ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.
In the artsy neighborhood of Echo Park in Los Angeles, right across the street from Echo Park Lake, you’ll find a building that begs to be noticed. It sits against the backdrop of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, and tattoo parlor/coffee shops. It’s a colossal white structure that looks like an arena laced with archways. Its defining feature is an enormous concrete dome perched overhead. The building itself is a blend of classical and modern design elements and has been described as “half Roman Colosseum, half Parisian opera house.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: I mean, some people have described it that way. But if you ask me, I think it looks more like a concrete flying saucer landed on top of the Rose Bowl Stadium.
ROMAN MARS: That’s reporter, actor, and frequent contributor, Gillian Jacobs.
GILLIAN JACOBS: One of my personal nerdier hobbies is driving around Los Angeles and looking up the history of buildings. It’s what I do to relax. So, of course, the first time I went to Echo Park Lake, I homed in on that building across the street. I had to know what it was. And luckily for me, there are tours available.
DAN SCOTT: The dome was also the largest freestanding dome of that size and shape, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the world, at the time.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Turns out this place is a Pentecostal church called the Angelus Temple. Dan Scott is head docent of the temple’s Heritage Museum.
DAN SCOTT: It seated 5,300 people. It was also uniquely built. It’s completely fireproof. So, that’s why it’s never burned down all these years.
GILLIAN JACOBS: The temple was designed by the church’s founder, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. Her voice was actually playing through the museum speakers throughout the tour.
DAN SCOTT: What you hear in the background are live church services that were broadcast live from the temple. I’m gonna turn her off for a while. Sometimes I feel like I’m competing with her. [LAUGHS]
ROMAN MARS: As it happens, the Angelus Temple isn’t just an architectural anomaly in Echo Park. It’s regarded as the very first megachurch ever built in the United States. The temple was opened in 1923, which predates the modern megachurch movement by about a half a century. Today, when millions of Americans enter contemporary megachurches with all of their accompanying theatrical accouterments, they unknowingly enter spaces pioneered by Aimee Semple McPherson.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: So much about what you see in megachurches today and Christian broadcasting and entertainment–Christian fiction–all of that is these things that she started.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is Claire Hoffman, author of Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson. As you can imagine from the title of Claire’s book, there’s a lot more to McPherson’s story than just being a preacher.
ROMAN MARS: McPherson transformed worship and, at one point, was arguably one of the most famous women in America. She built one of the largest churches in the country and filled it with thousands of people a week. She also stirred up one of most salacious public dramas of the early 20th century.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: You know, she was making some decisions and mistakes that were pretty questionable themselves. And so, here’s a really complicated person who was incredible and powerful and also made some really weird choices.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Before she added the “Semple” and “McPherson,” Sister Aimee was born “Aimee Kennedy” in 1890. Here she is talking about growing up in rural Canada.
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: It was some distance away, on a Canadian farm in Ontario, that I was born and brought up as a farmer’s daughter. I was the only boy on the farm–the only girl on the farm…
ROMAN MARS: By even her own account, Aimee was an overachiever during her schoolgirl years. In her own writings, she describes herself as top of her class, a natural leader, debater, elocutionist, and always looking for an opportunity to perform.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Aimee came from a religious family. Her mother, Minnie, was a devout member of the Salvation Army. And Aimee had her own divine experience when she was 17 years old.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She met this super hot preacher named Robert Semple, who was an early convert of Pentecostalism.
ROMAN MARS: Aimee fell deeply in love with the super hot preacher, Robert Semple, and with Pentecostalism. In the early 20th century, Pentecostalism was a new Protestant religious movement that was beginning to spread across the U.S. At the time, it was viewed as fringe within mainline Christianity, mostly because of its more dramatic elements.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Faith healing and the speaking in tongues.
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: In back of those specific things is the general idea of Pentecostalism, which is that everyone needs an infilling of the Holy Spirit. You need to open yourself up to this force beyond you, the Holy spirit, which will flow into you and transform you–make you an entirely new person.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Pentecostalism was looked down upon by many at the time. Followers were even disparagingly called “holy rollers” because, when that infilling of the Holy Spirit took place, some worshipers would uncontrollably roll on the ground during services.
