Matthew A. Sutton ""Between the refrigerator and the wildfire": Aimee Semple McPherson, pentecostalism, and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy." Church History, Mar 1, 2003, thefreelibrary.com/%22Between+the+refrigerator+and+the+wildfire%22%3A+Aimee+Semple+McPherson,…-a098978379.
Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the wayward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?
As the girl waited, she crafted a defense calculated to appease her Methodist father and her Salvation Army mother. She remembered Brother Kitchen, one of her mother's old friends, who years ago had been "struck by the Spirit" at the Salvation Army. Was her experience really any different? Then her father's bedtime stories came to mind. With longing he often recalled how "Holy Ghost power" seemed to pervade his childhood Methodist church. The mystified parents, when confronted with their daughter's unwavering conviction, realized that their respective churches had in fact lost the "old-time religion" that their child had rediscovered. (2)
Or so Aimee Semple McPherson testified in the 1920s in an elaborately fashioned tale intended for a diverse audience. In earlier narratives, McPherson offered a simpler story of her Holy Spirit baptism without drawing parallels between pentecostal experience and the traditions of Methodism and the Salvation Army. The latter version is particularly noteworthy because it reveals McPherson's efforts to broaden her message. In reconstructing her experience, she consciously entwined at least three strands of North American Protestantism--Methodism, the Salvation Army, and pentecostalism. Convinced that such positioning was faithful to her own experience, to the message of the Scriptures, and to historic Christianity, McPherson paved the way for pentecostals to contribute to the fundamentalist movement and led pentecostals into the mainstream of American evangelicalism. (3)
As I use them in this paper, the terms evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal are closely related. Evangelicals are Christians situated broadly in the Reformed and Wesleyan traditions that focus on conversion experiences, the individual's relationship with God, and missions. Fundamentalists are evangelicals who, during the progressive era, began militantly challenging new trends in American Protestantism. They fought evolution, higher criticism of the Scriptures, and changing standards of morality characteristic of the era. Pentecostals are one of the various groups that constituted fundamentalism. What distinguished pentecostals from their fundamentalist peers was their emphasis on the "baptism with the Holy Spirit," an emotional experience that occurred after conversion usually associated with speaking in tongues.
Historians have recognized the common nineteenth-century foundations that gave birth to different evangelical subgroups such as pentecostals, dispensationalists, and holiness groups. Many also acknowledge that following the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, pentecostals and other evangelicals often worked closely together. But regarding the critical period of fundamentalism's galvanization, the 1910s to the 1930s, historians for the most part have been myopic, ignoring or underplaying the partnerships between pentecostals and other fundamentalists. Scholars of fundamentalism relegate pentecostals to the fringes of their studies, treating them as marginal sectarians. Ernest Sandeen, a pioneering historian of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism emphasized pre-millennial dispensationalism as the essential doctrine that defined the movement, discounting pentecostals. (4) George Marsden expanded Sandeen's definition, arguing that fundamentalism was a broadly construed "phenomenon of the militantly anti-modernist evangelicalism of the 1920s" that "had wider roots" than earlier historians had acknowledged. His book is a masterful analysis, partly because of his ability to integrate the many streams that fed into a broad evangelical-fundamentalist coalition, but even Marsden largely overlooks pentecostals. (5) He treats pentecostalism as a principally separate phenomenon consisting of people who "were only tangentially part of the fundamentalism of the 1920s." (6) Rather than envisioning pentecostals as contributors to fundamentalism, much like dispensationalists, holiness partisans, and conservative Presbyterians, Marsden and others depict pentecostals as aloof from a clearly defined fundamentalist coalition and engaged in a different project. (7) "Pentecostalism," writes Marsden, "countered modern secularism with intense emphasis on the experiential side of spirituality" in contrast to fundamentalists who emphasized "the necessity of fighting secularizing forces at the level of ideology." Influence went "largely in one direction, from fundamentalism to pentecostalism." (8)
Most historians of pentecostalism fall into the same trough. "While the rest of Protestantism wrestled with the great fundamentalist controversy," writes Vinson Synan, "the Pentecostals observed the fray from the outside.... They remained isolated from the rest of American Christianity ... until after World War II." Like Marsden, these historians also assume that pentecostals were alienated from a broad-based coalition of fundamentalists, leaving little room for pentecostals to contribute to the fundamentalist project. (9) Even pentecostal theologians such as Cheryl Bridges Johns and Frank Macchia accept such arguments, disavowing the historic relationship between the two movements. (10) Although a few historians of pentecostalism such as Robert Mapes Anderson, Edith Blumhofer, Donald Dayton, and Grant Wacker have questioned such categorization, they have not developed sustained counterarguments. (11)
Pentecostals did have unique beliefs that characterized their movement and set them apart from other groups. But so did dispensationalists and conservative Presbyterians. While each group had its own room in the big house of fundamentalism, everyone--pentecostals, holiness, dispensationalists, and Presbyterians--lived under the same roof. But this has not been the image conveyed by scholars, who have typically overemphasized pentecostals' doctrinal variations, privileging the rhetorical battles sporadically waged in theological journals and Bible colleges, even as they have underemphasized pentecostals' grassroots relationships with fundamentalists." (12)
In defining evangelicalism's early-twentieth-century roots, my work, while not dismissing the histories of polemical antipentecostal preachers, highlights a different rhetoric and experience within the fundamentalist movement. What new as well as overlooked sources suggest is that pentecostals played a substantial role in the shaping of American fundamentalism. Although there were important differences among pentecostal, dispensationalist, holiness, and reformed evangelicals, all were part of a single broad river that consisted of distinct but related subcurrents. (13) Pentecostals participated in a complex religious world where competing ideologies helped them define their own practices and beliefs while simultaneously allowing them to influence and be influenced by other fundamentalist groups. It is this relationship of contact, exchange, and combination--not the traditional narratives of sectarianism and disassociation--that provided the foundation for twentieth-century evangelicalism. (14)
To support this claim, I will focus on McPherson and her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. While there is no doubt that McPherson was a colorful and unique individual whose antics, outsized talents, and significant flaws occasionally undermined her goals, the fact remains that to allow McPherson's personality to eclipse the importance of her role in building a national pentecostal movement in these critical years of fundamentalism is misguided. (15) Including McPherson's Foursquare organization along with the many evangelicals of all denominations who supported her revivals, the hundreds of churches whose pews she filled, and the legion of pastors she trained in histories of fundamentalism adds an important corrective to the scholarly literature. McPherson's participation in the fundamentalist-modernist debates is significant because it challenges us to rethink the polarized categories of pentecostal and fundamentalist that historians have for too long accepted uncritically and then essentialized. She created an open, ecumenical pentecostalism that resonated with many fundamentalists, who in turn, allied with the evangelist, creating opportunities for her to contribute to the fundamentalist movement in important and previously unacknowledged ways.
