Sister Christian
Transcript
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
For in the me, even in Jesus the Christ, is the solution for all your problems. The haven of rest for every storm-tossed soul, the pillow of comfort for every weary head.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That is the voice of one of radio’s true pioneers, though for her it was just a means to an end. Aimee Semple McPherson was most famous for her personal brand of thrilling, seductive Pentecostal evangelism. Back nearly a century ago, when the electronic media was just being born, McPherson already was the model of the modern self-made media sensation. She’d established her reputation for faith healing and sermonizing on the tent revival circuit, but it’s when she set down roots in Los Angeles in the early 1920s that her holy rolling really hit its stride.
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of the new book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. He says that for every Los Angeleno drawn to her church, there was an unsuspecting future congregant first captivated by her voice on the radio.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Radio was one of the first things she embraced in terms of the new technology of the 1920s. She actually claims to be the first woman to preach on radio, although she probably was not. Once she settles in Los Angeles, she decides she wants her own radio station, and so she’s able to build a state-of-the-art top of the line station, which opened in February of 1924. And it was one of the most powerful early stations in the western United States.
Even there are some reports that it might have been picked up in Australia. You could hear her north into Canada and south into Mexico, and so this just had a tremendous influence.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Didn’t she have a faith-healing show where she invited listeners to put their hands on the radio to be healed by her prayers?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
She did. In the early years, one of the things that really catapulted her into the national spotlight was she had this remarkable ability to lay hands on people, pray for them, and many of them were seemingly healed.
And so, she transferred this into radio, by once again saying that she believed the Holy Spirit had told her that there was somebody out there who needed to be healed of a particular affliction. And then she would say, you know, whoever you are, wherever you are, put your hands on your radio and let the power of the spirit flow through the radio to you. And so, people would actually do this. And it was very much a precursor to some of the things that televangelists have done in more recent years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She brought her style of tent revivals to her church. What could people expect when they went into her church?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
McPherson’s church was the most exciting place to be on a Sunday night. It had 5,300 mahogany opera chairs. There was a center stage. There was a giant orchestra. She had a beautiful choir. And every Sunday night she actually had an elaborate set designed and constructed. She had top-of-the- line lighting. And then she would reenact with a whole series of actors different Biblical stories.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
They always say, never use children or animals. Did she? [LAUGHS]
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
[LAUGHS] She did, yeah. [BROOKE LAUGHS] She always had children up there. She had sheep in the church. She had dogs. She would also use animals outside of the church, at one time posing with camels, another time posing with a lion from the L.A. Zoo. And she was able to use her connections with the movie studios to use the trained animals that were also being used by the film industry. This was the best show in town, and it was free.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She wasn’t just out there collecting parishioners. She was also assembling the media elite.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
One of the things that Aimee had learned while she was on the road, before she gets to Los Angeles, is how important it was to have sympathetic press. So when she sets up in L.A., right away she hires a public relations manager and she hires publicity experts. And every day she obliges the press with different candid photographs or with a quote. She has coffee ready for them every day, which apparently a lot of the movie studios gave out whiskey, and so McPherson countered that with her coffee, to try and sober up the reporters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So that brings us to the nascent film industry in Hollywood. She wanted to create what she called “talkie sermons,” but there were other people who advised her to stay away, because, for instance, the Hollywood movie industry was run by Jews.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Yeah, film was really controversial. Part of it was the anti-Semitism in the Fundamentalist movement and the Pentecostal movement. Part of it also was just seeing Hollywood as very secular, as very amoral, as sensationalizing and sexualizing.
But McPherson, especially once film went to the talkies, she believed this had the potential to revolutionize religious faith in the United States, and so she wanted to jump into that. And so right away she incorporated a film company and she began working with the best and biggest producers in Hollywood to try to create a film based on her own life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And how did that work out?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It actually didn’t, and I didn’t really know why when I was just in the archives reading the written sources, until I actually saw the footage that remains of her. And she’s not very comfortable on camera. She was so good on the stage, she was so good on the radio, but on film she looks a little awkward, not quite sure where to look or what to do. And so, the film projects eventually fizzled. The camera just didn’t love her.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
On the other hand, the camera seemed to love depictions of her created by other people.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Yeah. McPherson’s techniques, her use of media, her flamboyance, raised a lot of controversies, and so many people thought she was a charlatan. And there were also rumors of sexual improprieties, and so other Hollywood films sensationalized this. Frank Capra did The Miracle Woman in 1931, starring Barbara Stanwyck, which was based on McPherson.
