word of God” (50). Predictably, the jury returned a unanimous verdict, finding in favor of Jesus Christ and against the Modern Liberalist College Professor.¹

Although Gregory S. Jackson makes no mention of Angelus Temple or McPherson in his book The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism (2009), Sister Aimee’s illustrated sermons are nonetheless relevant to his account of homiletic pedagogy, by which “various Protestant movements and leaders sought to train the faithful in particular interpretive and reading practices” (Jackson 4). Many religious leaders had experimented with interactive and performative sermons, some by enacting miniature dramas in their congregations, a practice that dates back to the antebellum period. Consider Henry Ward Beecher’s sensational sermons at his church in Brooklyn, where on 8 February 1860 he led a nine-year-old African-American girl onto the stage and announced that she was a fugitive slave. In graphic language, Beecher described the brutal treatment she would receive if she were returned to her master in the South. Beecher then simulated a mock “slave auction,” inviting congregants to purchase the child’s freedom and hence safeguard her salvation. This episode illustrates for Jackson how, after the Second Great Awakening, revivalism began to shift from “an intense inward focus on the individual’s conversion and salvation” to “a broader focus on the social, on the salvation of community,” first through the abolitionist movement and, later, through the “interventionist credo” of the Social Gospel (190).

Illustrated sermons were hardly new then—Jackson proves that they had antecedents as far back as Jonathan Edwards—yet McPherson’s tended to focus less on social transformation than on the problem of piety in a modern, secular world. Thus, Sister Aimee is also relevant to Jackson’s study because she substantiates his claim that in the twentieth century, a growing emphasis on being “born-again” in effect “redirected evangelicalism from the social back to the individual among emerging charismatic and, later, fundamentalist evangelicals” (212). If American evangelicals developed “a national ethic of social intervention” (5) in the nineteenth century, culminating in the Social Gospel, they had largely abandoned such activism by the time Angelus Temple was founded in the early 1920s. In illustrated sermons like “The Heavenly Airplane” and “Arrested for Speeding,” for instance, McPherson pioneered a therapeutic ethos that would become a salient aspect of evangelicalism by the mid-twentieth century. “If Christ were alive today,” she declared, “he’d preach modern parables...