Bring to Heal

As a political force in America, the Christian right has never been stronger, calling for school library book bans and anti-trans legislation while undermining women’s health rights in the name of the Gospels. What do they want? A kingdom of Christ on earth. It may take a while (see the book of Revelation), but in the meantime, they’re settling for a kingdom of Christ — or a MAGA-adapted cartoon version of him — in Washington. “We’re bringing back religion in our country,” Donald Trump said at a Rose Garden event in May, and he didn’t mean Zoroastrianism. The Christian right has his ear, a canny legislative agenda, and even a White House Faith Office, led by the televangelist Paula White-Cain.

The roots of the Christian right run deep and lead to surprising places, including Canada. White-Cain, like Oral Roberts and Jim and Tammy Bakker, owes a debt to at least two Canadian tent revival preachers of the early twentieth century who figured out how to reach the masses through technology and stagecraft. Father Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest from Hamilton, Ontario, who studied at the University of Toronto before moving to Detroit, where he launched a radio ministry, The Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower, and whose church had theatre seats instead of pews. And Aimee Semple McPherson of Ingersoll, Ontario, was arguably the pioneer of religion as show business.

Coughlin was a zealot, an antisemite, and a fascist. By the 1930s, he had thirty million listeners a week in the United States. McPherson predates him by a couple of decades, and she was a more complex, less polarizing figure but just as popular and at times as controversial, not so much for her beliefs as for her spicy private life. The magazine writer Claire Hoffman tells her story well in Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson.

Ingersoll, near London, is deep Orange, which is to say that when McPherson was born there in 1890, it was thick with English, Scots, and Irish Protestant immigrants who came to farm and who went on Sundays to the kind of grey, sober stone Presbyterian churches that Robertson Davies knew from his childhood in nearby Thamesville. In Fifth Business, set in that part of rural Ontario, Davies wrote of a Jesus with “a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.” Aimee’s father was a devout Methodist who knew about that temper, her mother a Salvation Army convert who preached “soup, soap and salvation,” an adaptable Christianity that used pageantry and music (and military logistics) to catch the attention of sinners. “Aimee had been raised in a Christian home,” Hoffman writes, “with biblical truth as an explanation for every experience.”

Pageantry appealed to Aimee. As a teenager, she talked her father into taking her to a Pentecostal revival in town, where the saved spoke in tongues and writhed as if electrocuted by the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism had only recently emerged as a Christian movement from Topeka, Kansas, and Los Angeles. The point was to engage directly with the Holy Ghost, to make a personal connection with divinity in an almost sensual, certainly physical way: one-on-one Christianity, emphasizing the individual, as opposed to, say, the communion and community of Roman Catholicism. Aimee fell in love not just with this new religion but with the tall Irish preacher on stage that night, Robert Semple. They soon married.

The newlyweds moved to Chicago, where Aimee Semple joined her husband as an ordained pastor in the Full Gospel Assembly. Women preachers were rare enough, but she also discovered a special power: the ability to heal, or so she and others believed. It started with her sudden relief from the pain of a twisted ankle, brought about through prayer, and it soon carried over to treating sick members of the congregation, especially women.

Hoffman — who has previously written about her experiences growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement in Fairfield, Iowa — goes to some lengths, to good effect, to analyze what set Aimee Semple McPherson apart from male charismatic preachers. Her femininity, for example, allowed women to feel safe bringing her health problems they wouldn’t trust to a male doctor or healer. Also, her style in the pulpit was not so much fire and brimstone and damning the sinner, and more the love and protection of a caring God instead of the Father’s terrible temper. She spoke plainly and clearly — and convincingly. This mode, to put it crassly, sold well on the market.

The couple took their ministry to China to convert non-Christians. Both caught malaria. Even with prayer and a knack for healing, Robert got sicker and sicker and eventually died. Aimee Semple returned to North America, first to New York, where her mother was preaching with the Salvation Army, and then to Ontario, with the new baby, Roberta, the only child she and Robert had. In New York, she met a restaurant cashier named Harold McPherson, who “slowly romanced” her, even as he “wanted to change the girl he was in love with.” McPherson became her second husband, and soon enough her aide-de-camp for a growing ministry that took them to Florida, where Aimee earned enough in tithes to buy a car on which she painted “Jesus Is Coming Soon — Get Ready,” in recognition of the end-times fever burning through America after the First World War.

With the help of eager reporters, her reputation as a healer spread. “Blind Woman Has Sight Instantly Restored at Lyric Revival” read a headline in Baltimore. “Paralytic Woman Claims Limbs No Longer Useless” read another. In Dayton, Ohio, she filled a 3,000-seat hall, and people had to be kept from passing their sick relatives through the windows in the hope that Aimee Semple McPherson would cure them. She made a list of the illnesses she tried to treat that day: neuritis, hip diseases, varicose veins, St. Vitus’s dance, cataracts, palsy, afflictions of the ear, hand and foot disease, “shell shock, stiff knee, chronic disease, dropsy, cancer and inflammation of the stomach, liver trouble, broken ankle, etc.” She also wrote of the fear she felt at the outstretched hands grasping for her — an image that recalled Christ with the lepers and that, before long, became a pop culture trope.

A central character in the 1960 movie Elmer Gantry is a charismatic faith-healing woman in white robes of the kind that Aimee Semple McPherson wore onstage. The 1975 film The Day of the Locust, based on the novel by Nathanael West, about Hollywood and the fickle myth of the American dream, has an unforgettable scene with Burgess Meredith playing a sick and terrified man, once a vaudeville star and now a has‑been, being rolled onstage in a wheelchair to be healed by a white-robed preacher played by Geraldine Page. This is the Aimee Semple McPherson most people are familiar with: the charismatic evangelist, the star, the recording artist, the head of the massive and ornate Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, which she founded once she outgrew halls like the one in Dayton.

Hoffman quotes Orson Welles, who called Hollywood “a bright and guilty place” in The Lady from Shanghai. It’s also a place that’s quick to pull the rug out from under its stars when they stray or disappoint, and Aimee Semple McPherson strayed. In 1926, she disappeared, presumed drowned. Weeks later, she showed up at the Mexican border with a bizarre tale of kidnapping. But an investigation poked holes in her story and countered with another, involving a male employee at Angelus Temple who may or may not have become a love interest after she and Harold were through. Most of Sister, Sinner navigates the story in true-crime fashion.

Hoffman never mentions Donald Trump or the ascending Christian right in America, but at times the reader can think of nothing else. Hoffman does make room for Aimee Semple McPherson’s charisma and power as a celebrity: “I see nested inside Aimee’s story a cautionary tale about fame. About how poisonous the gaze of the public eye can be for those who live their lives in front of it.” This is also a story of the abuse of fame by those who wield it, including the long list of snake-oil salespeople who’ve used religion as a means to gain wealth and power since McPherson’s time, not least those who pray in the Oval Office today. “Liberals may mock people of faith who believe he was chosen to protect their values,” Paula White-Cain, an heir to Aimee Semple McPherson’s legacy, if not entirely in style then in mission, said several years ago, “but I believe Donald Trump is fulfilling his pledges and I pray he will continue to lead with divine guidance.”