Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review by George Yatchisin
Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep poking their, in the most recent case, oddly orange-tinged heads up far too often in history. That makes Clarie Hoffman’s steady, insightful biography Sister, Sinner, an examination of the fantastic and tragic life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, all the more timely. An early 20th century powerhouse, McPherson arguably created the first megachurch (what became the Foursquare Church, which still has over 6500 congregations globally today) and was wise enough to be the first woman to preach on the radio, too. Her style of Pentecostal ceremonies featured staged spectacle, from camels to faux police motorcycles, big choirs, some speaking in tongues.
But the most important voice was always Aimee’s. Her goal was to make one’s relationship with the lord more personal—her original magazine from her church was the Song of Solomon inspired The Bridal Call. As Hoffman puts it, “Aimee’s words were a sort of heavenly come-hither, a promise of intimacy with the divine, a lifting up away from all the darkness that was gathering in the world.” But, often drawing her sermons from her life—and what a life it was—“She emphasized her fallibility, always,” Hoffman further explains, “She was prideful and prone to make foolish mistakes, but all of this made her more adorable and magnetic.”
The most foolish mistake turned into one of the great scandals of the 1920s. For in 1926 she vanished when swimming at Santa Monica Beach. A month later her mother Millie (and the book also chronicles their great mother-daughter saga) held a memorial service at the Angelus Temple only to get a phone call that evening—Aimee was alive in Arizona. Her tale? She’d been kidnapped, threatened with white slavery, managed to escape, traversed the desert for 20 miles.
The tale didn’t hold water, though, partially because she didn’t show up dying from thirst. More and more details failed to add up, and the voracious press, fueled by the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Examiner battling to out-scoop each other, had a field day finding new witnesses and clues. Eventually it seemed clear—although Hoffman never directly chooses a side—that Aimee may have runoff to Carmel with Kenneth Ormiston, the operator of her radio station. In a line that makes you think, “Oh, the roaring 1920s,” Hoffman writes of Ormiston, “He was married to an Australian ice cream heiress, but rumors were he got around.”
The scandal rocked not just the church but much of the world, as McPherson existed on a fame level equal to Charlie Chaplin (no stranger to sexual scandal himself). Hoffman takes us clearly and unjudgmentally through each step of the succeeding court inquests and trials (trials would become a feature, not a bug, for the latter years of the preacher’s life), all wrapped in the miasma of Los Angeles politics. Aimee counter-attacked anyone who wouldn’t standby her, including rival preachers and even more so Catholics who didn’t brook fiery Pentecostalism. Hoffman wisely kicks off Part II of the book with the McPherson quote: “I believe there is such faith in Angelus Temple and loyalty to its pastor that if an angel from heaven were to come down and say, ‘Sister is not the child of God,’ they would not believe it.” How can one not think of Trump and his line about getting off scot-free for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue after reading that?
Hoffman, if anything, is too fair to her subject. At times one might wish for more authorial analysis, more shading in what at times reads like reporting versus the more in depth work of biography. For instance, not to get too Freudian, but when the young Aimee speaks in tongues for the first time, which to her means God has chosen her, well, couldn’t this ecstasy be a redirect of “sinful” sexual urges in a pubescent? Of course, Hoffman has her reasons to take it easy on her subject—she attended divinity school herself, and clearly approaches as someone hoping to understand faith from the inside, as opposed to a religious skeptic (like this reviewer, say) who assumes as soon as a religion gets organized it loses its credibility.
The more powerful reason Hoffman might defend McPherson is one we have yet to overcome in the U.S.—much of the ways the world responded to Sister Aimee were based on her gender. She was an outlier as a woman preacher, and then everything that still plagues women in power today followed along to belittle her, right down to a lot of discussion about the size of her ankles, not just in the news pages, but in courtrooms too.
While scandal is what sold newspapers in the 1920s (and, perhaps, this book in the 2020s?), there’s little doubt that despite the book’s title, Hoffman sees Aimee as Sister first and Sinner as an afterthought. “She had a sense of herself as divinely chosen,” Hoffman writes, accepting that truth for McPherson as fact. Especially as Hoffman then extrapolates, “That sense allowed her to ignore or bypass all the ways—large and small—that she was expected to hold herself back as a woman. She got to be big because she saw herself on a cosmic playing field.”
