Product Description

From the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth Rock to Christian Coalition canvassers working for George W. Bush, Americans have long sought to integrate faith with politics. Few have been as successful as Hollywood evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

During the years between the two world wars, McPherson was the most flamboyant and controversial minister in the United States. She built an enormously successful and innovative megachurch, established a mass media empire, and produced spellbinding theatrical sermons that rivaled Tinseltown's spectacular shows. As McPherson's power grew, she moved beyond religion into the realm of politics, launching a national crusade to fight the teaching of evolution in the schools, defend Prohibition, and resurrect what she believed was the United States' Christian heritage. Convinced that the antichrist was working to destroy the nation's Protestant foundations, she and her allies saw themselves as a besieged minority called by God to join the "old time religion" to American patriotism.

Matthew Sutton's definitive study of Aimee Semple McPherson reveals the woman, most often remembered as the hypocritical vamp in Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, as a trail-blazing pioneer. Her life marked the beginning of Pentecostalism's advance from the margins of Protestantism to the mainstream of American culture. Indeed, from her location in Hollywood, McPherson's integration of politics with faith set precedents for the religious right, while her celebrity status, use of spectacle, and mass media savvy came to define modern evangelicalism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #565305 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 351 pages

From Booklist
Sinclair Lewis thought he had taken the measure of America's most prominent female evangelist when he created the notorious Sister Sharon Falconer in his novel Elmer Gantry. Sutton thinks otherwise, discerning in McPherson a complex personality far more interesting than Lewis' fictional hypocrite. Passionately committed to ancient scripture, McPherson was savvy in the use of emerging media technologies. An advocate of Victorian social values, she transgressed traditional gender roles to perform her ministry. McPherson cultivated her celebrity by showcasing her physical beauty and weaving provocatively erotic themes into her sermons--and destroyed her status by stumbling into sexual scandal. After years as a leper, McPherson reemerged as a religious leader when she reached out to African Americans and others at the social margin. But Sutton helps readers see in McPherson more than one paradoxical woman: her Foursquare Gospel helped catalyze a fundamental cultural realignment that brought Pentecostals and Evangelicals into the American mainstream, transforming American politics in ways that continue to write today's headlines. A nuanced portrait of an entire movement. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Matthew Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson may be the best single book yet published on this icon of early twentieth-century American religion and culture. Beautifully paced and superbly researched, the book weaves McPherson's inherently fascinating and ultimately tragic career into larger stories about California, pentecostalism, and emerging popular culture. Empathetic, critical, and insightful simultaneously, Sutton has produced a compellingly narrated book about one of modern America's most magnetic women.
--Jon Butler, author of Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (20070217)

At long last, a biographical exploration of Aimee Semple McPherson that steers clear of stereotype, caricature, and condescension. Matthew Sutton deftly addresses Sister Aimee's fame and her legacy in his fine biography, but he does so with care and attention to her humanity as well.
--William Deverell, University of Southern California (20070401)

Aimee Semple McPherson passionately embraced her role as a religious celebrity in an increasingly mass media-oriented age and steadfastly refused to be constrained by traditional notions of gender or sexuality. Americans of the 1920s and 1930s were fascinated by her, and readers today will feel the same way, thanks to Matthew Avery Sutton's timely and absorbing biography.
--Susan Ware, editor of Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (20070422)

Not content to see Aimee Semple McPherson--"Sister"--simply as a woman evangelist, or even as a religious icon, Matthew Sutton places her career in a wide range of contexts, including gender, media, Southern California popular culture, and the muscular expansion of American evangelicalism. This is terrific history, reflecting meticulous research, persuasive argumentation, and a writing style as vibrant as the story it tells.
--Grant Wacker, author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (20070513)

