Aimee Semple McPherson was the most famous evangelist in the U.S. during the 1920s. She harnessed the new medium of radio to spread her gospel. In Echo Park, she built a megachurch called Angelus Temple, which still exists today.
However, during the height of her popularity, in 1926 at age 35, she suddenly vanished. That day, she drove to Venice Beach to work on her Sunday sermon, dipped into the Pacific Ocean wearing a bright green bathing suit, and disappeared. A massive search went on for weeks, but nothing turned up. Her mother started a church collection for her funeral. Then about a month later, she reappeared in Mexico. Her story was dramatic — she had been kidnapped and held prisoner, then fled on foot through the desert. And yet, her skin was still pale, her clothes weren’t torn, and she didn’t ask for water.
Thus, some people were skeptical. Witnesses also claimed they saw her strolling in Tucson and at a beachside cottage in Carmel with a married man. The press covered the story obsessively, including charges of fraud against McPherson, which were eventually dropped.
To this day, the public doesn’t know for sure what happened.
Her saga is traced in journalist Claire Hoffman’s new book titled Sister, Sinner.
Hoffman recalls driving by McPherson’s temple each day when commuting to work for The LA Times. “Everyone in the city knew her name. She was this founding forebearer of so much of what Los Angeles is. And I didn't like that she had been erased.”
Hoffman says a big part of McPherson’s story is her mother, who fed her ambition and outsized self-esteem by telling her that God chose her. “She just really believed in her dreams and her ability to do them, even though she was operating in a world where women weren't allowed to have property, they weren't allowed to vote. She just had a bigger sense of self.”
Before coming to Los Angeles in 1918, McPherson was traveling the U.S. with one or two of her kids, living hand-to-mouth, and hosting tent revivals and “divine healings,” Hoffman explains. Then at one point, McPherson said that Jesus told her to go to LA, so she listened.
As for her preaching style, McPherson was not a hellfire and brimstone type. Instead, she was uplifting and talked about Jesus in a romantic and matrimonial way, Hoffman describes. During her so-called illustrated sermons, she had a large orchestra, live animals, and props like palm trees onstage — all meant to rival movie houses.
“Even though it was very sophisticated entertainment, she often would be dressed as a nurse or as a milkmaid to represent her time on the Canadian farm. She often preached sermons about her time on the farm. So that was this real old-fashioned religion, in a way. It was fundamentalist. And it was really meant for these new arrivals in Los Angeles in the 1920s. … Many of them are coming from small towns and farms across America. And they're coming to this city just as it's being built.”
McPherson even captured the attention of Charlie Chaplin, who said they were doing the same thing with different goals.
“Her sense of Christian entertainment is totally formative to what we see today. And not just in Christian entertainment, but also in terms of influencers or self-help gurus or these big mega preachers. … The way that she used herself as a story and as a platform really is incredibly innovative at the time,” Hoffman says.
Though McPherson became famous when women earned voting rights and dressed more liberally, she didn’t openly support the suffragist movement or feminism, Hoffman points out, though she completely believed in her own potential.
Plus, “she was a lot of contradictions, like she was divorced twice, she did a lot of things that weren't necessarily part of the doctrine that she was preaching,” Hoffman says.
As for McPherson’s disappearance, how did she explain it?
“Aimee says that she walked down to the beach after sending her assistant away to make a phone call. And just as she was about to swim, a couple … asked her to come up to the street where they had their sick baby, and they wanted her to pray for the baby. And she says, ‘How did you know I was here?’ And they say, ‘Oh, your mother told us.’ And she says, ‘Okay, let me just go back and get my robe.’ And they say, ‘No, no, we just have to hurry.’ And they rush her to the car, and she leans over to pray over the baby in the back seat. And she gets knocked in the back of the head and drugged. And she wakes up, and she's chained to a bed. … She's being held by people … who are seeking retribution for her political activism. She was considered an enemy, so to speak, of the mafia and the underworld.”
Hoffman continues, “And she was held, according to her, for 35 days until she managed to escape through a window in a desert shack where she was being held in Mexico. She ran through the desert, through day and through the night, and showed up in somebody's backyard on the border and asked for a telephone. Not water. She asked to call her mother.”
The public quickly doubted the veracity of McPherson’s story. Hoffman says two consecutive court inquiries in 1926 took over LA. A grand jury originally focused on finding the kidnappers, then quickly picked apart McPherson’s life, business, romances, and relationship with her mother, Hoffman notes.
The scrutiny led to the church expanding. “She goes from … sometimes 10,000 people on Sunday, to 15,000-plus. So just huge numbers. People sitting in their cars outside the church, standing on the sidewalks, just traffic stopped for hours. She becomes just an even bigger public sensation.”
However, the growth warped and changed McPherson, who served as a cautionary tale about fame, Hoffman says.
“She thought, when she first began this journey, that she could control the media. If she did run away to a love nest in Carmel … I think she thought that she could. … It's just this funny inflection point in the city's history and the history of the way that we interact with celebrities. Because after that, she really almost seemed to … embody a lot of the criticism that her critics had lobbed at her for years, that she was too commercial, too economically driven, too vain, too sexual, too frivolous. And in some ways, those things started to almost come true.”
Over the years, McPherson spent a ton of time in court, became estranged from her mom, and died of an apparent overdose.
“There's a lot of tragedy in her story. … She consistently felt that she had to choose her legacy and her church over her family. So she has this falling out with her mother and later on with her daughter that are both around church management issues. … And she treated … her son a bit like an afterthought. But he's the one, when she dies, Ralph McPherson … takes over the church for five decades and brings it to economic prosperity.”