August 6, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, seeing Los Angeles beginning to bustle, Aimee Semple McPherson built a 5,000-seat church building with stained-glass windows to bring a Four-Square gospel to the people there. From radio broadcasting to illustrated sermons, this first megachurch was just the home base of this vibrant preacher and just the beginning of a movement. Dr. Matthew Sutton, the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and The Ressurection of Christian America, tells the story.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next the
story of the first televangelist and the originator of the megachurch,
the Pentecostal preacher Amy Semple McPherson. She rose to prominence
in the nineteen twenties using innovative techniques to spread the
Gospel and became a household name. Here to tell the
(00:32):
story is doctor Matthew Sutton, Chair of the History Department
at Washington State University and author of the book Amy
Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Let's get
into the story, and friends, I know if God is
my judge, that I do on a marshall anything in myself.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
If I know, I'm just a girl from the fire.
But I know I should have God ever called anyone,
God called me, and God put.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It on myself. Tosuda Sarsberg off with around the world.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
If you were living in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
you would certainly know who Amy Simple McPherson was. She
was one of the most famous Americans at the time
in the sense that she had created a Christian ministry
that seemed very relevant to the needs and desires and
interests of Americans in this period, and so she became
(01:27):
a celebrity on par with Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin.
When I would give talks in the early two thousands,
when there were more people still alive from the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, I almost never gave a talk
in which some old person didn't come up to me
and tell me when they had visited Los Angeles they
saw McPherson. That was just something everybody did in this erab.
You wanted to see the Hollywood studios, you wanted to
(01:49):
go to the beach, and you wanted to see Amy
McPherson on her stage. McPherson grew up in Canada. She
grew up on a rural farm. She joined the Salvation
Army as a teenager basically because her mother was working
with the Salvation Army. And what that experience taught her
(02:09):
was the importance of evangelism, of trying to make converts
to Christianity. But it also taught her how to use
innovative methods, how to take the Christian message to the
public rather than wait for the public to come to you,
to come to a traditional church. And so from there
she decided to launch her own ministry in the nineteen tens,
(02:31):
and so she moved to the United States. She traveled
around the country and what she called her gospel car.
This was, of course, in the early days of automobile travel,
and she would just hold her revivals. She had a
cheap tent she would set up as she went from
city to city to city, and she would draw the
attention of all kinds of Americans, and she was very
good at using publicity to bring attention to her stories.
(02:53):
She ultimately decided that it would make sense to settle down,
and she had two small children. Her first husband had
passed away, the father of her children, and so she
decided that rather than keep traveling, that she would build
essentially a permanent revival tabernacle, a place where people could
come to her, experience her four score gospel, and then
take it back out to the rest of the country.
(03:15):
And she settled on Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
and Los Angeles in that period was exploding, and so
McPherson recognized that Los Angeles was becoming a tourist destination,
and so she essentially made her church part of that.
She had pretty humble plans of building a large revival tent,
basically some inexpensive wooden tabernacle. Instead, she built a huge
(03:40):
five thousand seat theater. It had three tiers, it was
basically filled with opera chairs rather than pews, It had
a huge orchestra pit, it had a beautiful stage, and
it was the state of the art church that really
was the perfect place for her to preach her evangelistic
message in what symbol was a new era in church building,
(04:02):
this sense that churches were not going to be these
kind of old, boring, puritanical functionary but was going to
be a place of comfort, a little bit lavish, where
people could come and be entertained. And so it really
set the foundation for the megachurch movement. McPherson also recognized
very early on the power of radio, and so she
(04:23):
built her own radio station and immediately took her four
score Gospel onto the air, and so it really drew
even larger audiences from all over the Western United States.
So the gospel that McPherson preached drew on earlier revivalist ideas,
and she called it the four scare Gospel, and what
she emphasized was Jesus as Savior, so that was the
(04:46):
first of the four squares. The second was that He
was the healer, and this had to do with the
kind of Pentecostal emphasis on the idea that God could
intervene in your life today and could bring you healing, physical, emotional, spiritual.