Traditional McPherson scholarship portrayed the evangelist as a rigid sectarian or a flamboyant personality, either way obscuring her true significance. By overemphasizing one aspect of McPherson's life to the detriment of the others, they failed to reach beyond McPherson's media images, which clouds her historical agency. (16) More recent works have moved in the right direction. Daniel Mark Epstein's engaging biography captures the evangelist's innovative religious practices and her passion for her ministry, while Edith L. Blumhofer's study redresses the various imbalances of older works. Having uncovered scores of new sources, she emphasizes McPherson's ecumenical orientation and is the only biographer to place her in the broader context of American religion. Blumhofer's groundbreaking work has raised the issues addressed in this article, and I wish not to challenge but to amplify and nuance her contribution. My arguments are prompted by access to new materials, including the corporate minutes of the Foursquare denomination, the membership records of McPherson's Angelus Temple, the evangelist's unpublished sermon notes and transcripts, her previously sealed ministerial file with the Assemblies of God, (17) and overlooked or underutilized archival material, tracts, newspaper and journal articles. (18)
The first part of this essay examines the evolution of McPherson's religious ideology and her relationship to multiple evangelical religious groups in the late 1910s and early 1920s, which brought her ecumenical vision of the faith to maturity. Part two illustrates McPherson's participation with the nation's leading fundamentalists from 1923 through the 1930s in militantly opposing modernism, made possible by a new church base and Bible college in Los Angeles. In light of these two sections, Foursquare participation in the newly formed National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in the early 1940s would have seemed inevitable. Yet the last section explains why it was not. The problem was not pentecostal theology or McPherson's Foursquare denomination, but rather her own controversial actions. Though the thrust of this argument moves beyond personality, McPherson's theatrics intruded at times, which is apparent in the NAE membership debates. Like her older biographers, the men of the NAE could not see past McPherson's media image to access her contributions to American religion. Following her death, the Foursquare organization was welcomed into the NAE, thus fulfilling McPherson's longtime goal of cementing pentecostals' participation as essential players in the evolving fundamentalist movement.
I. BUILDING AN ECUMENICAL IDENTITY
When McPherson joined the pentecostal movement at the age of seventeen, she did not anticipate this myriad of complicated issues. As an impressionable adolescent attending a revival held by Robert Semple, a fiery preacher and Irish immigrant working with Chicago's North Avenue Mission, she found Semple and his message irresistible. He managed not only to capture McPherson's soul for pentecostalism but also her heart for himself. In August 1908 the couple were married on McPherson's family farm near Ingersoll, Ontario. Shortly thereafter, the newlyweds moved from Canada to Chicago and went to work as evangelists with the North Avenue Mission where McPherson encountered William Durham, a preacher who had experienced Holy Ghost baptism at the legendary Azusa Street, Los Angeles, revivals. Noted by historians for his antiestablishment stance, his belief in the sovereignty of the individual church, and a congregational polity, Durham taught McPherson that any efforts to organize pentecostal congregations into a denomination would fail. During the next decade, she heeded Durham's advice, but as the scope of her evolving ministry grew, she gradually moved away from his admonition and began to institutionalize pentecostalism. (19)
In 1910, McPherson and her husband went to China as missionaries, a dream they had shared since their courtship. During this trip McPherson began to develop her own religious ideology, which surfaced in a remarkable letter sent to friends at the North Avenue Mission. The note foreshadowed the radical fundamentalist defense of the scriptures that would shortly envelop McPherson's life. She prefaced her letter with a claim for its divine origins. While many pentecostals argued that their messages came directly from God, it was especially important for women to make such claims explicit; she was not exegeting Scripture but rather acting as a mere vessel for the Holy Spirit. Narrating the vision, McPherson described seeing "those clad in priestly robes and ministerial attire" smothering the "Book of light and wisdom," representing the Bible, with "wisdom, ... thoughts and theories of men." The ministers continued by hedging in the glorious book with mortar and stone walls. Then, at a climactic moment, McPherson believed that God spoke directly to her so that she would understand what she had witnessed. The ruinous writings, according to McPherson, were "the dark and foolish sayings and theories of the unbelieving and false church" epitomized by the liberal theologies of modernists, evolutionists, and biblical critics. "But behold," God told McPherson, "even so have I chosen and ordained thee, that thou shouldst go forth, and clear away the debris and contamination, with which they have covered and obscured the light of My Word." This prophetic vision described and published when McPherson was twenty would define the essence of her ministry. The fundamental truths of the scriptures needed to be resurrected, and McPherson was convinced that God had chosen her to do it. Her mandate echoed the content, if not the form, of the call to battle modernist ideas and evolution felt by many "conventional" fundamentalists like R. A. Torrey and James M. Gray. But rather than go it alone, McPherson reached out to like-minded evangelicals, contributing to the creation of an inclusive, evangelical, ecumenical movement. (20)
