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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.
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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 of 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.
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