[CLIP]:
BARBARA STANWYCK:
You want to know why I’m going away? [CRYING] Because I’m a fake, and all those people that tell about the good things I’ve done, they’re fakes too. They’re paid to testify! It’s lies, all lies! I’m not going away, I’m running away.
ACTOR:
What from?
BARBARA STANWYCK:
From all those people I’ve robbed and cheated, those people that think I perform miracles. Miracles!
[END OF CLIP]
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Elmer Gantry was made in the 1960s, obviously based on the novel, and both the novel and the film were based on McPherson.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, an incident in 1926 would change her life and the steady growth of the church. Tell us briefly about her abduction and how she framed it.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
One afternoon in the spring of 1926, McPherson had gone swimming. She’d gone down to the beach with an assistant. At one point the assistant looked up and the evangelist had just vanished. She stayed gone for over a month. Her church members, her mother, her family - they all believed she had died, that she had probably drowned.
Well suddenly, she reappeared in the border town of Agua Prieta, just south of Douglas, Arizona, with this fantastic tale of kidnapping.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
A lot of people thought that was a bunch of hooey, right, that she had actually run off with her radio engineer.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Right. He had actually disappeared at about the same time McPherson did, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the Los Angeles media that he had been in northern California with a heavily disguised lover. And so, the question then became, was McPherson this secret lover?
Eventually this ended up playing out in the Los Angeles courts. And so, McPherson was set to go to trial in 1927 until the charges were, at the last minute, dropped.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
How did the press treat this trial?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It absolutely captivated the Los Angeles newspapers, which were competing for readers, in an era in which L.A. is doubling in size. But it also got the attention of the national papers. The New York Times did almost a hundred articles on the kidnapping over the course of 1926, which was roughly the same number of articles it had done on the Scopes Trial –
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Incredible.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
- to give you a sense of comparison. And the national magazines all picked up the story: Vanity Fair; The New Republic; The Nation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And yet, by the early ‘30s, she had rehabilitated her image somewhat. She was a provider of free meals during the Depression, and she was a strident voice against Communism and Fascism. Didn’t that help?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It did. She seems to regain her footing in the early- to mid-‘30s. Part of it was the Depression. She had always been interested in social welfare work, but she also recognized that her efforts to become a Hollywood star had failed, that the media had turned on her.
And so, what she does is, she really returns to her Pentecostal roots. She begins bringing African-Americans into her church and preaching side-by-side with them. She begins emphasizing women’s rights again, and she begins embracing the more controversial practices of Pentecostalism, things like speaking in tongues that she had downplayed in her early years, because she knew you don’t want people speaking in tongues on the radio or everybody’s going to think you’re crazy. But by the late ‘30s she didn’t care so much anymore.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You suggest that one of her greatest innovations, the one that stays with us today, is to equate evangelicalism with patriotism.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
McPherson really came to believe that in the same way that God had chosen the Middle East for the birth of Christ, she believed that God had chosen the United States for this last, final revival before the apocalypse. And so for her, this meant it was as important as anything to make sure that America maintained what she saw as its Christian foundations. And she really encourages Pentecostals for the first time, who had been focused on otherworldly issues, to make sure and bear down and get involved in the rough and tumble world of American political life.
And with that then came the sense of nationalism, this idea that it was God’s will for American Christians to take their message and to spread it throughout the rest of the globe.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Matthew, thank you very much.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Thank you so much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Matthew Sutton is the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
[CLIP][PIANO PLAYING] [SINGING]:
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
My precious Lord –
CHOIR:
My precious Lord –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
Has won my heart –
CHOIR:
Has won my heart –
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON:
And never from –
CHOIR:
And never from –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
Him will I part.
CHOIR:
Him will I part.
ALL:
My precious Lord Has won my heart
And never from him will I part.
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
I ain’ta gonna grieve –
CHOIR:
I ain’ta gonna grieve –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
My Lord anymore.
CHOIR:
My Lord anymore.
[“I AIN’T GONNA GRIEVE MY LORD ANYMORE”
UP AND UNDER]
ARUN RATH:
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo and Nazanin Rafsanjani, and edited – by Brooke. Dylan Keefe was our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Christopher Werth and Andy Lanset. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, mp3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
ARUN RATH:
And I’m Arun Rath. Garfield will be back next week.