Developing the movement would not be easy or immediate. When Robert died two months later in China, Aimee went to work for the Salvation Army and, in time, married Harold McPherson, an American middleclass businessman who was not enthusiastic about having a preacher for a wife. The McPhersons most likely attended an Episcopal church during the first years of their marriage, thus adding to the evangelist's potpourri of religious influences. (21) Despite her husband's prohibitions, McPherson began in 1915 what became a ceaseless career of preaching and coalition-building among similarly disillusioned evangelicals. Together, she and her coreligionists sought to restore the American Protestant church to what they believed was its original and "pure" form, using traveling tent revivals to reach not only non-Christians, but also mainline church members and Catholics. Although she rejected the theological and philosophical ideas associated with modernity, she appropriated the weapons, tactics, and technology of modern life for her arsenal. Newspaper accounts and participant recollections reveal a complex interaction of men and women from various religious institutions; diversity characterized both those filling the pews and the clergy whom McPherson invited to join her on stage. The evangelist encouraged those people who were not already members of a church to join the local congregation of their choice after the revival. McPherson's objective at this point was not to establish new "pentecostal" churches, but rather to infuse existing churches with her passions and beliefs. (22)
Leaders of a new denomination, the Assemblies of God, were carefully monitoring McPherson's message and revival successes. The Assemblies consisted of various pentecostal churches that had loosely united in 1914 to evangelize more effectively and to stabilize the movement. By 1917 they regularly printed narratives of McPherson's meetings in their magazine, the Pentecostal Evangel, and also advertised her upcoming revivals. However, McPherson was leery of working too closely with an organization that encouraged people to abandon established Protestant churches. (23) She also longed for a less peripatetic ministry. Heading for the warmer climate of the West in 1918, she concluded her first "transcontinental gospel tour" in an Assemblies of God church in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles. Fortuitously, Christians in Southern California offered to build a West Coast home for the evangelist and her two children. McPherson accepted, knowing that she could maintain communication with her national audience from Los Angeles through the Bridal Call, a magazine that she had started in 1917. She settled on Echo Park as the spot to build an inexpensive, permanent revival tabernacle, but the cost of the edifice quickly skyrocketed when the city insisted on the construction of a modern, fireproof building for services. As a result, McPherson began raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to finance the construction of Angelus Temple. (24)
To raise the money McPherson re-embarked on a four-year national preaching tour. From the pulpits of Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, and Assemblies of God churches, as well as convention centers, halls, and sports arenas, she persuaded parishioners of all persuasions to join her cause. During these years of relentless travel the foundation of McPherson's religious identity jelled as she wrestled with the creeds of the maturing pentecostal movement and sought to build alliances with other more established evangelical traditions. The Assemblies of God, Methodists, and Baptists all licensed McPherson to preach. At the same time, she developed her own independent ministry under the name of the Echo Park Evangelistic Association, which laid the foundation for her future organization, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. This ecumenical interaction, combined with an independent organization dedicated to interdenominational, international evangelism, became the hallmark of her remarkable career.
Although McPherson had been ordained by Durham and another pentecostal leader, she formed her first major institutional alliance in 1919 when she joined the pentecostal Assemblies of God after a California member suggested her ordination to the denominational leadership with the evangelist's tacit approval. (25) McPherson's affiliations with the early Assemblies seemed to be evidence of her broad-based ecumenism rather than a decision to affiliate with a single religious body. McPherson probably did not consider the Assemblies alliance to be anything more than an informal expression of the parallel work in which she and the Assemblies were engaged. What she did not realize was that the Assemblies of God was quickly evolving from an ad hoc association to an institutionalized denomination. By the end of the decade the Assemblies had established "official" policies, unofficial practices, and doctrinal statements--exactly those things that Durham had warned her to avoid.
In 1920, McPherson accepted an invitation to preach at the Assemblies of God's general council, the first of only a few women ever to achieve such prominence. McPherson set the tone for the convention, delivering the opening message as well as many subsequent sermons, and won the respect of most of the organization's leaders. However, one man who may not have been so enthusiastic about McPherson's presence in Missouri was Eudorus N. Bell. According to Assemblies historian Edith Blumhofer, Bell "considered most women `busybodies' who tended not to settle down and accomplish anything of enduring worth." This hostile view of women, although dormant at the convention, would resurface, adversely affecting McPherson's continuing relationship with the Assemblies of God. (26)
While dazzling the Assemblies, McPherson quietly began to differentiate herself from the separatist trends that increasingly characterized her pentecostal friends. She removed the word "pentecostal" from the Bridal Call's cover--probably an indication that she found the category to be too restrictive. (27) Choosing to renew the faith of her childhood, she kept one foot in pentecostalism while she grounded the other squarely within the Methodist tradition. In Philadelphia, shortly after the Assemblies' convention, McPherson held multidenominational meetings with broad Methodist support. Reluctant about overwhelming a predominately conservative group with pentecostal practices, she turned to religious history to explain her work, claiming that people in Philadelphia were being slain in "good old-fashioned Wesley Methodist fashion." The nonpentecostal clergy, according to McPherson, never doubted her. When asked how they perceived the revival's progress, the clergy responded, "isn't it grand, the old Wesleyan days have come back again." Enchanted with Methodist history, she would later claim, "My people had all been Methodists. Our family had been a straight line of Methodists ... right down from the time of John Wesley." (28)
