SISTER, SINNER

In the gospel business.

The charismatic evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) was a national celebrity as leader of the largest church in America. Largely forgotten since her death, she is revived in journalist Hoffman’s empathetic—and dramatic— account of her life. Raised in a Christian home, the young Aimee claimed to have been infused with the spirit of Jesus when she attended a church of the Holy Rollers in her Canadian hometown. She fell in love with preacher Robert Semple; in 1908, they married, moved to Chicago, and were ordained as pastors, soon traveling abroad as missionaries. By 1910, Robert was dead, and Aimee and their infant daughter returned from Hong Kong to New York, where she and her mother became proselytizers for the Salvation Army. Aimee, though, had bigger ideas: harnessing “the wildness of Pentecostal spirit,” with her mother as a vigilant manager, they drove cross-country to Los Angeles and set up a church in a tent. Preacher, faith healer, and inspiration, Aimee soon amassed thousands of followers whose contributions enabled her to build a megachurch, hire a stage manager to design her spectacles, and rent costumes and scenery from Hollywood studios. Marriage and motherhood (she had a son with her second husband) came second to spreading God’s word. But scandal dogged her: in 1926, she disappeared, turning up in Mexico after a month, claiming to have been kidnapped. When her alleged perpetrators were caught, inconsistencies in her story led to revelations about an affair and fueled accusations of her being a “fame-hungry huckster.” Lawsuits, bitter family rifts, and money problems marred her last years. Hoffman’s discerning biography is as much a work about faith, self-mythologizing, and ambition as it is, in Hoffman words, “a cautionary tale about fame.”

A well-researched portrait of an outsize personality.