ROMAN MARS: But Aimee was deeply moved by this form of worship. She converted to Pentecostalism. And soon she and Robert Semple were married and expecting a child. Together, they embarked on an evangelical tour to China, hoping to spread Pentecostalism to the other side of the world.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Pentecostalism would become a huge part of the rest of her life. Robert, however…
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: He died within a month of them arriving in China.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Aimee married again a couple of years after returning to the United States, becoming Aimee Semple McPherson. But she quickly realized that this second marriage wasn’t her path. She fell into a depression that severely impacted her mental and physical health to the point that she was hospitalized.
ROMAN MARS: And in the midst of this traumatic period, she had an epiphany.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She says that Jesus came to her and said, “You know, you have to spread the word. And this is your job.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: So McPherson answered the call. She left husband number two, packed her kids and her mom into her car, and began a new life as a traveling preacher on what was called the Sawdust Trail.
ROMAN MARS: The Sawdust Trail wasn’t a literal trail with a set path–rather roving pastors, who were almost exclusively men, would travel from city to city and town to town, holding boisterous revival meetings.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: So, with the Sawdust Trail–it’s a really competitive marketplace. There are hundreds–thousands–of itinerant revivalists. And so you are in a constant state of competition with other people.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Many of these other preachers on the circuit evangelized in a sort of testosterone-laden aggressive style.
BILLY SUNDAY: America needs to be taken down to God’s bathhouse and have the hose turned on her! And I want to take a pledge in this audience to join me in a pledge that you will never rest until this old God-hating, Christ-hating, whisky-soaked, sabbath-breaking, blaspheming, infidel, bootlegging old world is bound to the cross of Jesus Christ by the golden chains of love…
GILLIAN JACOBS: Sister Aimee’s message was nothing like that. She had all of the charisma and theatricality but a gentler message.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: Aimee packages–for lack of a better word–a really domestic style, which you don’t see among many people on the Sawdust Trail.
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: This is my task–to love someone more dearly every day, to help a wandering child to find his way, to ponder o’er a noble thought and pray and smile when evening falls. This is my task…
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: She emphasizes her connection with people–this image of a simple country person, a milkmaid, who has been infused with this divine power. And this might be the thing which allows Aimee to rise out of this very competitive religious marketplace.
GILLIAN JACOBS: McPherson intuitively knew how to reach people and used whatever mass media tools were at her disposal. At first, she used a megaphone, and then started a monthly magazine. With her success, she wasn’t just popularizing her ministry, she was popularizing Pentecostalism itself.
ROMAN MARS: One of the foundational leaders of American Pentecostalism was a Black pastor named William Seymour. Seymour wanted to create an interracial church, where congregants of any race could worship together. But by 1914, segregation caused the denomination to split.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: There’s sort of the white Pentecostal movement and the African American. And they’re both pretty fringy.
ROMAN MARS: Aimee Semple McPherson began ministering around the time of this split and popularized the predominantly white version of Pentecostalism to the masses.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: I have compared her both sort of positively and negatively to Elvis. And she made it a spectacle. She made it palatable. You know what I mean? She made it white. So, all the things that, like, kind of popularizing does in the way that Elvis did with the blues, right? So, you know, the origins are very much elsewhere. But she was sort of this bridge.
GILLIAN JACOBS: In 1918, after three years of making a name for herself on the Sawdust Trail, McPherson’s profile had grown, but the endless traveling was beginning to wear on her.
ROMAN MARS: After her daughter nearly died from the 1918 flu, McPherson claimed that she was “called by God” to head west and build a permanent church. And that church would be in Los Angeles. It was a decision that ultimately would reverberate not just through the city but the future of American Christianity.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Los Angeles, in many ways, was the perfect fit for Aimee Semple McPherson. For one, the city was playing a pivotal role in the rise of Pentecostalism because it’s where William Seymour’s revival was located. But also, LA in 1918 was a small but rapidly growing city packed with Christian migrants from the Midwest and South. It was a place looking for spiritual guidance.
ROMAN MARS: Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, McPherson and her mother found an empty lot for sale across from Echo Park Lake. She felt this was where her church should be built.
GILLIAN JACOBS: She imagined her temple to be a grand coliseum-like neoclassical structure with a soaring dome overhead. And while those combinations of words generally conjure a very specific type of macho architecture, she built this structure to mirror her femininity.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: It looks like a wedding cake to me. It’s got a lot of gilded soft floral edges to it. It’s a version of power, you know? You see some buildings and it’s obvious that they are supposed to be signifying power and permanence. But I think there is this thing where you don’t see that many buildings that have so much money poured into them that are so female.