In the page-turning book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, Matthew Avery Sutton makes a persuasive case that the Canadian evangelist was responsible for rescuing conservative Protestantism from obscurity while creating the political model for today's powerful Religious Right. She promoted the now-widely held conviction that Jesus Christ and the 'American way of life' are synonymous. Other books have been written about McPherson, but Sutton's goes furthest in making the important argument that the Canadian evangelist was the most influential model for the merging of conservative Christian identity and American patriotism...At the time of the 1925 Scopes 'monkey trial' over the teaching of evolution, McPherson organized a giant parade and theatrical stage play at her baroque Angelus Temple that portrayed what she called the 'hanging and burial of monkey teachers.' Eighty years later, McPherson's brand of evangelical sensationalism is again spiking up the issue of whether to teach evolution in U.S. public schools, while in most other industrialized countries the dispute barely registers...Sutton's book deserves special praise for its socio-political analysis--for outlining Sister Aimee's pivotal role in giving birth to today's politicized evangelical Christianity.
--Douglas Todd (Vancouver Sun 20070526)

Sutton helps readers see in McPherson more than one paradoxical woman: her Foursquare Gospel helped catalyze a fundamental cultural realignment that brought Pentecostals and Evangelicals into the American mainstream, transforming American politics in ways that continue to write today's headlines. A nuanced portrait of an entire movement.
--Bryce Christensen (Booklist 20070701)

[Sutton] reminds us that Aimee Semple McPherson 'exemplified evangelicalism's appeal to millions of Americans' and suggests that it is time to re-examine her life and legacy.
--Bryan F. LeBeau (Kansas City Star 20070602)

In a clear and frightening way [Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America] both locates her origins in what could be called America's mainstream fringe and her influence on today's Christian right, with its political manipulating and media empires.
--George Fetherling (Seven Oaks 20070719)

Decades before televangelists like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker started mixing show business and conservative Christianity, there was Aimee Semple McPherson...An impressive new biography.
--Don Lattin (San Francisco Chronicle 20070701)

Matthew Avery Sutton has done such a thorough and engaging job with Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
--John M. and Priscilla S. Taylor (Washington Times 20070724)

[A] delightful biography of the first American woman to become a celebrity-preacher.
--David Crumm (Detroit Free Press 20070609)

This biography of McPherson explores how the evangelist combined old-time religion with newfangled technology to build a multimedia soul-saving juggernaut in 1920s Los Angeles...A thorough and absorbing portrait of a wholly original figure. (The Atlantic 20071002)

[Sutton] gives an account of McPherson's life within the cultural currents of her time. He argues that she had an almost preternatural ability to tap her audience's social fears--about immigration, for instance, or the changing role of women--and offer reassurance in the form of simple spiritual storytelling...As Mr. Sutton's fine book shows, she proved to be an emblem of things to come.
--Christine Rosen (Wall Street Journal 20071008)

Lively and diligently researched.
--Caleb Crain (New York Review of Books 20071101)

[A] gripping new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson...Sutton has focused on McPherson's substantive legacy--a politically powerful religious commitment shared by millions of Americans--rather than the legend of the self-proclaimed salvation-bearing empire-builder. Many readers will find themselves giving new thought to the potent and disturbing policy-shaping force that today's Christian Right embodies.
--Peter Skinner (ForeWord 20070901)

Although it is hard to imagine in this era, the dominant view among religious Christians in the early part of the 20th century was that mixing the realms of Christ and Caesar was unholy business. McPherson smashed that taboo, and turned evangelical Protestantism into a fighting faith.
--Jonathan Kay (National Post 20080401)

[Sutton's] delightful biography of the first American woman to become a celebrity preacher makes us want to enroll in one of his classes. (Ventura County Star 20080501)

Sutton's study, part biography and part cultural history, attempts to explain the long 20th-century run of traditionalist Protestantism on the political stage. It is, therefore, an important book.
--Anne Blue Wills (Christian Century )

This book is a timely warning for modern religious leaders seeking a place at the table as the 2008 election looms.
--Michael P. Orso (America )

Sutton's engaging work also makes important contributions by linking McPherson's adept use of publicity and celebrity status, social conservatism, and American patriotism to the modern evangelical vision of a more Christian nation.
--W. B. Bedford (Choice )

[Sutton] offers progressive Christians a must-read study of this important but enigmatic figure in American religious history. If we wish to understand the use of celebrity and technology by religious conservatives, not only to spread the gospel but to influence politics as well, we must look to its beginnings in the ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson.
--Rev. Robert Cornwall (Progressive Christian )