By placing pentecostal experience within the Methodist tradition, McPherson found legitimacy in a more established evangelicalism than the Assemblies of God and Azusa Street pentecostalism could have provided. She also rejected the separatist direction of pentecostalism for a more ecumenical approach. As modernist philosophy seeped into many American churches, evangelicals of all persuasions debated whether to abandon their churches or to work for reform. McPherson, facing such a choice, opted to work from the inside out rather than to separate from historic denominations. The contact between traditional American evangelicals and pentecostals at McPherson's meetings blended the traditions of the nineteenth-century Methodist revivals and pentecostalism. This hybrid evangelical synthesis, challenging both the complacency of the traditional denominations and the excesses of the pentecostal groups, represented an important first step toward McPherson's goal of rebuilding the early church in the modern world, on a broadly, vibrantly, evangelical basis. (29)
McPherson also developed partnerships with conservative Presbyterians. For example, she worked with California oilman and fundamentalist leader Lyman Stewart. He had orchestrated and financed the publication of the Fundamentals from 1910-1915, a twelve volume series of booklets that articulated many of the tenants of American fundamentalism. He also built the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) and a related publishing house. In 1921, McPherson called upon Stewart to help her publish a collection of messages entitled Divine Healing Sermons, which in addition to emphasizing miraculous healings included a few testimonies of people speaking in tongues. Stewart agreed to print the book, and so the presses from which the Fundamentals had rolled were reset to print McPherson's words. While Stewart and McPherson may have disagreed on such issues as the nature of the baptism of the Holy Spirit or the details of dispensationalism, their similarities were greater than their differences--they were both dedicated to the fundamentalist cause. The failure of BIOLA's publishing house to recognize a conflict in their production and distribution of both the Fundamentals and Divine Healing Sermons suggests the comparable nature of McPherson's work and that of BIOLA during the early 1920s. (30)
In late 1920, McPherson returned to Philadelphia and held a second revival sponsored by local Methodist preachers, including L. W. Munhall, a prominent fundamentalist. Inspired by apocalyptic predictions following World War I, Munhall participated in the exploding fundamentalist movement of the period. Convinced that developing theories of evolution and the application of literary criticism to the biblical text threatened the Christian faith, fundamentalist men and women militantly went on the offensive. Munhall, an old revivalist himself, traveled the country seeking to purge modernist influences from American evangelicalism. In Philadelphia, he and his colleagues believed that McPherson embodied "old-fashioned" Methodism, and they saw her as a potential ally in their antimodernist crusade; therefore they received her into "full membership" and provided her with an exhorter's license from the Methodist Episcopal church. (31)
After receiving her Methodist license in Philadelphia, McPherson immediately wrote a letter to the Assemblies of God. Her statement became the cover story for the following month's Pentecostal Evangel. Titled "Methodism and Pentecost," the article revealed specific examples of the religious exchange of practices and ideas inherent in McPherson's multdenominational services. She explained to readers of the Evangel that she had to instruct the clergy from "traditional" churches that pentecostalism was in fact consistent with the locals' own historic tradition of Methodist Christianity. The Methodists agreed, convinced that the pentecostal baptism and speaking in tongues did not make "any schism in the body whatsoever." On the contrary, McPherson reported, "they felt assured that this was just what the church needed." Regarding her new exhorter's license, which lends credence to McPherson's version of events, she explained that the Methodists were not attempting to entice the evangelist away from pentecostalism, but only to prove their "acceptance of Pentecost." Yet despite her disclaimers, McPherson recognized that tension was growing within the pentecostal movement. In her concluding assurances to fellow pentecostals, she wrote, "We wanted you to be the first to know of this lest any enemy tongue or pen should endeavor to place a misconstruction upon this matter.... Be assured that I am ever loyal and true to the heavenly vision." (32)
But she was not. As early as 1919 McPherson had demonstrated her escalating differences with many pentecostals, and, by 1922, she prepared to act on her convictions. In San Jose, California, the First Baptist Church ordained the evangelist in a controversial coup. The ordination service began with a sermon from McPherson, preached before a teeming audience. She "expressed herself as definitely out of sympathy with the extravagances and fanaticisms" of pentecostalism, wrote one witness, thereby publicly articulating her continuing movement away from radical pentecostals and towards a reformulated, revivalist evangelicalism. When local Baptist leaders interrogated her on such issues as divine healing and speaking in tongues in order to determine whether or not she should be ordained, McPherson was evasive. She believed that the overriding threat of "higher criticism" was cause for minimizing the differences between pentecostal and nonpentecostal evangelicals. When the ordination came to a vote, the council of clergy and regional leaders split evenly. Since the votes of regional authorities were nonbinding given the congregational polity of Baptist churches, in March 1922 the San Jose church went ahead and ordained Aimee Semple McPherson a Baptist. (33)
McPherson saw continuity between her own mission and that of the "old-time" Baptists and Methodists, which led her to align with them. While she may have been interested in achieving the middle class respectability that would come with associating with such established denominations, it appears that the evangelist had greater interests in mind. By returning their overtures of membership and licensing, McPherson hoped to reinvigorate twentieth-century "mainstream" churches by embodying the religion of their forbearers before their very eyes. What actually occurred was not a rebirth of the Second Great Awakening, but rather what Catherine L. Albanese has termed a relationship of contact, exchange, and combination characteristic of American religion. As McPherson worked with Baptists and Methodists, she appropriated ideas and practices from their traditions, such as an expositional preaching style and strong biblicism. At the same time she infused members of these traditional denominations with a new sense of God's imminence and power, helping them feel less inhibited about expressing themselves in worship. (34)