GILLIAN JACOBS: McPherson and her mother Minnie were able to work out a unique deal with a construction company that was famous for building movie palaces around the city. They allowed her to pay in installments and build whatever they could afford incrementally. McPherson would travel around, holding revivals to raise funds. And they would construct parts of the temple piecemeal as the money came in.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: I believe she bought the property by Echo Park in 1921. There was a little story in the Los Angeles Times that was like, “Lady Evangelist has big ideas.” You know? And yeah, two years later, she opens the largest church in America.
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: Oh, I wish that you might know the joy of it–the preaching the gospel, the seeing the thousands wending their way down the altars to kneel at the feet of Jesus, the crucified… And now, after all of these years, there’s come to crown our labors, the beautiful Angelus Temple…
ROMAN MARS: On New Year’s Day of 1923, McPherson opened the Angelus Temple, home to the ministry that she named the Foursquare Church. Inside, there was a room for performing miracle cures, a watchtower that acted as a round-the-clock prayer room, a room dedicated to speaking in tongues… People dubbed it the “million dollar temple.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: Its auditorium sat 5,300 people in tiered stadium-style seating. The stage could accommodate a 100-person choir, a full orchestra, and elaborate stage sets.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And when people would look up, they would see that the ceiling was painted blue to look like the sky or the heavens. And they were dotted with puffy clouds.
ROMAN MARS: Of course, extravagantly built houses of worship were not a new thing. They existed in many religions and many cultures. But in Protestant Christianity, there had been this belief since the 16th century that the church should be small and humble because that would signal a more intimate relationship with God.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But Sister Aimee wanted to bring the spirited energy and large congregation of the big, roving, tent revival-style worship permanently indoors. And in doing so, she helped create the blueprint for all the megachurches that came after her.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: You know, if you go to a megachurch today, this is what Aimee sort of innovated–bringing this big, rowdy, wild mass worship inside and every Sunday.
ROMAN MARS: From the moment the temple opened, Sunday services at the Angelus Temple were an instant hit mostly because McPherson put on the best show in town.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She incorporated a lot of vaudeville–a lot of Hollywood–into her sermons. So, she would do these… They were called “illustrated sermons,” but they were essentially, I mean, like, early Christian entertainment.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Because this was Los Angeles and LA was, at its core, a small town at the time, Sister Aimee had access to people who worked in the movie business. She tapped Hollywood stage managers, set designers, lighting designers, and makeup artists to bring her vision to life.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She would bring lions onto the stage, camels, elaborate sets, incredible costumes, huge, you now, musical theater productions…
GILLIAN JACOBS: And Sister Aimee herself was the riveting center of it all.
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: But now the little piggy goes in his house, thinking, “Well, I see the wolf coming, but I’m not afraid.” And as he arrives at the house, he says, “Piggy wiggy, will you let me in?” He said, “By my chubby chin chin, I’ll never let you in.” And the wolf says, “All right then. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in…”
ROMAN MARS: McPherson was preaching to a packed house regularly. There were so many congregants that Foursquare had to add a third service on Sundays. And even though the temple already fit 5,300 seats, sometimes over 7,000 worshipers would cram into the Angelus Temple. Sister Aimee herself was becoming a Los Angeles institution.
DAN SCOTT: Are you familiar with the Hooray for Hollywood song?
GILLIAN JACOBS: This is Dan Scott, head docent of the Angelus Temple Heritage Museum again.
DAN SCOTT: Yeah, she’s actually in that song. So it’s like, “Hooray for Hollywood. Da-da-da-da…” And then later it goes, “And Shirley Temple, and Aimee Semple…”
[HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD]
GILLIAN JACOBS: Despite her incredible popularity and status as a local celebrity, McPherson knew that she could reach far more people than a few thousand Angelenos a week. So, the year after she opened the Angelus Temple, she also built her very own Christian radio station, where she could reach followers as far away as Hawaii.
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: I’m very, very happy indeed to have the privilege of speaking to the radio audience. Angelus Temple–myself as pastor of the temple–was the first church in the world to own a radio station. And when those shining silver towers were lifted up above our temple dome and flashed the message east, west, north, and south, our opportunity and privilege was broadened by hundreds of thousands of people who united with our radio church audience. And now…
GILLIAN JACOBS: In person, the services engaged with sets, costumes, and lighting changes. But McPherson understood that with the radio, she could communicate just as effectively because of the intimacy of hearing a voice speaking to you in your home.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: I read it somewhere about this early theory of radio, which I loved. Somebody called it that “you could have your hand on the doorknob of living rooms across America,” which is kind of creepy–but, like, this idea of, you know, people could be touched by media.