So Macpherson believed that she could lay hands on people
and they might be healed. The third piece of the
four score gospel was that Christ was the baptizer and
(05:09):
the Holy Spirit, and the idea was that you would
have a secondary experience after salvation, this kind of moment
of sanctification where you would be purified by the Holy Spirit,
freed from sin, and live a more godly holy life.
And then the final part of it that she emphasized
was Jesus as the soon coming king. She really emphasized
(05:30):
the imminent apocalypse. She believed she was living in the
last days, that Jesus was coming back soon, that the
rise of the anti Christ was imminent, and that the
world was creening towards this global battle of armageddon, and
that things were going to get really bad before they
got better, before Jesus returned to establish his kingdom on earth.
And so for her she believed that the US had
(05:50):
special divine origins, and so her sermons tended to be
very patriotic, very pro American. And this is true of
many immigrants, right. She was a Canadian, so she'd come
to the United States and really embraced the United States.
And so she blended with her message the sense that
the United States was the new Chosen Land, was the
new Israel, and was the place that God had destined
(06:12):
for this special work in his last days. What made
her services so attractive is what she did every Sunday night.
She rather than deliver a traditional service behind a pulpit,
she developed what she called illustrated sermons, and she drew
on the talents of Hollywood to do this. She recruited producers, actors,
(06:34):
lighting artists, prop designers, set designers, and she would have
these huge, elaborate productions on Sunday nights, these stories, these plays,
and she often took the starring role, of course, in
which she embodied different biblical stories, different messages of the
Christian Gospel. She was very explicit about this that you
needed to do something to compete with Hollywood, with movies,
(06:56):
with radio, and so the way to do that was
to essentially take the two rules of Tinseltown and make
them your own. And one of my favorites was called
the Heavenly Aeroplane. She had to get up to San
Francisco for a radio exposition and she didn't have a
lot of time to get up there and get back,
and so she charted a plane. And this was in
the nineteen twenties, early nineteen twenties, in the early days
(07:17):
of flying. So it was a biplane, one of these
planes that you think of, you know, World War two
fighter planes, which is two seats. So it's her and
the pilot. Pilot didn't see a giant pothole in the runway,
drove the wheel right into it and essentially crashed the
landing gear. So the plane did a nosedive, the tail
flipped up into the air, and McPherson went tumbling out
(07:38):
of the plane, and it was this really dangerous, kind
of catastrophic runway plane crash. Luckily nobody was hurt. McPherson
walked away unscathed. What it did was it got a
bunch of national media attention because this was a famous
American and a plane accident, and so she used that
attention like she always used me attention to craft an
(08:01):
illustrated sermon. So when prishioners came into Angela's temple that
next Sunday night, what they saw on the stage was
a miniature airplane, extra two miniature airplanes, and the stage
was decorated as an airfield, and she had the planes
connected to wires, and one, she said, was piloted by
the Devil, the other one was piloted by Jesus, and
the planes would fly over the congregation, fly around the
(08:23):
whole church, and she would encourage prishioners to make a choice,
did they want to be on the Devil's plane or
did they want to be on Jesus's plane. And of course,
at the end of her message, the Devil's plane crashed
into this heap, this pile on the church stage, while
Jesus's plane flew up to the Heavenly City to this
little model of heaven that she had built that was
(08:43):
suspended from the top of the church. And it was
these kinds of elaborate sermons with props, with costumes, with extras,
with actors, with innovative technology. The idea that these planes
are going to be flying all over church is what
was so exciting and so enticing about.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to doctor Matthew Sutton tell the
story of Amy Simple McPherson, and my goodness, what a
story indeed, taking church and the gospel to another level,
to a new level, and to compete in the end
with high entertainment from Los Angeles by building the first
megachurch in Los Angeles. When we come back more of
(09:24):
Amy Simple McPherson's story here on our American stories, and
we return to our American stories, and the final portion
(09:45):
of our story on Amy Simple McPherson telling the story
is Matthew Sutton. Let's return with the story.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So macpherson grew up at Pentecostal. She had experienced this
baptism in the Holy Spirit, as she described it's spoken tongues.