Matthew Avery Sutton knows how to spin a yarn. His new biography of the Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson beautifully evokes the allure of this early-twentieth-century charismatic revivalist, and manages as well to capture the boosterism and bravado of Los Angeles in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. One can easily understand why the Public Broadcasting Service chose this book as the basis for an episode of the American Experience. Sutton’s tale has all the pathos of a soap opera, while speaking at the same time to central issues of American cultural life, including gender, celebrity, sexuality, and the volatile mix of religion and politics. When Sutton harnesses his gift for storytelling to the task of critical analysis, the book is a model of what narrative history can be at its best.
--Matthew S. Hedstrom (Politics and Religion )

An impressive work...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...I highly recommend it, not just because it teIls 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. Sanchez Walsh (Books & Culture )

About the Author
Matthew Avery Sutton is Assistant Professor of History at College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University.

Customer Reviews

fantastic book
This is an incredible biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, one of America's most important religious leaders. It is a fabulous read (I breezed through it on a long plane ride); it tells amazing stories of supposed kidnappings and faith healings, of sexual intrigue and flappers, of patriotism and anti-Communism. Every chapter was fascinating. Professor Sutton shows how Sister Aimee played a pivotal role in helping to create what we call today the Christian Right. Its ability to connect old-time religion, media ingenuity, and American nationalism does seem to build from McPherson. Great book for the classroom, the airplane, or the beach.

Giving "Sister Aimee" her due
Long before megachurches and names like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen became commingled with American Christianity, Aimee Semple McPherson was America's key religious figure, representing fundamentalism and old-time religion in America between the two World Wars. She was America's most famous and certainly flamboyant minister, during the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the early 1940s. Given the scope of her influence, and thorough remaking of the country's religious landscape, it is unfortunate that so few within, and without the confines of American Christendom know about "Sister Aimee" today.

While there have been books detailing McPherson's life before (both Edith Blumhofer and Daniel Epstein produced solid works about McPherson) Matthew Avery Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America is the first book that places her firmly within the cultural, political, and religious milieu of her era.

The book, which came out in 2007, avoids some the traps of previous treatments of McPherson's life--the stereotypes and caricature so often attendant with this early 20th century religious icon.

Avery does an excellent job of highlighting the context of the period when McPherson's star began to rise. From simple beginnings on a farm in Ontario, McPherson would utilize the new media of her day, particularly radio, to draw upon the burgeoning appeal of popular entertainment, and the development of modern day Hollywood.

While there is no doubt that McPherson would have attained a measure of fame and notoriety regardless of where she put down roots, the city of Los Angeles during the 1920s was the perfect place for someone with McPherson's gifts, charisma, and sexual aura to be living. It is Avery's ability to place McPherson within this context, and his understanding of its importance that makes his book the standout that it is.

Avery clearly makes the case that it was McPherson who deserves credit for the megachurch movement, and the political strength exhibited by the religious right, and figures such as James Dobson.

Eighty years ago, fundamentalism floundering. It was on the ropes, after taking an uppercut to the jaw from the Scopes Trial, and repeated attacks from liberal theologians like Fosdick, making claims that modern science invalidated the fundamentalist theology. McPherson and her allies reshaped the "old-time religion" and found new ways to promote it and connect it to changes happening in mainstream American culture.

Avery's book is well-researched, without being overly pedantic, or unnecessarily scholarly. This isn't to say that it doesn't hold up well as a strong source of historical documentation.

He takes a very even-handed approach to an important 20th century figure, one that is sadly underrepresented in the 21st century, and should be, given the importance of who she was, and what she represented, particularly her role model for women, as a religious and cultural pioneer.

The book should appeal to anyone wanting to broaden their understanding of America and early 20th century history. It also is a very strong work on the phenomenon of urban growth in the last century, particularly Los Angeles, and its ascendancy to becoming one of the nation's great cities.

From A Secular View
I've read the books on ASM by Blumhofer and Epstein and prefer them both more than this one. "Storming Heaven" is good too. This one was from a more political viewpoint, in which some good points were made, but it was hard to tell whether he's on Aimee's side or not. But it is nonbiased writing. The fundamental/political mix written about is still relevant and active in today's America. She was a leader there is no doubt.