She was Sexy; She was Hot, and She Served God

07 Nov She was Sexy; She was Hot, and She Served God

Aimee Semple McPherson (October 9, 1890- September 27, 1944) ’s charisma was legendary, her theatrical sense: genius. Arriving in LA in 1918 with $100, an old beat-up car, and 2 children, by 1925 she had built an international empire worth more than a million dollars with property of $250,000. (Those numbers are impressive today, but imagine what they would be calculated for inflation.) At the height of her fame, her Angelus Temple was filled with five thousand worshippers three services a day, seven days a week, listening to her preach the word of God and watching the best show in town which once included her chasing the devil around the stage with a pitchfork.

Although she was the first woman to start her own denomination, the Foursquare Church, of which there are today 1600 churches with a membership of 8M worldwide, it is her risqué personal life for which she is most remembered. Married three times, she was involved in a scandal from which her reputation never recovered.

In 1926, Sister Aimee, wearing a bathing suit, walked into the water off Ocean Park and disappeared. Thousands flocked to the beach to pray for her return, and a plane dropped flowers onto the ocean where she had been “lost.” The Church raised $35,000 in her memory. However, Aimee was later located in Agua Prieta, Mexico, where it was claimed she had escaped with her lover and former employee, Kenneth Ormiston. When Aimee returned to LA, it was the return of a Queen: she exited the train onto a carpet of roses, and a band played as she paraded down the street with an escort of twenty cowboys and police squads.

She was arrested but the charges were never proven and were dropped. What crime had she committed, after all? Perhaps Sister Aimee’s success was a thorn in the side of the Protestant clergy, and this trial and harassment had been merely a way to try to besmirch her reputation and popularity.

Despite the scandal and showmanship, Aimee Semple McPherson certainly was a dedicated server of the spiritual. She preached her Four Square Gospel which taught salvation, the Second Coming, the possibility of redemption, and physical healing through prayer. She herself never claimed to be able to heal the sick, but her fans said otherwise. During her lifetime she prayed for the healing of three hundred thousand people, and her ministries fed over a million people during the Depression.

Her funeral in 1944 at Forest Lawn was the biggest LA had yet seen. Her death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates, rather than, as some said, a suicide. Her son, Rolf, continued her work for the next 44 years.

© 2020 Catherine Auman

This is an excerpt from Catherine Auman’s book Guide to Spiritual L.A.: The Irreverent, the Awake, and the True