Sister Amiss
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
by Matthew
Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press, 2007
(351 pages, $26.95, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
Matthew Avery Sutton, of the history faculty at Oakland University (of which this reviewer is an alumnus), himself raised in the environs of the Foursquare Church of Sister Aimee’s founding, has done what he can in this book to cast her as something of a world-historical character. Because he has written an honest and workmanlike biography, however, he has in the end drawn the portrait of a woman who, while in many ways extraordinary, and a memorable character in the fantastic cavalcade of American folk religion, lacks something of the symbolic weight he seems to have set out to find.
Walk My Way
Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy, born in Ontario into a pious Protestant family in 1890, was converted to Pentecostalism by Robert Semple, an evangelist she married in 1908. The Semples left their home in Chicago for the China mission field in 1910, where Robert contracted malaria and died. Soon after his death Aimee gave birth to a daughter, Roberta.
She returned to the United States, destitute and miserable, joined the Salvation Army in New York, and married Harold McPherson, a successful businessman who was able to provide her with a comfortable home, and by whom she bore her son, Rolf, who would upon her death succeed her as president of the denomination she founded.
But home life depressed Aimee. She recalled that during this time the Holy Spirit persistently urged her to “preach the Word,” asking, “Will you go? Will you go?” Her health deteriorated, and she came to believe that God was offering her the choice to do his work on earth or be taken to heaven. She agreed to obey, left home with her two children, and went to her parents’ house in Canada without telling Harold.
After her arrival in Ontario, she telegraphed her husband with an invitation: “I have tried to walk your way and have failed. Won’t you come now and walk my way?” Harold responded with letters asking her to return immediately, “wash the dishes,” “take care of the house,” and “act like other women,” but McPherson never again adhered to traditional gender norms or returned to domesticity.
Abandoned by Aimee, and refusing to join her in ministry as a traveling evangelist, Harold divorced her on grounds of desertion.
In 1918 Aimee and her mother arrived in Los Angeles, where they decided to stay. By 1923 her healing services and dramatic preaching had brought her a huge following and enough money to erect the massive, domed, Angelus Temple.
Untraditional Evangelist
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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