Not all Baptists, however, welcomed a dynamic relationship between their denomination and McPherson. The split vote over her ordination quickly spilled onto the pages of local newspapers. One of those against her, Orville Coats, sent a long letter to the San Jose Mercury Herald explaining that the contested vote meant that McPherson represented only the San Jose church, not the Baptist denomination as a whole. McPherson disagreed. A few days later, in response to the controversy, she told the San Francisco Chronicle that she was "qualified to fill a pulpit of the [Baptist] church whether it be in San Jose or Bangkok, Siam." (35)
Coats was not the only person upset by the proceedings in San Jose. The day after the ordination, J. H. Sparks, an Assemblies of God pastor from California, wrote to E. N. Bell, who was serving as General Secretary of the Assemblies, to inform him of McPherson's actions. He explained that during the course of McPherson's questioning, she did not defend the pentecostal belief that speaking in tongues evidenced a person's baptism in the Holy Spirit. Instead she testified, "I very seldom speak in tongues, but my message now is the cross of Christ." She explained to her interrogators that she wanted to join their denomination because she had "been knocked by the Pentecostal cranks on one side, and by the cold church on the other side." According to Sparks, McPherson committed "the biggest compromise" that had ever occurred in the pentecostal movement. (36)
Unbeknownst to most pentecostals, three months earlier McPherson had quit the Assemblies of God. She and Assemblies leader E. N. Bell were only briefly acquainted, and communication between them was poor. A difference of opinion over the control of Angelus Temple had finally provoked McPherson's resignation. Bell seemed to believe that churches needed independent oversight by a strong central governing body, while McPherson's hope for decentralized ecumenical alliances with many fundamentalist groups made her unwilling to relinquish control of her property to any separatist pentecostal group. When Bell wrote in the Pentecostal Evangel that religious leaders who held church property in their own names invited graft and corruption into their communities with allusions, but no direct reference, to McPherson, the evangelist saw it as a breach of faith and immediately chose to sever all ties with his organization. It was up to Bell to decide how to make McPherson's resignation known, especially since he feared that Assemblies men and women were continuing to donate money to the erection of a defecting Temple. (37)
A month after her Baptist ordination, McPherson went to Wichita, Kansas for a revival where her negative comments on separatist pentecostalism widened the breach. Almost a week into the meetings McPherson met with a reporter from the local newspaper, the Wichita Daily Eagle. He asked, "Is it true that you are a member of the Pentecostal church, Assembly of God? [sic]" McPherson confidently replied, "No, I am not a member of that sect.... I have done everything in my power to curb the apparent wildness of the Pentecostal believers." (38) Her reply may have reassured the Baptists, but it dramatically increased the level of dissatisfaction among pentecostals in McPherson's audience. Both McPherson's leadership of the revivals and the Daily Eagle interview left them feeling frustrated and rejected. Paul Ralstin, an Assemblies of God leader from Oklahoma, mailed a copy of McPherson's interview to Bell in Missouri and suggested that the Assemblies make it clear to their members that McPherson was not part of their movement. Bell agreed and penned an article for the Pentecostal Evangel, which he signed on behalf of the General Council of the Assemblies of God. (39) Titled "Is Mrs. McPherson Pentecostal?" the Evangel article began with an anonymous letter from a "brother" who had attended the revivals. The "brother," distraught over McPherson's claim to be a Baptist minister, wondered whether McPherson was still pentecostal. Bell printed a message after the letter indicating that McPherson had broken her relationship with the Assemblies of God, and he expressed doubts about McPherson's commitment to pentecostalism. He wrote, "We desire to see Mrs. McPherson reclaimed to the full Pentecostal power, which is reported to us to be greatly decreasing in her meetings," and concluded, "If Sister McPherson can get to the place where she can joyfully bear reproach for the sake of the Master ... and where she does not compromise in any way the full Gospel, she can certainly be a mighty power for God." Bell would later admit that he should not have "commented" on McPherson's faith. (40)
"How can you expect to escape hell" for hurting "Sister Aimee," one outraged reader responded to Bell. McPherson was equally upset. Although she repeatedly claimed that she did not respond to criticism, this article provoked a sizzling reply. McPherson could, when necessary, fit the mold of militant, edgy, combative fundamentalist just as easily as she could play peacemaker. The evangelist began her rejoinder with an article in her own magazine, entitled "The Narrow Line or `Is Mrs. McPherson Pentecostal' No? Yes?" The article opened with an allusion to a child walking on the top of steel railroad tracks on her way to school--the narrow line. McPherson connected this to her work as an adult, where she was called to walk between "fanatical flesh masquerading as the Spirit" (pentecostals), and "cold, backslidden, worldly formality, on the other" (indicting both modernists and those fundamentalists who neglected her moderate view of the "gifts" of the Holy Spirit). "To be Spirit-filled," according to McPherson, "is the grandest, proudest, tribute of sobriety and piety one can possess." The Holy Spirit, she continued, "is not marked by wildness, hysteria, screaming, or unseemly manifestation: but by deep, holy, sober, godly, reverent, prayerful exaltation of the gentle Christ." Lambasting the leaders of the Assemblies of God whom she referred to as "silly," "unjust," and "pitiful" for questioning the faith of those "that do not conform exactly to their mold," she went on to defend herself from the attacks of pentecostals on one side and those of the "spiritually dead" conservatives, modernists, and higher critics on the other. Seeking to define her own ministry, McPherson elaborated on her desire to carve out new ground, explaining that her hope was to "walk the middle of the road, seeking to give offense to neither, but to keep life and doctrine straight to the word, and take the hand of the one who is burning with fire and zeal, and put it into the hand of they who are cold, backslidden and dead." She later reiterated, "So here we are," "On the left hand--Formalism. On the right hand--Fanaticism. The Refrigerator or the Wild-fire, which will you choose?" But "thank God," she wrote, "there is a middle-of-the-road experience."
