Hollywood Religion

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 29 Giberson to bepublished by Harvard University Press. 1 Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals andAmerican Culture (Harvard University Press, 2001), 271. Of these southern denominations only forty-one provide U.S. membership figures, totaling more than 6,549,278, still a conservative estimate. J. Gordon Melton, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Religions, vol. 1 (Triumph Books, 1991), 231-291. Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 15-19. Walter Russell Mead, "God's Country," foreignaffairs.org (September—October 2006). 2 Duncan Aikman, "Holy Rollers," American Mercury 15 (October 1928): 183. 3 Anna Kelly, "More about Women Preaching," The Holiness Advocate, March 1, 1906, 5. 4 "John Dull's Letter," Live Coals of Fire, December 15, 1899, 7. s Aikman, "Holy Rollers," 183. * Gastona Gazette, April 15 and December 6, 1910, quoted in Liston Liston Pope, Mil/hands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (Yale University Press, 1942), 129. Hollywood Religion* Matthew Avery Sutton Pentecostalism has gone Hollywood. From Paul and Jan Crouch's lavish Trinity Broadcasting Network, to Jim and Tammy Bakker's now defunct media empire, to Pat Robertson's groundbreaking work with satellite technology and cable television, it is evident that American Pentecostals have found spiritual renewal on Sunset Boulevard almost as often as in the Book of Acts. Integrating Tinseltown panache with the old-time religion better than just about any other modern religious group, Pentecostals have created one of die fastest growing and largest religious movements in the world. But it wasn't always this way. While baseball-player-turned-preacher Billy Sunday was popping into die headlines and religious modernists were battling fundamentalists for the soul of Protestantism, Pentecostals in the first decades of the 20di century generally kept a low profile. In fact, one of the first profession historians to tackle Pentecostalism labeled it a movement of the "disinherited."1 But this all changed with the advent of the spectacular, charismatic , Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She integrated show business pizzazz with a tongues-speaking, holy-rolling faith; she adopted the latest technologies to market herself and her message to the nation ; and she ushered the Pentecostal movement in from the margins of American culture to the mainstream . And it was no coincidence that she did it from just outside of Hollywood. McPherson was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy to James and Mildred (Minnie) Kennedy near Ingersoll, Ontario, on October 9, 1890. Her * Adapted and reprinted by permission of the publisher from Aimee Semple McPherson andthe Resurrection of ChristianAmerica by Matthew Avery Sutton, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved . Aimee Semple McPherson dressed as motorcycle cop for a sermon entitled "Arrested for Speeding." Used by permission of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Heritage Department. father was a farmer and her mother worked for the Salvation Army. A bright and popular student, she excelled in the classroom—until exposure to Darwinian theories of evolution shook her faith. But this crisis came to a happy end when a Pentecostal revivalist came to town in 1907. Aimee, curious about the new evangelical movement that purportedly encouraged strange behaviors, attended a service . There she met Robert Semple, a fiery young preacher and Irish immigrant. She found both Semple and his message irresistible, and in August 1908 the couple married. The union ended in tragedy just a few years later when Robert succumbed to malaria, leaving his wife pregnant and alone. Aimee remarried, diis time to a middle-class businessman named Harold McPherson, with whom she had a second child. Aldiough she tried living as a traditional housewife, she believed that God wanted her to exchange her mop for the pulpit. In 1915 she packed up the two children, left her husband, and hit the road as an itinerant preacher. She believed that God had given her no other choice. During World War I, she crisscrossed die nation in a "gospel car" painted with the slogan "Where will you spend eternity?" She arrived in Los Angeles for the first time in December 1918, completing a transcontinental journey. She believed...