She believed she had been healed of an injury. She
believed she could heal others through prayer at times, and
so she very much embraced Pentecostalism in her early career
as she was traveling the country as a revivalist. But
(10:15):
once she settled into Los Angeles, as her status increased,
as her audience grew, as she moved up into the
middle class, she downplayed some of the more exotic and
esoteric dimensions of Pentecostalism, and so a typical service in
Angels temple would not have people speaking in tongues, would
not have prayer for divine healing, certainly wouldn't have people
(10:37):
dancing in the aisles. All those things still happened in
her congregation, but they usually happened in rooms off to
the side of the main sanctuary, so people could go
into these separate rooms pray for healing, pray for the
baptism and the Holy Spirit. If they spoke in tongues,
they spoke in tongues. But mcpherston didn't want those kinds
of things happening during services, and she certainly didn't want
(10:58):
them being captured by the radio micro phones in broadcast
out to much of the rest of the country, where
they might sound kind of weird in some ways. Though
at the end of her career she really re embraced
that heritage. In the late thirties and nineteen forties, she
returned to her Pentecostal roots. That's also the moment when
(11:18):
she really made a clear effort to integrate her church
racially integrate her church. She brought some leading Black Pentecostals
to speak at her church, and she began to champion
civil rights in ways that she never did in the
nineteen twenties. That for much of her career in becoming
middle class and respectable, that also meant embracing Jim Crow,
(11:39):
segregation and really setting aside black civil rights. But at
the end of her career, I think she recognized the
sin of that choice and began to move away from
it and to focus more on trying to reintegrate the
Pentecostal movement that had some integrative origins that had really
lost it. By the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, McPherson
(12:04):
was in the nineteen twenties one of the most famous
Americans in the country. She was profiled in all of
the major magazines. She was regularly in the major newspapers,
But things took a turn in nineteen twenty six. At
that point, she vanished. She disappeared. Her family and her
church leaders presumed that she had died. She had gone
(12:26):
for a swim down in Venice Beach in southern California
and never came back. A little over a month later,
though she stumbled across the Mexican border into Arizona with
this crazy story of having been kidnapped, taking them to
Mexico and held for ransom, And in fact, there were
ransom notes that arrived at her church at her Angelis
(12:46):
Temple organization, but there were all kinds of crank notes
that they were receiving, so it's hard to know what
was legitimate in what was not legitimate. Her story, which
she stuck to the end of her life, was that
she had been kidnapped and that the kidnappers wanted to
sell her back as a way to raise money. The
other reason she believed she had been kidnapped a claim
(13:07):
she had been kidnapped was that she had taken on
the Los Angeles criminal underground. That she was really trying
to stop the trade, especially an illegal alcoholism alcohol this
was in the era of prohibition, and also trying to
take on the dance clubs. She was taking a stand
for this kind of moral integrity and that those who
(13:27):
were complicit in these underground businesses wanted to stop her.
So that was her story. At the same time, though,
enterprising journalists began asking questions and began pursuing this story
and what they discovered was that at the same time
that McPherson had disappeared, her radio engineer, guy named Kenneth Ormiston,
had also disappeared. He had also vanished, just walked away
(13:48):
from his job and was gone. And what journalists discovered
was that while McPherson was gone, he was up in Carmel,
a beautiful beachtown in northern California, with a heavily disguised woman.
So he checked into a hotel. He was there with
a woman, and it was never clear who this woman was,
and after the fact, McPherson's mother acknowledged that there had
(14:10):
been rumors in the church that Amy was having an
affair with this ormuson before the kidnapping. There were worries
and there were concerns that perhaps they had grown too close,
and the radio engineer was actually married at the time
when McPherson returned. When these stories broke, the local district
attorney launched an investigation, first to determine whether or not
there could be charges against these alleged kidnappers, and then
(14:33):
ultimately he determined that she had lied. He took his
evidence before a grand jury, and the grand jury issued
criminal indictments against McPherson, and so there was a subsequent
major trial that dragged on and on, and it was
covered in the national news. This was huge story. All
the major journalists in the nation were covering it. It
was on the you know, in the New York Times,
(14:53):
in the La Times, of course, in the New Yorker,
in all the major magazines, and so Americans were obsessed
this trial and trying to determine whether or not McPherson
had had an affair. The district attorney ultimately decided to
drop the case, drop the charges. He was probably pressured
into doing that by William Ranoff Hurst, the major media
(15:14):
tycoon of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. It may
be that McPherson blackmailed Hurst. Hurst, at the time was
having an affair with a Hollywood actor. McPherson found out
about this, and she communicated to him that she was
going to use the power of her radio station to
embarrass him for his moral foibles if he was going
to continue to try to embarrass her through his use
(15:35):
of the media. But we don't ultimately know what happened
in that month that McPherson was gone. Certainly the circumstantial
evidence makes it appear that she was having an affair.