[SINGING OUT]
For in the me, even in Jesus the Christ, is the solution for all your problems. The haven of rest for every storm-tossed soul, the pillow of comfort for every weary head.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That is the voice of one of radio’s true pioneers, though for her it was just a means to an end. Aimee Semple McPherson was most famous for her personal brand of thrilling, seductive Pentecostal evangelism. Back nearly a century ago, when the electronic media was just being born, McPherson already was the model of the modern self-made media sensation. She’d established her reputation for faith healing and sermonizing on the tent revival circuit, but it’s when she set down roots in Los Angeles in the early 1920s that her holy rolling really hit its stride.
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of the new book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. He says that for every Los Angeleno drawn to her church, there was an unsuspecting future congregant first captivated by her voice on the radio.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Radio was one of the first things she embraced in terms of the new technology of the 1920s. She actually claims to be the first woman to preach on radio, although she probably was not. Once she settles in Los Angeles, she decides she wants her own radio station, and so she’s able to build a state-of-the-art top of the line station, which opened in February of 1924. And it was one of the most powerful early stations in the western United States.
Even there are some reports that it might have been picked up in Australia. You could hear her north into Canada and south into Mexico, and so this just had a tremendous influence.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Didn’t she have a faith-healing show where she invited listeners to put their hands on the radio to be healed by her prayers?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
She did. In the early years, one of the things that really catapulted her into the national spotlight was she had this remarkable ability to lay hands on people, pray for them, and many of them were seemingly healed.
And so, she transferred this into radio, by once again saying that she believed the Holy Spirit had told her that there was somebody out there who needed to be healed of a particular affliction. And then she would say, you know, whoever you are, wherever you are, put your hands on your radio and let the power of the spirit flow through the radio to you. And so, people would actually do this. And it was very much a precursor to some of the things that televangelists have done in more recent years.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She brought her style of tent revivals to her church. What could people expect when they went into her church?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
McPherson’s church was the most exciting place to be on a Sunday night. It had 5,300 mahogany opera chairs. There was a center stage. There was a giant orchestra. She had a beautiful choir. And every Sunday night she actually had an elaborate set designed and constructed. She had top-of-the- line lighting. And then she would reenact with a whole series of actors different Biblical stories.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
They always say, never use children or animals. Did she? [LAUGHS]
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
[LAUGHS] She did, yeah. [BROOKE LAUGHS] She always had children up there. She had sheep in the church. She had dogs. She would also use animals outside of the church, at one time posing with camels, another time posing with a lion from the L.A. Zoo. And she was able to use her connections with the movie studios to use the trained animals that were also being used by the film industry. This was the best show in town, and it was free.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She wasn’t just out there collecting parishioners. She was also assembling the media elite.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
One of the things that Aimee had learned while she was on the road, before she gets to Los Angeles, is how important it was to have sympathetic press. So when she sets up in L.A., right away she hires a public relations manager and she hires publicity experts. And every day she obliges the press with different candid photographs or with a quote. She has coffee ready for them every day, which apparently a lot of the movie studios gave out whiskey, and so McPherson countered that with her coffee, to try and sober up the reporters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So that brings us to the nascent film industry in Hollywood. She wanted to create what she called “talkie sermons,” but there were other people who advised her to stay away, because, for instance, the Hollywood movie industry was run by Jews.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Yeah, film was really controversial. Part of it was the anti-Semitism in the Fundamentalist movement and the Pentecostal movement. Part of it also was just seeing Hollywood as very secular, as very amoral, as sensationalizing and sexualizing.
But McPherson, especially once film went to the talkies, she believed this had the potential to revolutionize religious faith in the United States, and so she wanted to jump into that. And so right away she incorporated a film company and she began working with the best and biggest producers in Hollywood to try to create a film based on her own life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And how did that work out?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It actually didn’t, and I didn’t really know why when I was just in the archives reading the written sources, until I actually saw the footage that remains of her. And she’s not very comfortable on camera. She was so good on the stage, she was so good on the radio, but on film she looks a little awkward, not quite sure where to look or what to do. And so, the film projects eventually fizzled. The camera just didn’t love her.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
On the other hand, the camera seemed to love depictions of her created by other people.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Yeah. McPherson’s techniques, her use of media, her flamboyance, raised a lot of controversies, and so many people thought she was a charlatan. And there were also rumors of sexual improprieties, and so other Hollywood films sensationalized this. Frank Capra did The Miracle Woman in 1931, starring Barbara Stanwyck, which was based on McPherson.
