Clutching to "Christian" America: Aimee Semple McPherson, the Great Depression, and the Origins of Pentecostal Political Activism

In 1934 pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson went on a national preaching tour to promote her political sermon "America Awake!" Praising "those staunch souls" who were "lifting up hand and voice" to turn the nation "back to the Faith of Our Fathers," she challenged what she perceived as the nation's secularizing trends. More than two million people—one in every fifty Americans—attended her meetings in addition to even larger audiences that listened in by radio. While she was traveling through Washington, D.C., her publicist, Guido Orlando, introduced the charismatic preacher to Louisiana Senator Huey Long. According to Orlando, "The Kingfish and the Angel clicked so well that, before I could get Aimee out of there, they had decided to run for President and Vice President on the same independent ticket." Long's assassination the following year foiled the potential plan, leaving no way to confirm Orlando's account. What can be confirmed from abundant new sources is that McPherson was far more politically active and her influence far greater than historians have realized.¹

Between the 1925 Scopes Trial and Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, scholars for the most part have written religious conservatives out of the American political scene. Only the anti-Semitic, fascist extremists lurking at the margins or culturally withdrawn, sectarian fundamentalists have attracted attention during these decades, while pentecostals have been ignored.² In the late twentieth century, historians and political scientists, by contrast, have recognized the impact that pentecostals—the largest subgroup within modern Christian evangelicalism—have had on later-day American politics. Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001) highlights the contributions of Orange County, California, pastor Chuck Smith to the creation of a new right; Alan Brinkley examines televangelist Oral Roberts's powerful religious empire; and Michael Lienesch illuminates former presidential candidate and media mogul Pat Robertson's influence on conservatism. The 2001 appointment of pentecostal John Ashcroft as Attorney General further validates what these students of the new right have been arguing: pentecostals do indeed expect to play a leading role in American politics. But when and why did pentecostals move from the "otherworldly" stance, which had presumably characterized the majority since the 1920s, to the political engagement we associate with these pentecostal representatives of the contemporary religious right?³

Most pre–World War II white pentecostals, such as those in John Ashcroft's Assemblies of God, spent little time on political pursuits. They believed that Jesus' second coming was imminent and that focusing on "earthly" issues was futile—God had destined the world for destruction and the time was at hand. They added to their eschatological argument a scriptural justification, rejecting political activism on the basis of Matthew 22:21, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Ernest Williams, the Assemblies' General Superintendent asked, "Shall the Church leave its place in the Kingdom of God to dabble in the affairs of men? To do so," he replied, "would prove it to be a feeble failure." Similarly, Assemblies leader Alice Luce queried, "Shall we try to improve matters by entering into politics, and by raising our voices against the graft and corruption we see on every hand? This does not seem to be the Bible way. God's plan . . . in all ages involved a separation from the world."⁴

Accordingly, many pentecostals maintained a rigid separation between Christianity and politics. Yet one leading pentecostal figure interpreted Jesus' instruction differently. Although Aimee Semple McPherson shared the Assemblies of God's eschatology, and even wrote one of her first books warning readers of the coming apocalypse, over time she developed a more moderate, "this worldly," focus.⁵ She saw in Matthew 22:21 and other biblical passages not a mandate for withdrawal but a directive to work within the nation's political institutions for a more Christian nation. Using a flashy, socially attuned, "show biz" style that distinguished her from rural southern and midwestern pentecostal leaders, she pushed...