There was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she
was the woman with Kenneth Orminston and Carmel, and there
was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she was kidnapped.
The kidnappers were never found, There was never anybody who
(15:57):
acknowledged that they had been involved. To this day, we
don't really know. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries
in American history. After the trial, McPherson took a hit
in publicity. A lot of people were very skeptical about her,
very cynical of her, and so she spent some time
sort of regrouping. She made a few additional but I
(16:20):
think she would acknowledge were poor choices. After that, she
rushed into another marriage with a guy who was really
kind of a disaster for her ministry. He was a
heavy drinker, probably a womanizer, probably didn't care that much
about her ministry. At the same time, McPherson had a
falling out with her mother, who had been her right
hand person in the ministry. McPherson had a falling out
(16:44):
with her at that point adult daughter. So there's just
one scandal after another, there were rumors of financial impropriety.
McPherson really embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. She started dressing in
the latest Hollywood fashions, wearing expensive jewelry. She bought a
really nice house in this resort town outside of southern California.
(17:04):
She was driving really nice cars, and so it really
hurt her reputation. But in the mid nineteen thirties she
sort of had this moment of redemption where she wanted
to return to her roots, and then at that point
her ministry began to really rebuild once again, so that
by the nineteen forties she had really rebuilt her ministry.
Churches related to her ministry were expanding all over the country.
(17:27):
So it really established the foundations for a denomination, the
International Church of the Force Work Gospel, which is still
a major major American denomination today with a huge missionary
apparatus that has churches all over the world. McPherson died
in nineteen forty four of an overdose of barbituates. There
(17:49):
were rumors at the time that it might have been
a suicide. It probably was not. These were heavy sleeping
pills she would take when she would preach her revival services.
She would get so up she really needed drugs to
come back down to be able to get any kind
of relaxation. In this particular drug, you could take it
and forget that you had taken it, and so it's
(18:10):
likely that it was an accidental overdose. But it ended
her life in tragedy, which was much of how she
lived that. It was the story this American dream of
becoming one of the nation's most innovative preachers and revivalists,
but also was one that led her own life in
deep dark places, real real unsatisfactory, real unhappiness within her career.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How many out there know you are Christians?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Amen?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Well, Europe, come on, now, that's God's deal with She
just had.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
This ability to make people feel warm and seeing and
encouraged and heard, and people really resonated with her. She
was also very charismatic, but also very humble that she
because she came from the far, because she was relatively
poorly educated, she made herself very relatable to average Americans.
(19:06):
She was never condescending, she never talked down to them,
She was encouraged them and met them where she was at.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by her own Megan Pidcock, and a terrific job on
the storytelling by Matthew Sutton. He's the author of the
book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
Oh what a story we heard. She develops a real
pension for spreading the gospel, develops innovative techniques to do it,
(19:34):
a real show woman in the end, and it ends
up building America's first megachurch. Their scandal. There are problems,
as almost always happens in these regards, and she dies
in the end of a barbiturate overdose in nineteen forty four.