ROMAN MARS: Aimee Semple McPherson blended entertainment with religion and broadcast it out to the world, creating a template for American televangelism.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: You know, she’s not the founder of televangelism.
GILLIAN JACOBS: William Schultz, again.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: It would, I think, be very proper to say televangelism and radio evangelism would be unthinkable without the path blazed by Aimee in the early 20th century.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Within just a couple of years of establishing her ministry, the Foursquare Gospel Association already had 32 church branches in Southern California with dozens of other churches applying to become affiliates of the Angelus Temple.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: She also feels the need to just constantly keep the church growing. This is one of the defining features of the megachurch movement–the idea that growth itself is a positive good. If your church is growing, you’re spreading God’s kingdom. And you need to grow in order to continue growing because people want to be part of something that seems to be booming.
ROMAN MARS: But all of that growth came with an immense amount of pressure. McPherson kept an utterly grueling schedule. If she wasn’t expanding the church, she was preaching at the temple. If she was not preaching at the temple, she was on the radio. If she wasn’t on the radio, she was tending to her congregants.
GILLIAN JACOBS: She was also under a very intense kind of scrutiny as a woman in a position of power.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: She was trapped by the role she had created. That she constantly has to put up this front–that she consistently has to sell herself as a perfect woman–that ultimately becomes so destructive.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And that self-destruction manifested in some truly bizarre ways.
DAN SCOTT: As we make our way into her bedroom, this wall here represents her kidnapping, which I’m sure you heard about or read about, too.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Yes. Yes.
ROMAN MARS: After the break, Sister Aimee’s story takes a turn for the scandalous. Stay with us…
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: In 1926, the Angelus Temple had been a Los Angeles institution for about three years. Aimee Semple McPherson was at the height of her fame and preaching to thousands of devoted worshippers a week.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: I think there was a USC survey where students named her as one of the top three most famous women that they could think of.
ROMAN MARS: That’s Claire Hoffman again.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: So–you know–really a household name.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But all the pressure she was under–to grow the ministry, to shepherd its members, to keep them entertained–was beginning to take a toll. McPherson made herself available at all hours to the church and had no privacy or solitude.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: So, she is starting to feel the stress of her celebrity and the burdens of her job. She’s got 10,000-15,000 people coming to see her preach on a lot of days. And so she starts to do this routine where she drives down to Venice Beach from downtown. And she sits in the sun and she swims in the ocean and she works on her sermons.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Which is exactly what she did on May 18th, 1926.
ROMAN MARS: On this particular day, McPherson was writing a sermon called Light and Darkness when she was approached by a man and a woman that she had never seen before.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And they say, “Mrs. McPherson, we have a baby in the car who’s sick. Will you please come and pray over her?”
GILLIAN JACOBS: As a faith healer, McPherson was very used to getting these kinds of requests. The Angelus Temple even had a dedicated room for all of the crutches and wheelchairs left behind by people who had been miraculously healed. So she followed the couple to their car to heal their sick child.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: In the back seat, she sees, like, a pile of blankets and she thinks, “Oh, this must be the baby.” And they open up the door. And she thinks she’s going to pray for the baby, but instead she gets hit on the head. And she has something put over her mouth, and she passes out.
ROMAN MARS: McPherson disappeared in broad daylight without a trace.
GILLIAN JACOBS: Sister Aimee’s thousands of followers were stricken by her sudden disappearance and launched a massive search to find her. Fearing she may have drowned in the Pacific, divers combed the shallows of Venice Beach and Santa Monica. They even blasted the waters with dynamite, hoping it might surface her body.
ROMAN MARS: One diver tragically died trying to find her. Another grieving church member became so distraught that she drowned herself.
GILLIAN JACOBS: But McPherson was very much alive.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She wakes up–she doesn’t know how much later–in some kind of awful bedroom, chained to a bed.
GILLIAN JACOBS: She quickly realized that she had been kidnapped by that couple who had approached her on the beach.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: Somebody that she said was called Mexicali Rose, which happened to be a famous song at the time, and a guy named Steve…
ROMAN MARS: Mexicali Rose and Steve told her that she was being held captive in a shack near Agua Prieta, Mexico, and that they were demanding $500,000 ransom for her return.
GILLIAN JACOBS: For weeks, McPherson found herself restrained to a bed, growing more and more delirious. But at one point, her captors left her alone to get groceries. And she saw her chance.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And she escaped by taking the ropes around her wrist and sawing them on a serrated edge of a can.
