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Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
Matthew Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press
May 2007
On Sale: April 30, 2007
416 pages
ISBN: 0674025318
EAN: 9780674025318
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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