But what a life she led in the nineteen twenties,
as famous as Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. And in
(19:57):
the end, her work, through the use of the most
the modern technology known to man, radio, spread the Gospel
to millions. The story of Amy Simple McPherson here on
our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next the
story of the first televangelist and the originator of the megachurch,
the Pentecostal preacher Amy Semple McPherson. She rose to prominence
in the nineteen twenties using innovative techniques to spread the
Gospel and became a household name. Here to tell the
(00:32):
story is doctor Matthew Sutton, Chair of the History Department
at Washington State University and author of the book Amy
Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Let's get
into the story, and friends, I know if God is
my judge, that I do on a marshall anything in myself.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
If I know, I'm just a girl from the fire.
But I know I should have God ever called anyone,
God called me, and God put.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It on myself. Tosuda Sarsberg off with around the world.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
If you were living in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
you would certainly know who Amy Simple McPherson was. She
was one of the most famous Americans at the time
in the sense that she had created a Christian ministry
that seemed very relevant to the needs and desires and
interests of Americans in this period, and so she became
(01:27):
a celebrity on par with Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin.
When I would give talks in the early two thousands,
when there were more people still alive from the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, I almost never gave a talk
in which some old person didn't come up to me
and tell me when they had visited Los Angeles they
saw McPherson. That was just something everybody did in this erab.
You wanted to see the Hollywood studios, you wanted to
(01:49):
go to the beach, and you wanted to see Amy
McPherson on her stage. McPherson grew up in Canada. She
grew up on a rural farm. She joined the Salvation
Army as a teenager basically because her mother was working
with the Salvation Army. And what that experience taught her
(02:09):
was the importance of evangelism, of trying to make converts
to Christianity. But it also taught her how to use
innovative methods, how to take the Christian message to the
public rather than wait for the public to come to you,
to come to a traditional church. And so from there
she decided to launch her own ministry in the nineteen tens,
(02:31):
and so she moved to the United States. She traveled
around the country and what she called her gospel car.
This was, of course, in the early days of automobile travel,
and she would just hold her revivals. She had a
cheap tent she would set up as she went from
city to city to city, and she would draw the
attention of all kinds of Americans, and she was very
good at using publicity to bring attention to her stories.
(02:53):
She ultimately decided that it would make sense to settle down,
and she had two small children. Her first husband had
passed away, the father of her children, and so she
decided that rather than keep traveling, that she would build
essentially a permanent revival tabernacle, a place where people could
come to her, experience her four score gospel, and then
take it back out to the rest of the country.
(03:15):
And she settled on Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
and Los Angeles in that period was exploding, and so
McPherson recognized that Los Angeles was becoming a tourist destination,
and so she essentially made her church part of that.
She had pretty humble plans of building a large revival tent,
basically some inexpensive wooden tabernacle. Instead, she built a huge
(03:40):
five thousand seat theater. It had three tiers, it was
basically filled with opera chairs rather than pews, It had
a huge orchestra pit, it had a beautiful stage, and
it was the state of the art church that really
was the perfect place for her to preach her evangelistic
message in what symbol was a new era in church building,
(04:02):
this sense that churches were not going to be these
kind of old, boring, puritanical functionary but was going to
be a place of comfort, a little bit lavish, where
people could come and be entertained. And so it really
set the foundation for the megachurch movement. McPherson also recognized
very early on the power of radio, and so she
(04:23):
built her own radio station and immediately took her four
score Gospel onto the air, and so it really drew
even larger audiences from all over the Western United States.
So the gospel that McPherson preached drew on earlier revivalist ideas,
and she called it the four scare Gospel, and what
she emphasized was Jesus as Savior, so that was the
(04:46):
first of the four squares. The second was that He
was the healer, and this had to do with the
kind of Pentecostal emphasis on the idea that God could
intervene in your life today and could bring you healing, physical, emotional, spiritual.
So Macpherson believed that she could lay hands on people
and they might be healed. The third piece of the
four score gospel was that Christ was the baptizer and
(05:09):
the Holy Spirit, and the idea was that you would
have a secondary experience after salvation, this kind of moment
of sanctification where you would be purified by the Holy Spirit,
freed from sin, and live a more godly holy life.
And then the final part of it that she emphasized
was Jesus as the soon coming king. She really emphasized
(05:30):
the imminent apocalypse. She believed she was living in the
last days, that Jesus was coming back soon, that the
rise of the anti Christ was imminent, and that the
world was creening towards this global battle of armageddon, and
that things were going to get really bad before they
got better, before Jesus returned to establish his kingdom on earth.