[CLIP]:
BARBARA STANWYCK:
You want to know why I’m going away? [CRYING] Because I’m a fake, and all those people that tell about the good things I’ve done, they’re fakes too. They’re paid to testify! It’s lies, all lies! I’m not going away, I’m running away.
ACTOR:
What from?
BARBARA STANWYCK:
From all those people I’ve robbed and cheated, those people that think I perform miracles. Miracles!
[END OF CLIP]
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Elmer Gantry was made in the 1960s, obviously based on the novel, and both the novel and the film were based on McPherson.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Now, an incident in 1926 would change her life and the steady growth of the church. Tell us briefly about her abduction and how she framed it.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
One afternoon in the spring of 1926, McPherson had gone swimming. She’d gone down to the beach with an assistant. At one point the assistant looked up and the evangelist had just vanished. She stayed gone for over a month. Her church members, her mother, her family - they all believed she had died, that she had probably drowned.
Well suddenly, she reappeared in the border town of Agua Prieta, just south of Douglas, Arizona, with this fantastic tale of kidnapping.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
A lot of people thought that was a bunch of hooey, right, that she had actually run off with her radio engineer.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Right. He had actually disappeared at about the same time McPherson did, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the Los Angeles media that he had been in northern California with a heavily disguised lover. And so, the question then became, was McPherson this secret lover?
Eventually this ended up playing out in the Los Angeles courts. And so, McPherson was set to go to trial in 1927 until the charges were, at the last minute, dropped.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
How did the press treat this trial?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It absolutely captivated the Los Angeles newspapers, which were competing for readers, in an era in which L.A. is doubling in size. But it also got the attention of the national papers. The New York Times did almost a hundred articles on the kidnapping over the course of 1926, which was roughly the same number of articles it had done on the Scopes Trial –
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Incredible.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
- to give you a sense of comparison. And the national magazines all picked up the story: Vanity Fair; The New Republic; The Nation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And yet, by the early ‘30s, she had rehabilitated her image somewhat. She was a provider of free meals during the Depression, and she was a strident voice against Communism and Fascism. Didn’t that help?
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
It did. She seems to regain her footing in the early- to mid-‘30s. Part of it was the Depression. She had always been interested in social welfare work, but she also recognized that her efforts to become a Hollywood star had failed, that the media had turned on her.
And so, what she does is, she really returns to her Pentecostal roots. She begins bringing African-Americans into her church and preaching side-by-side with them. She begins emphasizing women’s rights again, and she begins embracing the more controversial practices of Pentecostalism, things like speaking in tongues that she had downplayed in her early years, because she knew you don’t want people speaking in tongues on the radio or everybody’s going to think you’re crazy. But by the late ‘30s she didn’t care so much anymore.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You suggest that one of her greatest innovations, the one that stays with us today, is to equate evangelicalism with patriotism.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
McPherson really came to believe that in the same way that God had chosen the Middle East for the birth of Christ, she believed that God had chosen the United States for this last, final revival before the apocalypse. And so for her, this meant it was as important as anything to make sure that America maintained what she saw as its Christian foundations. And she really encourages Pentecostals for the first time, who had been focused on otherworldly issues, to make sure and bear down and get involved in the rough and tumble world of American political life.
And with that then came the sense of nationalism, this idea that it was God’s will for American Christians to take their message and to spread it throughout the rest of the globe.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Matthew, thank you very much.
MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON:
Thank you so much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Matthew Sutton is the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
[CLIP][PIANO PLAYING] [SINGING]:
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
My precious Lord –
CHOIR:
My precious Lord –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
Has won my heart –
CHOIR:
Has won my heart –
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON:
And never from –
CHOIR:
And never from –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
Him will I part.
CHOIR:
Him will I part.
ALL:
My precious Lord Has won my heart
And never from him will I part.
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
I ain’ta gonna grieve –
CHOIR:
I ain’ta gonna grieve –
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON:
My Lord anymore.
CHOIR:
My Lord anymore.
[“I AIN’T GONNA GRIEVE MY LORD ANYMORE”
UP AND UNDER]
ARUN RATH:
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo and Nazanin Rafsanjani, and edited – by Brooke. Dylan Keefe was our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Christopher Werth and Andy Lanset. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, mp3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
ARUN RATH:
And I’m Arun Rath. Garfield will be back next week.
[SINGING OUT]
Produced by WNYC Studios