Cult of Personality

Several years ago, I spent an afternoon on tour with my church as we retraced the life of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. Normally, I am very skittish about such “historical” tours, simply because they usually turn out to be little more than hagiographic excursions through an imagined past. The trip to Angelus Temple included the typical stops—the miracle room, for instance, where all the wheelchairs, crutches, eyeglasses were on display. In fact, the elderly tour guide spent most of the time regaling us with stories of the miracles that occurred at the Temple; it was clear that her presentation was heartfelt, since she was near tears through many of the stories. I felt then what I have known about Foursquare folk for quite a while—Aimee is special.

The rest of the tour was unremarkable, apart from the graveside prayer at Forest Lawn at the end of the excursion. The tour guide made brief mention of the scandalous escapades in which Aimee was allegedly involved, then dismissed their importance: after all, Aimee saved souls, she was Spirit-filled, and that is what we should hold as critical in assessing her life. Many Foursquare folk prefer an imagined past. In Aimee’s parlor room at the Foursquare museum just off Angelus Temple, mundane objects like hairbrushes and makeup keep this average-looking, exceptionally human, profoundly complex woman frozen forever.

That tour reinforced a lesson I’ve learned in over twenty years of studying and worshipping with Pentecostals: the Pentecostal cult of personality tells us more about who Pentecostals are than it does about the leaders they hold in such high esteem. Why is it that American Pentecostal history is so full of these colorful characters? Pentecostal spirituality can be quite a democratizing experience: ideally, we all can do the miraculous, we all can speak in tongues and interpret them, heal the sick, and cast out demons. Our leaders are our role models, but along the way, they become much more than that. Why? Perhaps because they represent us to a skeptical world that won’t credit our spiritual gifts but will be compelled to pay attention to larger-than-life figures such as Sister Aimee. For their boldness, their willingness to step out in front of that cynical audience, to bear the burden of ridicule and disbelief, these stars gain our lifelong allegiance.

Such uncritical loyalty seems misplaced. The unwillingness of contemporary Foursquare folks to take the measure of Sister Aimee’s failings, moral and otherwise, suggests a deeply ingrained evasiveness, a habit of living in denial. When the Sister Aimees of the Pentecostal world appear to “fall”—the case ofÂ Ted Haggard comes to mind—too many believers explain away such conduct with talk of “spiritual warfare,” rather than acknowledge the harsh reality that what people believe and what people do are often two different things. It’s as if the leaders must be kept securely on their pedestals in order for ordinary Pentecostals to maintain their own sense of spiritual purity.

While Edith Blumhofer’s and Daniel Epstein’s biographies focused more attention on the early years of McPherson’s ministry, Matthew Avery Sutton’s Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America places its subject in the cultural milieu of early 20th-century Los Angeles politics and entertainment and takes her story much further. Sutton’s book reads like a traditional historical narrative. There are few arguments with scholars of Pentecostal history here, and those few are relegated to the endnotes. While Sutton tells us in the notes that his approach to popular culture has been influenced by the neo-Marxist culture-critic Fredric Jameson, “who argues that popular culture is the battlefield on which struggles for social dominance are played out,” there is little overt theoretical analysis in the text itself. Some readers, of course, will be grateful for a book that’s largely free of jargon.

What particularly stands out is Sutton’s treatment of gender issues. His sympathetic portrayal of Aimee is not reserved for the Pentecostal evangelist but also extends to Aimee the lonely, depressed single mom. He contextualizes her sexuality both within the genteel evangelical circles of the day and the very different culture of the Hollywood beauty machine. The sexualizing of Aimee’s every move, her clothing, her sermons, her ministry in general, tells us much about how evangelical women are drawn into a seemingly endless struggle, in which representations of virtuous Christian womanhood seem to be irreconcilable with everyday humanity. There are no more deeply felt passages in Sutton’s book than those in which he considers the hidden loneliness that Aimee feared sharing with anyone. How could Aimee display the human need for physical intimacy if she had to maintain the mantle of purity that is the burden of all Pentecostal women? Sutton’s account of Aimee’s search for companionship and the debilitating toll her “kidnapping” took on her mentally as well as physically (in 1926, she disappeared for 36 days, then concocted a bizarre tale of kidnapping that led to a lengthy trial, the equivalent in its day of the O. J. Simpson trial) is the most persuasive portrayal of this episode to date; it also sheds light on the continuing struggles of Pentecostal women called to ministry in a man’s world.

Another strength of Sutton’s book is his exhaustive work on the political nature of Aimee’s ministry and how, not simply as a forerunner of television preachers but also of the Christian Right, Aimee was a political player, consumed by the desire to right the American ship of state back to an ideal Christian past. Detailing her alliances with everyone from William Jennings Bryan to local Los Angeles politicos, Sutton sharpens the picture for us: Aimee was an evangelist, yes, but one who hoped to reshape American politics along fundamentalist lines. This political side of Aimee would also be seen in her attempts to refurbish her public image, which took a beating in the aftermath of the kidnapping story.

If Sutton’s book has a weakness, it would be his treatment of Aimee’s relations with racial and ethnic minorities. He is to be applauded for excavating the KKK connection—Aimee sometimes condemned the Klan but other times “asked for and received its support”—but his treatment of race in relation to Aimee’s rather large following in the Mexican community, for example, isn’t comparably nuanced. Sutton does well in noting that when she needed an expedient excuse for her kidnapping story, Aimee reverted to racist stereotypes, going so far as to chastise the media for accepting the word of a “Mexican” over hers. Aimee, like so many early white Pentecostal leaders, preached racial inclusion—and in her case, practiced it—but it would be wrong to suggest that racial inclusion in any way meant racial equality. While many Mexicans took shelter at Angelus Temple during the Great Depression and were fed and clothed by her ministry, there were many more who, for political expediency, were carted off to be repatriated to Mexico (whether they were American citizens or not). Aimee was silent on this issue. Sutton leaves us with the picture of Aimee vacillating: wanting to be integrationist, wanting be color blind, and yet, in reality, not being able to be much of either. This is true as far it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Readers would have been better served if Sutton had directly engaged the ongoing debate among Pentecostal historians, many of whom view the early years of Pentecostalism as a “golden age” of race relations, whereas many others among us view such claims as overstated at best, and baseless at worst.

Still, Sutton’s book is an impressive work. I highly recommend it, not just because it tells a good story—though it certainly does that—but also because its insights into the Pentecostal cult of personality are all too relevant today.

Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh is associate professor of Church History and Latino Church Studies at Azusa Pacific University, and is (still) licensed in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.