And so for her she believed that the US had
(05:50):
special divine origins, and so her sermons tended to be
very patriotic, very pro American. And this is true of
many immigrants, right. She was a Canadian, so she'd come
to the United States and really embraced the United States.
And so she blended with her message the sense that
the United States was the new Chosen Land, was the
new Israel, and was the place that God had destined
(06:12):
for this special work in his last days. What made
her services so attractive is what she did every Sunday night.
She rather than deliver a traditional service behind a pulpit,
she developed what she called illustrated sermons, and she drew
on the talents of Hollywood to do this. She recruited producers, actors,
(06:34):
lighting artists, prop designers, set designers, and she would have
these huge, elaborate productions on Sunday nights, these stories, these plays,
and she often took the starring role, of course, in
which she embodied different biblical stories, different messages of the
Christian Gospel. She was very explicit about this that you
needed to do something to compete with Hollywood, with movies,
(06:56):
with radio, and so the way to do that was
to essentially take the two rules of Tinseltown and make
them your own. And one of my favorites was called
the Heavenly Aeroplane. She had to get up to San
Francisco for a radio exposition and she didn't have a
lot of time to get up there and get back,
and so she charted a plane. And this was in
the nineteen twenties, early nineteen twenties, in the early days
(07:17):
of flying. So it was a biplane, one of these
planes that you think of, you know, World War two
fighter planes, which is two seats. So it's her and
the pilot. Pilot didn't see a giant pothole in the runway,
drove the wheel right into it and essentially crashed the
landing gear. So the plane did a nosedive, the tail
flipped up into the air, and McPherson went tumbling out
(07:38):
of the plane, and it was this really dangerous, kind
of catastrophic runway plane crash. Luckily nobody was hurt. McPherson
walked away unscathed. What it did was it got a
bunch of national media attention because this was a famous
American and a plane accident, and so she used that
attention like she always used me attention to craft an
(08:01):
illustrated sermon. So when prishioners came into Angela's temple that
next Sunday night, what they saw on the stage was
a miniature airplane, extra two miniature airplanes, and the stage
was decorated as an airfield, and she had the planes
connected to wires, and one, she said, was piloted by
the Devil, the other one was piloted by Jesus, and
the planes would fly over the congregation, fly around the
(08:23):
whole church, and she would encourage prishioners to make a choice,
did they want to be on the Devil's plane or
did they want to be on Jesus's plane. And of course,
at the end of her message, the Devil's plane crashed
into this heap, this pile on the church stage, while
Jesus's plane flew up to the Heavenly City to this
little model of heaven that she had built that was
(08:43):
suspended from the top of the church. And it was
these kinds of elaborate sermons with props, with costumes, with extras,
with actors, with innovative technology. The idea that these planes
are going to be flying all over church is what
was so exciting and so enticing about.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to doctor Matthew Sutton tell the
story of Amy Simple McPherson, and my goodness, what a
story indeed, taking church and the gospel to another level,
to a new level, and to compete in the end
with high entertainment from Los Angeles by building the first
megachurch in Los Angeles. When we come back more of
(09:24):
Amy Simple McPherson's story here on our American stories, and
we return to our American stories, and the final portion
(09:45):
of our story on Amy Simple McPherson telling the story
is Matthew Sutton. Let's return with the story.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So macpherson grew up at Pentecostal. She had experienced this
baptism in the Holy Spirit, as she described it's spoken tongues.