The synthesis derived from McPherson's experience over the course of these years convinced her that the gospel would be best served by integrating aspects of both the pentecostal and more mainstream branches of Protestantism. The result would be a reciprocal relationship in which traditional churches appropriated revival techniques and a new awareness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit from pentecostals while pentecostals learned to articulate and defend the "historic" doctrines of the evangelical faith from other theologically conservative Protestants. (41)
II. CRAFTING A FUNDAMENTALIST COALITION
McPherson had carved out her position none too soon. Just months later, New Year's Day, 1923, thousands of men and women descended upon Echo Park, Los Angeles, to dedicate Angelus Temple. Having a permanent base for her Echo Park Evangelistic Association allowed the evangelist new opportunities for building cross-denominational alliances with individuals rather than denominations. Instead of joining other traditions, McPherson attracted Baptists, Methodists, Brethren, Catholics, Mormons, Presbyterians, and countless others to Los Angeles and to the Temple. During the opening festivities, McPherson advertised that preachers from the Methodist Episcopal, the United Brethren, Baptist, Congregational, and Southern Methodist denominations, among others, would be delivering sermons. (42) She further outlined this ecumenical ideology in a sermon delivered later that year, arguing that in the pentecostal movement "myriad streams, coming from myriad fountain-heads, had met and mingled together and NOW flowed on in ONE great stream as though they had never been divided." She specifically identified the Methodists, the Baptists, the Salvation Army, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Adventists, Quakers, and even Roman Catholics as contributors to the movement. (43)
The purpose of Angelus Temple was to provide a place where McPherson could build a national market by inculcating Christians with her via media. By establishing the ministry in Los Angeles, McPherson strategically hoped to capitalize on the city's tremendous growth and good weather, as well as on the new popularity of the automobile and the vacationers who came to the coast. She believed that her Temple should stand where "tourists coming constantly from all parts of the earth, could receive the message, then return like homing pigeons, bearing the message in their heart." (44) But what of local residents? McPherson claimed that she had built the Temple as a place for people to visit where they might experience revival, not as a permanent church fellowship. Yet such a plan was impractical. McPherson needed a sizable core of members to run the organization, staff the commissary, serve as Sunday school teachers and ushers, and to play in the band and sing in the choir. Almost immediately those living in Los Angeles were encouraged to leave their own fellowships for McPherson's. The membership records of Angelus Temple reveal a diverse constituency who were required to pledge their loyalty to McPherson's Declaration of Faith and to commit to ecclesiastical service. She also recognized that having a permanent, modern building would lend credibility to her work. No longer did McPherson need to roll up her sleeves and drive tent stakes into the ground to draw a crowd; now she had a unique church that the nation's most important and influential people could comfortably attend. This brought her further into the mainstream of evangelical Protestant life and opened up new opportunities for partnerships with other fundamentalists. (45)
McPherson decided to build a Bible college next door to the Temple, Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism (LIFE), where she could educate students with her recently articulated "foursquare gospel." Common among both pentecostal and holiness groups, this gospel emphasized the fourfold nature of Christ's character; he was savior, baptizer with the Holy Spirit, healer, and coming king. McPherson hoped that by molding young men and women with her ideas and practices, they would take the foursquare gospel across the country to churches of all denominations. As proof of her "middle of the path" inclination, McPherson convinced Frank Thompson, author of the popular Thompson Chain Reference Bible, to serve as dean of the school. Thompson, a Methodist, never claimed to be a pentecostal; yet McPherson allowed him to oversee her college, which became the bastion of doctrinal dissemination in McPherson's hierarchy. McPherson did not express concern over Thompson's failure to seek a pentecostal experience since she believed that her ministry truly was a reincarnation of old-time Methodism. Thompson inculcated students with Wesleyan ideas while McPherson simultaneously taught them the tenants of the pentecostal movement. (46)
The combination of church base and Bible college pushed McPherson into creating a new denomination. Although she continued to claim that she had no intention of starting an independent pentecostal organization, she could no longer heed Durham's warnings against institutionalizing the movement. "There was no idea in our mind of forming a denomination," she argued just after incorporating the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927. "Indeed we shrank away with fear and distaste from the thought, yet here was the work growing with the most amazing rapidity." McPherson's extensive radio audience demanded local "Foursquare" churches, while the students exiting LIFE Bible College with diplomas in hand provided the leadership for new congregations. McPherson concluded, "there was nothing to do but let the work grow," and so she began organizing "branch churches" shortly after Angelus Temple opened. Despite its denominational form, McPherson continued to define her organization as ecumenical and interdenominational, although it became less so as time progressed. (47)
With the fundamentalist-modernist controversies brewing in the 1920s, McPherson, more popular then ever and ensconced in a formidable institutional base, jumped into the fray and identified herself further with the interdenominational fundamentalist movement. Unlike some fundamentalists who worked in narrow, sectarian groups, she partnered with the many conservative evangelicals who decided to put aside denominational differences in order to fight modernism together. In 1924, when L. W. Munhall, the Methodist who had shared a stage with McPherson during her licensing in Philadelphia, visited the Temple as a member of the Board for the International Fundamentalists' Association, he prefaced his sermon with a tribute to McPherson. He explicitly characterized her as a "fundamentalist" by the standards of his association and praised her loyalty "to the Bible as the word of God, and all the fundamental doctrines of historic Christianity." Later, McPherson and Munhall were photographed together; the caption, reiterating McPherson's passion for the Methodist tradition, read, "Go on my sister! You are preaching the identical gospel and doing the same work as did the early Methodists when I was a boy." (48)
