Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson by Claire Hoffman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

By Ann Fabian

My friends all say they’ve heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, although they aren’t sure why. Something to do with religion, they say. Some kind of scandal, they add. Even if memories are vague, they’re sure she’s one of those 20th-century characters likely to show up as a mid-priced Jeopardy question.

After they’ve read journalist Claire Hoffman’s wonderful biography, Sister Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, they’ll be plenty ready to answer their McPherson quiz. Yes, McPherson was a religious figure—the presiding genius of the Angelus Temple, the country’s first megachurch, and the Founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church, a denomination that still claims some 8 million adherents around the world.

And, yes, her life and her work did get embroiled in scandal when, at the height of her fame in May 1926, she up and disappeared during a sermon-writing afternoon on the beach in Santa Monica. McPherson told her secretary she was going for a swim, but she didn’t come out of the water. McPherson reappeared in Arizona a month later amid a swirl of gossip and rumor. Had she been kidnapped? Trafficked by a network of white slavers? Or had she spent the month in a love-nest with her radio operator? To this day, no one knows precisely what happened. Or why. But plenty of evidence suggests that the whole thing was staged.

We cynical secularists have filed McPherson’s story among the excesses of early Hollywood. But what makes Hoffman’s book so good is her ability to entertain both the miracle of McPherson’s faith and the tawdry mystery of her feigned disappearance. McPherson’s story of the kidnapping may well have been a hoax, but in Hoffman’s telling McPherson herself was not a hoax. Her faith was genuine, a mystery in its own right. And her appeal to the working-class faithful newly settled in Los Angeles, even with its staged Biblical pageants, was as legitimate a religious expression as any kind of high church sermonizing.

McPherson was born in 1890 on a farm in Ontario, Canada. Her mother was an ardent devotee of the Salvation Army and dedicated young Aimee to future service of the Lord. Or so the story goes. But it was an encounter with the Irish-born preacher Robert James Semple that sent McPherson on her own evangelical path. She married Semple in 1908, just shy of her 18th birthday, and the two followed his call to convert China. Robert died of dysentery in Hong Kong and widowed Aimee and a young daughter made their way back to the states. Her mother, a steadying force in her life, joined the pair in New York.

It took McPherson some time to find her way to her evangelical gifts. Hoffman skillfully conjures a world awash in a new Pentecostalism—a religious movement defined by prophecy, speaking in tongues, the power to heal by faith and confidence that Jesus would soon return to earth. Pentecostalism was, Hoffman writes, “a pivotal moment in the history of religion. Church historians at the time would call it a new element in the religious life of the world. The visible manifestation of the divine into the bodies of the individual as an act of grace became a radical act of egalitarianism that would change the shape of global Christianity in the century to come.” The experience of Jesus was “personal and palpable.”

McPherson rode this wave of Pentecostalism. With a new husband in tow—the mild-mannered Harold McPherson—Aimee, dressed in white, preached her way through the south and Midwest. She “harnessed the wildness of Pentecostal spirit and used her charisma to draw people in.” Hoffman describes her as “spellbinding, hypnotic, powerful. People stood on tiptoe to watch her. She was like an ancient priestess, conjuring elemental and divine powers and funneling them down into the tent, to the hungry multitude.”

In 1918, after three years on the road, preaching, camping and living out of her” Gospel Car,” McPherson headed to Los Angeles—“one of the fastest-growing cities in the history of the world.” In five years, the lady evangelist was presiding over the Angelus Temple—the largest church in America—a celebrity in a celebrity-obsessed town, one more outsize character among the bootleggers, mobsters, dreamers, hicks, starlets, reporters and politicians. Not a surprise that an other-worldly faith might flounder in this very worldly metropolis.

Hoffman works through the allegations that arose in the wake of McPherson’s disappearance and return. She follows the trials for fraud and perjury that stretched on for the better part of a year. A different sort of historian might have settled on one explanation for the events and dug a smoking gun out of the archival record. Hoffman’s interest seems to lie more with McPherson’s exuberant Pentecostal aspiration than with her scandalous unraveling. The Temple went through some financial struggles in the 1930s, and McPherson’s ran it for decades following her unhappy death in 1944.

It could be that Hoffman’s own history helps explain her sympathy, not for the content of McPherson’s Pentecostal beliefs, but for the vision and energy that fueled those beliefs. Hoffman grew up in a community based on faith, describing her parents as members of Transcendental Meditation Movement and followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She went on to earn a graduate degree in religious studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School. But she also knows the celebrity world that derailed McPherson. Hoffman cut her journalist’s teeth writing about the costs of celebrity for Amy Winehouse, David Lynch, Prince and Justin Bieber.

We are lucky that Hoffman’s fascination “with the relationship between heaven and earth,” her skill with celebrity interviews and her taste for ocean swimming brought her to Aimee Semple McPherson. She has given us a very fine portrait of faith, celebrity, California and the unsettled chaos of the modernizing United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Ann Fabian grew up in the shadow of the Angelus Temple. She lives in New York and writes about books.