She believed she had been healed of an injury. She
believed she could heal others through prayer at times, and
so she very much embraced Pentecostalism in her early career
as she was traveling the country as a revivalist. But
(10:15):
once she settled into Los Angeles, as her status increased,
as her audience grew, as she moved up into the
middle class, she downplayed some of the more exotic and
esoteric dimensions of Pentecostalism, and so a typical service in
Angels temple would not have people speaking in tongues, would
not have prayer for divine healing, certainly wouldn't have people
(10:37):
dancing in the aisles. All those things still happened in
her congregation, but they usually happened in rooms off to
the side of the main sanctuary, so people could go
into these separate rooms pray for healing, pray for the
baptism and the Holy Spirit. If they spoke in tongues,
they spoke in tongues. But mcpherston didn't want those kinds
of things happening during services, and she certainly didn't want
(10:58):
them being captured by the radio micro phones in broadcast
out to much of the rest of the country, where
they might sound kind of weird in some ways. Though
at the end of her career she really re embraced
that heritage. In the late thirties and nineteen forties, she
returned to her Pentecostal roots. That's also the moment when
(11:18):
she really made a clear effort to integrate her church
racially integrate her church. She brought some leading Black Pentecostals
to speak at her church, and she began to champion
civil rights in ways that she never did in the
nineteen twenties. That for much of her career in becoming
middle class and respectable, that also meant embracing Jim Crow,
(11:39):
segregation and really setting aside black civil rights. But at
the end of her career, I think she recognized the
sin of that choice and began to move away from
it and to focus more on trying to reintegrate the
Pentecostal movement that had some integrative origins that had really
lost it. By the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, McPherson
(12:04):
was in the nineteen twenties one of the most famous
Americans in the country. She was profiled in all of
the major magazines. She was regularly in the major newspapers,
But things took a turn in nineteen twenty six. At
that point, she vanished. She disappeared. Her family and her
church leaders presumed that she had died. She had gone
(12:26):
for a swim down in Venice Beach in southern California
and never came back. A little over a month later,
though she stumbled across the Mexican border into Arizona with
this crazy story of having been kidnapped, taking them to
Mexico and held for ransom, And in fact, there were
ransom notes that arrived at her church at her Angelis
(12:46):
Temple organization, but there were all kinds of crank notes
that they were receiving, so it's hard to know what
was legitimate in what was not legitimate. Her story, which
she stuck to the end of her life, was that
she had been kidnapped and that the kidnappers wanted to
sell her back as a way to raise money. The
other reason she believed she had been kidnapped a claim
(13:07):
she had been kidnapped was that she had taken on
the Los Angeles criminal underground. That she was really trying
to stop the trade, especially an illegal alcoholism alcohol this
was in the era of prohibition, and also trying to
take on the dance clubs. She was taking a stand
for this kind of moral integrity and that those who
(13:27):
were complicit in these underground businesses wanted to stop her.
So that was her story. At the same time, though,
enterprising journalists began asking questions and began pursuing this story
and what they discovered was that at the same time
that McPherson had disappeared, her radio engineer, guy named Kenneth Ormiston,
had also disappeared. He had also vanished, just walked away
(13:48):
from his job and was gone. And what journalists discovered
was that while McPherson was gone, he was up in Carmel,
a beautiful beachtown in northern California, with a heavily disguised woman.
So he checked into a hotel. He was there with
a woman, and it was never clear who this woman was,
and after the fact, McPherson's mother acknowledged that there had
(14:10):
been rumors in the church that Amy was having an
affair with this ormuson before the kidnapping. There were worries
and there were concerns that perhaps they had grown too close,
and the radio engineer was actually married at the time
when McPherson returned. When these stories broke, the local district
attorney launched an investigation, first to determine whether or not
there could be charges against these alleged kidnappers, and then
(14:33):
ultimately he determined that she had lied. He took his
evidence before a grand jury, and the grand jury issued
criminal indictments against McPherson, and so there was a subsequent
major trial that dragged on and on, and it was
covered in the national news. This was huge story. All
the major journalists in the nation were covering it. It
was on the you know, in the New York Times,
(14:53):
in the La Times, of course, in the New Yorker,
in all the major magazines, and so Americans were obsessed
this trial and trying to determine whether or not McPherson
had had an affair. The district attorney ultimately decided to
drop the case, drop the charges. He was probably pressured
into doing that by William Ranoff Hurst, the major media
(15:14):
tycoon of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. It may
be that McPherson blackmailed Hurst. Hurst, at the time was
having an affair with a Hollywood actor. McPherson found out
about this, and she communicated to him that she was
going to use the power of her radio station to
embarrass him for his moral foibles if he was going
to continue to try to embarrass her through his use
(15:35):
of the media. But we don't ultimately know what happened
in that month that McPherson was gone. Certainly the circumstantial
evidence makes it appear that she was having an affair.