McPherson's reciprocal relationship with William Jennings Bryan, another stalwart champion of a broadly based fundamentalist movement, further complicates rigid pentecostal-fundamentalist dichotomies. McPherson studiously followed and supported Bryan's antievolution campaign while, at the same time, exposing him to her particular mix of pentecostal practice and antimodernist theology. That she influenced him was apparent in a sermon he preached at the Temple in which Bryan confessed that he had "borrowed" and then repeatedly preached a lesson that he heard McPherson once deliver. Hearing her speak on divine healing had left an indelible mark on him, he explained, reshaping his thinking, language, and preaching about the subject. Affirming McPherson's fundamentalist credentials, he told Munhall, "I think, Brother Munhall, if some of our Modernist preachers, who are preaching for the most part to empty pews, would study this woman, her message and methods, they would learn much to their advantage, if they were wise enough to profit by it." The following year at Angelus Temple, Bryan preached a characteristic sermon on the fundamentalist defense of the Bible, which McPherson decided to print and reprint in her magazine. (49)
McPherson, in return, appropriated Bryan and Munhall's rhetoric as she made clear during a dramatic sermon entitled "Trial of the Modern Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ." The evangelist played the role of prosecutor in a mock trial that focused on the infiltration of modernism into American churches. As exhibits, she quoted professors and preachers including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Walter Rauschenbusch, Shailer Mathews, Earnest Dewitt Burton, and many more who embodied the perils of modernism, revealing how thoroughly aware McPherson was of the persons, if not the full dimensions of the ideas that fundamentalists were battling. McPherson's case, on the other hand, rested simply on the Bible and the views of Bryan and Munhall, who were specifically contrasted to Fosdick and Rauschenbusch. (50)
While Bryan was engulfed in the 1925 Scopes Trial, McPherson sent a supportive telegram to him affirming: "Ten thousand members of Angelus Temple with her millions of radio church membership send grateful appreciation of your lion hearted championship of the Bible against evolution and throw our hats in the ring with you." It continued by relaying the festivities McPherson was orchestrating for Bryan's support in the "monkey trial." There would be an all-night prayer service and on the following Sunday afternoon she planned to lead a massive church meeting followed by a Bible parade through Los Angeles. The rally, she promised, would culminate with a trial, which, to the fundamentalists' great delight, would portray the "hanging and burial of monkey teachers." (51)
In addition to parades and spectacular sermons, McPherson used her magazine the Bridal Call to aid the fundamentalist cause. But in the 1920s it was not the only antimodernist periodical coming out of Los Angeles. The journal The King's Business, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), provided another forum where fundamentalist leaders could assail Protestant America's liberalism. Because Munhall and Bryan, among others, contributed to both periodicals and engaged in well-publicized partnerships with McPherson and BIOLA at the same time, many Los Angeles parishioners speculated that BIOLA and Angelus Temple were in the process of combining their ministries. The rumors became so prevalent that BIOLA's board of directors printed a notice in The King's Business informing the public that the ministries were not joining. While some of the faithful were very much aware of the different emphases expounded by preachers at Angelus Temple and BIOLA, enough Los Angeles parishioners saw so little difference between the ministries that BIOLA felt compelled to articulate its independence from McPherson. (52)
McPherson also worked with Paul Rader, another prominent fundamentalist. A well-known preacher and, like McPherson, a famous religious radio personality in the 1920s, Rader served as pastor of the Moody Memorial Church before opening the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. After collaborating for a few revival campaigns, McPherson and Rader developed a relationship so strong that in 1926 Rader filled in as pastor of the Temple when McPherson took a long vacation. The arrangement represented more than just a friendship; it revealed the ideological compatibility of the two, which was evident in a sermon Rader preached in Chicago during April of 1926, only weeks after returning from Angelus Temple. Entitled "The Midnight Cry," this sermon was deemed so pivotal to Rader's ministry that his followers chose it for reproduction in a memorial booklet following his death in 1938. Rader used the sermon to lay the foundation for a renewed revival campaign that he claimed "was placed on my heart while in Los Angeles." The revival would occur, Rader preached, "through the anointing of the Holy Ghost, an outpouring of His Spirit upon ministers and laymen of all kinds and creeds everywhere." Again, the McPherson-Rader relationship, like her relationship with Bryan and Munhall, challenges historians' caricatures of awestruck pentecostals ignored by sophisticated fundamentalists. Instead it illuminates the egalitarian commonalities and contacts shared by evangelicals of various sorts in the 1920s. (53)
While McPherson challenged people like Munhall, Bryan, and Rader to rethink issues of divine healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, she was profoundly affected by the fundamentalist-modernist wars of the 1920s. Despite the public ridicule heaped upon fundamentalists in the wake of the Scopes Trial, McPherson conducted an ideological fight against modernism. Five sermons entitled "What's the Matter?" provide a case in point. In this series, McPherson analyzed the problems with the church, the preacher, the pew, the seminary, and old-time religion, respectively, and in the course of each provided a scathing critique of modernism. Churches were criticized for "joining hands with the world" and popularizing the gospel by "cutting out" the doctrine of repentance and the mourners' bench. Her remedy: "Put out the world and get back to the old-time fundamental faith." Reminiscent of Gilbert Tennent's Great Awakening sermon "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," McPherson argued that the modern preacher had not experienced a Christian rebirth but busied himself holding dances and showing movies while aligned with modernism, evolution, and higher criticism. She chided the seminary as well. "The cold, revivalless, bloodless, back-slidden Seminaries of the present age" embraced modernism, evolution, and higher criticism, while ridiculing the virgin birth and relegating to mythology the biblical account of creation. She ended with a call to return to "the old-time religion," which emphasized the power of the Holy Spirit and the essential doctrines of "fundamentalist" Christianity. (54)
The tactics that McPherson used in her sermons against modernism also defined the mission of her Bible college. A Bridal Call story with its customarily sensationalist rhetoric explained the school's purpose: "Help! Help! The minute guns are firing. The S.O.S. is pealing through the air. The storm is raging, the waves are roaring, as the hurricane is blowing." The enemies, according to the author, were both the public schools and "in the ranks and pulpits of orthodox and evangelical Christendom." But parishioners had reason to hope. Rather than abandoning their children to "Higher Criticism," "Darwinism," and "Modernism," McPherson's readers were to concentrate their "forces and finances" by joining with the evangelist to inculcate their children at LIFE Bible College with the "Four Square Gospel, so that no power on earth or hell can shake them from the Fundamental Doctrines." (55)