GILLIAN JACOBS: McPherson fled through a window and ran 20 miles through the blistering Mexican desert.
ROMAN MARS: She eventually ended up stumbling across a small home where she found help and then immediately fainted. She was taken to a hospital on the American side of the border.
GILLIAN JACOBS: McPherson had been missing for over a month and already presumed dead. Her mother, Minnie, had even held a memorial service for her at the Angelus Temple. But three days after that service, McPherson reappeared alive, mostly unscathed, and ready to tell her story.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And so, yeah, that’s her kidnapping.
VIVIAN LE: Can I ask a follow-up question to that?
GILLIAN JACOBS: Oh, yeah, of course.
GILLIAN JACOBS: At this point, my producer, Vivian, chimed in with a question.
VIVIAN LE: Like, that’s the story. What do you think are the chances that happened?
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: One percent? I mean, I’m a journalist, so I never like to say anything definitively.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: I mean, you can never say never. But it didn’t happen.
GILLIAN JACOBS: When McPherson returned to Los Angeles, she trumpeted her harrowing journey of abduction, captivity, and escape. But it didn’t take long for people to start questioning her account.
ROMAN MARS: It turns out there was a lot to investigate.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: Law enforcement immediately was just like, “This doesn’t add up.”
ROMAN MARS: There were a number of holes in her kidnapping story. By her own account, she had been walking 20+ miles in the blazing hot Sonoran desert. Yet, when she was rescued, she was in suspiciously good physical shape.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: You know, she wasn’t sunburned. She wasn’t cut. She wasn’t bruised. She didn’t ask for water.
GILLIAN JACOBS: There was also the fact that law enforcement was never able to locate the shack in Agua Prieta that she claimed she escaped from. Instead, they found other evidence that suggested something else.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: They spent days looking for the shack that she said she was trapped in, and they never found it. They found tire marks more like a half a mile from where she showed up with footprints that matched the slippers she was wearing. So, it looked like somebody had gotten out of a car and kind of walked over to the yard where she appeared.
GILLIAN JACOBS: There were also long-standing rumors that McPherson was having an affair with a married radio engineer at her station, KFSG, which led to a theory that she hadn’t been in Mexico at all but hiding out with her lover in California.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: Soon, witnesses started to kind of come out of the woodwork and say, like, “Actually, we saw Aimee not in Mexico but in Northern California in Carmel-by-the-Sea,” where she was wearing a disguise and living in what the press called a “love shack.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: There were several other witness sightings and pieces of evidence. And as other details were uncovered, it became more and more likely that McPherson had concocted the kidnapping story in order to conceal her affair and protect her reputation.
ROMAN MARS: This alleged affair became the focal point of an investigation against her. And the district attorney ended up charging McPherson with fabricating evidence, lying under oath, and conspiracy to commit a hoax.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: So, they do this pre-trial hearing, which takes months and set records for its cost. It was the most expensive trial in Los Angeles’ history until the Manson murders. And it was just every day on the front pages.
GILLIAN JACOBS: During her ascent, sister Aimee had been a darling of the media. But by this point, newspapers all over the country had turned against her in cruel and misogynistic ways. They scrutinized her appearance, her divorce, the size of her ankles…
AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON: However, this time, there are shadows in the sky. But I’m sure that many people out there have their own particular troubles–only mine always somehow unfortunately seem to get into the headlines…
ROMAN MARS: Through it all, McPherson stuck by her story, claiming the seedy gangster underworld, corrupt politicians, Satan, and the Catholics were all plotting to take her down.
GILLIAN JACOBS: McPherson suffered an onslaught against her credibility, and things were looking pretty grim. But surprisingly, about a month into the investigation, McPherson was presented with an unusual defense to her story.
ROMAN MARS: Unfortunately for McPherson, the defense would come in the form of one of the least credible witnesses in legal history–a woman named Lorraine Wiseman-Sielaff.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And Lorraine Wiseman-Sielaff is, like, a character that I feel like could only exist in the 1920s. You know, she had had a railroad accident and kind of lost her mind. She’d been in lunatic houses and was a kind of hustler scam artist who maybe also was schizophrenic–and who had a twin sister.
GILLIAN JACOBS: The district attorney’s leading theory for McPherson’s whereabouts was that she had been hiding out in Carmel with her lover. But Wiseman-Sielaff showed up to the Angelus Temple, claiming that the mysterious woman spotted in Carmel wasn’t McPherson but Wiseman-Sielaff herself.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And Aimee’s like, “Fantastic. Great.”