There was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she
was the woman with Kenneth Orminston and Carmel, and there
was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she was kidnapped.
The kidnappers were never found, There was never anybody who
(15:57):
acknowledged that they had been involved. To this day, we
don't really know. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries
in American history. After the trial, McPherson took a hit
in publicity. A lot of people were very skeptical about her,
very cynical of her, and so she spent some time
sort of regrouping. She made a few additional but I
(16:20):
think she would acknowledge were poor choices. After that, she
rushed into another marriage with a guy who was really
kind of a disaster for her ministry. He was a
heavy drinker, probably a womanizer, probably didn't care that much
about her ministry. At the same time, McPherson had a
falling out with her mother, who had been her right
hand person in the ministry. McPherson had a falling out
(16:44):
with her at that point adult daughter. So there's just
one scandal after another, there were rumors of financial impropriety.
McPherson really embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. She started dressing in
the latest Hollywood fashions, wearing expensive jewelry. She bought a
really nice house in this resort town outside of southern California.
(17:04):
She was driving really nice cars, and so it really
hurt her reputation. But in the mid nineteen thirties she
sort of had this moment of redemption where she wanted
to return to her roots, and then at that point
her ministry began to really rebuild once again, so that
by the nineteen forties she had really rebuilt her ministry.
Churches related to her ministry were expanding all over the country.
(17:27):
So it really established the foundations for a denomination, the
International Church of the Force Work Gospel, which is still
a major major American denomination today with a huge missionary
apparatus that has churches all over the world. McPherson died
in nineteen forty four of an overdose of barbituates. There
(17:49):
were rumors at the time that it might have been
a suicide. It probably was not. These were heavy sleeping
pills she would take when she would preach her revival services.
She would get so up she really needed drugs to
come back down to be able to get any kind
of relaxation. In this particular drug, you could take it
and forget that you had taken it, and so it's
(18:10):
likely that it was an accidental overdose. But it ended
her life in tragedy, which was much of how she
lived that. It was the story this American dream of
becoming one of the nation's most innovative preachers and revivalists,
but also was one that led her own life in
deep dark places, real real unsatisfactory, real unhappiness within her career.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How many out there know you are Christians?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Amen?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Well, Europe, come on, now, that's God's deal with She
just had.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
This ability to make people feel warm and seeing and
encouraged and heard, and people really resonated with her. She
was also very charismatic, but also very humble that she
because she came from the far, because she was relatively
poorly educated, she made herself very relatable to average Americans.
(19:06):
She was never condescending, she never talked down to them,
She was encouraged them and met them where she was at.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by her own Megan Pidcock, and a terrific job on
the storytelling by Matthew Sutton. He's the author of the
book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
Oh what a story we heard. She develops a real
pension for spreading the gospel, develops innovative techniques to do it,
(19:34):
a real show woman in the end, and it ends
up building America's first megachurch. Their scandal. There are problems,
as almost always happens in these regards, and she dies
in the end of a barbiturate overdose in nineteen forty four.
But what a life she led in the nineteen twenties,
as famous as Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. And in
(19:57):
the end, her work, through the use of the most
the modern technology known to man, radio, spread the Gospel
to millions. The story of Amy Simple McPherson here on
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Boysober
Have you ever wondered what life might be like if you stopped worrying about being wanted, and focused on understanding what you actually want? That was the question Hope Woodard asked herself after a string of situationships inspired her to take a break from sex and dating. She went "boysober," a personal concept that sparked a global movement among women looking to prioritize themselves over men. Now, Hope is looking to expand the ways we explore our relationship to relationships. Taking a bold, unfiltered look into modern love, romance, and self-discovery, Boysober will dive into messy stories about dating, sex, love, friendship, and breaking generational patterns—all with humor, vulnerability, and a fresh perspective.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com