GILLIAN JACOBS: This was such a convenient counter-story that McPherson leapt at the opportunity. She actually moved Wiseman-Sielaff into the parsonage of the Angelus Temple so that she could coach Wiseman-Sielaff on ways to make her appear more convincing.
ROMAN MARS: It eventually came out that McPherson and Wiseman-Sielaff had been conspiring with one another, which caused yet another media storm. But in the end, it didn’t really matter. The charges against McPherson were dismissed before they ever went to trial because there wasn’t quite enough evidence to prove that she wasn’t kidnapped, and officials in Los Angeles were desperate to be rid of this case because of the media circus it had caused.
GILLIAN JACOBS: And it truly was a circus with all sorts of unhinged details that we couldn’t even get into for this story, such as…
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: The sole, alleged, other witness to her kidnappers was, first of all, a blind attorney who was related to President McKinley. But then he dies–just as he’s about to give further evidence–in a car accident where he drowns in a ditch of, like, one foot of water.
GILLIAN JACOBS: See what I mean?
ROMAN MARS: As for Sister Aimee and America’s first megachurch, oddly enough, even with her name being dragged through the mud in every headline, the whole debacle ended up being great for the church.
WILLIAM SCHULTZ: The Angelus Temple actually grew during the scandal. Put that in the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” files. But in terms of her fame, I mean, this was an era where you start to have the emergence of these figures who come to embody a single type, like Babe Ruth as the athlete or Charles Lindbergh as the adventurer. Aimee was the preacher.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: And just to pause–the outreach is incredible. You know what I mean? There was a year in the early 1930s where she spoke to over two million people. The Angelus Temple and Aimee were at the center of public service during the Great Depression. They helped house people. I mean, it was incredible. But she definitely screwed up, like, mega, you now? But at the same time she accomplished so much.
GILLIAN JACOBS: For the next couple of decades, the Foursquare ministry expanded, but McPherson herself struggled. She suffered from poor health, poor financial decisions, lawsuits, a questionable third marriage, and ultimately became estranged from her own mother and daughter, the two closest people in her life.
ROMAN MARS: On September 27th, 1944, McPherson was in Oakland for a series of revival meetings when it all came to an end.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: She gives one of her most famous sermons, The Story of My Life, and she goes home that night to the hotel. She was with her son and had bottles of prescription medicine that they can’t trace to where she got them. And she took the whole bottle–or a lot of it–and she died.
ROMAN MARS: Even after McPherson died, her church continued to live on and grow. There are thousands of Foursquare churches around the world today, with millions of members. But while followers may remember Aimee Semple McPherson as an important religious figure, for those not in the church, she is more likely to be remembered for the scandal and tragic end to her life–if at all.
CLAIRE HOFFMAN: You really have to understand that she was, like, a forerunner of getting that from kind of the fringe of religion into the mainstream. You know, now there are 600 million Pentecostals in the world. It’s a quarter of the world’s Christians. It has moved from the absolute fringe to the mainstream, and she’s a big part of that story.
DAN SCOTT: So, we can go down the mezzanine here. Watch your step. Let me just show you what it used to look like, though, when Sister was here. Now it’s very plain Jane. But when she was here, it was quite lovely…
GILLIAN JACOBS: Walking around the Angelus Temple, it’s clear that the building itself is a long way from its opulent beginnings. The church has had to evolve with modern culture. But modernization, in many ways, has sanded away some of the details that made this building singular. The prayer tower is now an HVAC room. The iconic KFSG station was sold to help pay for a parking structure. The 100-person choir has been traded in for contemporary music. Even that heavenly sky blue dome, designed to evoke the outdoor revival, is now obscured by sound absorbing panels.
DAN SCOTT: Because with the newer modern drums and keyboards and electric guitars for the music and the worship, this room was terrible. It just caused a lot of noise.
ROMAN MARS: It may be a bit more subdued these days, but the Angelus Temple makes for a fitting monument to the woman who built it–enormously influential, half-forgotten, and even after all these years, still begging to be noticed.
99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs, produced by Vivian Le, and edited by Kelly Prime.. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. And special thanks this week to Bix Davis and Richard Flory.
Claire Hoffman’s book is called Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson–it is such a fun read and is packed with lots of juicy details that we couldn’t fit into this episode so you should definitely check it out.
Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.
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