McPherson continued to fight the good fight well into the 1930s, engaging in a series of debates with Charles Lee Smith, the president and founder of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. Smith, who had previously debated fundamentalist luminaries John Roach Straton and William Bell Riley, added her to his list. Opening the debates, he informed the audience, "I have met the leading Fundamentalists of the nation ... and I am frank to admit to you that Aimee Semple McPherson is the greatest defender today of the Bible and Christianity.... She has an extraordinary mind," he added, "particularly for a woman." (56)
To modernism and atheism McPherson added her other archenemy, communism. Her anticommunist crusade reinvigorated and broadened McPherson's ecumenism in the mid-1930s, involving her in the world of partisan politics. To her cache of sermons she added, "America Awake!" a call for fundamentalists to turn to the ballot to save the country. "Whether we be Republican or Democrat, Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, we are made of the same clay, worship the same God and swear allegiance to the same country. How much longer," she asked, "will red-blooded Americans, who claim to be worthy offsprings [sic] of the Pilgrims, sit and tolerate this wholesale destruction of the faith of their fathers? There comes a time when the limit of endurance is reached." (57) By the end of the year, her target was Upton Sinclair, the social critic, novelist, and socialist who seemed positioned to win California's gubernatorial election on the Democratic ticket. Sinclair horrified McPherson, who believed that he represented a godless threat that would undermine America's Christian faith. When a group of similarly minded Southern California clergy decided to hold an anti-Sinclair rally at the Shrine Auditorium on the Friday before Election Day, they invited McPherson to put together a three hundred member musical pageant based on her sermon "America Awake!" for the finale. The following Sunday even more people of all faiths visited Angelus Temple to hear her preach three similar messages. While she never again became so visibly active in partisan politics, McPherson continued tirades against communism in partnerships with people like Gerald Winrod. (58)
III. CEMENTING FULL MEMBERSHIP IN EVANGELICALISM
Wondering if she would find yet another opportunity to craft an ecumenical partnership in the early 1940s, McPherson watched curiously as members of various denominations convened the first meetings of the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action (NAE). Having been temporarily sidelined by the Scopes debacle, many moderate American fundamentalists, who had begun to call themselves evangelicals, sought cultural power by uniting their churches in a common cause. Bringing together over forty denominations, the NAE provided an alternative to the liberal Federal Council of Churches. Under the leadership of J. Elwin Wright, the NAE founders sought to break down the barriers between different fundamentalist groups who had long avoided each other. Wright and his partners hoped that dispensationalists would work alongside Nazarenes, that conservative Presbyterians would work with pentecostals, and that Baptists would work with Free Methodists. Wright assured pentecostals: "We are making it quite thoroughly understood that the Pentecostal and Holiness groups are welcome members in the National Association." He later observed, "I have been gratified that there has been so little evidence among the various groups interested in United Action against our Pentecostal brethren." Harold Ockenga, the president of the NAE, agreed, claiming, "one of the reasons for God's blessing upon the National Association of Evangelicals is that it has a breadth of spirit." (59)
Despite promises to the contrary, the NAE stalled on admitting McPherson's organization to fellowship, thereby indicating that they had some concerns about the Foursquare organization. The prominence given to the Assemblies of God among the NAE leadership had begun to alienate other nonpentecostal groups, and the religious press pressured the NAE to maintain a balance between pentecostal/holiness groups and nonholiness groups. As president, Ockenga had initially sent the Foursquare Board of Directors a telegram promising their "acceptance" into the organization and dispatched Wright to Los Angeles to speak at the 1943 Foursquare ministers' convention to try to sell the denomination on membership in the NAE. (60) Shortly thereafter, Wright told the Foursquare Board of Directors that the local NAE committee supported Foursquare and that even McPherson's longtime rival "Fighting" Bob Shuler "expressed himself unquestionably in favor of acceptance." Wright insisted, "there is positively no question whatsoever as to the acceptance" of Foursquare. (61) Accordingly, the denominational board then voted to affiliate with the NAE. But probably hoping to forestall criticism from antipentecostal segments, the NAE delayed Foursquare's affiliation. (62) In 1944, a frustrated Foursquare Board of Directors lost its patience with the NAE's delays and withdrew its application for membership. Yet the matter was not settled, even with McPherson's untimely death from an accidental overdose of prescription medication later that year. (63)
In a 1946 meeting, NAE leaders raised the issue of Foursquare admission again, illuminating more clearly why they may have previously dragged their heels with respect to membership affiliation. One leader predicted that affiliating with the Foursquare church would provoke the types of negative publicity that the NAE had worried about a few years earlier. Then the Assemblies of God's Ernest Williams made known that his reservations about Foursquare had to do with "some things that had taken place in the life of the little woman." First was her battle in 1922 with Assemblies leaders, while she was still affiliated with them, over who had sponsored a missionary family left stranded in Africa. Then came her famous "kidnapping" incident in 1926. Believing McPherson was dead, the Assemblies published a sympathetic cover story and eulogy in the Pentecostal Evangel, only to find out that she was still alive and claiming to have been kidnapped while rumors spread that she was having an affair with a married man. And, possibly the final nail in the coffin, her marriage and divorce in the early 1930s to a young baritone from one of her sacred operas resulted in the defection of a number of her churches. It should come as no surprise, then, that these events did not sit well with the male leadership of the NAE, who were seeking public respectability, not an unwanted lightening rod for controversy. They therefore decided to avoid affiliating with her ministry while simultaneously embracing many of the churches whose pulpits and pews she had filled over the previous decades. McPherson's vision of an ecumenical evangelism had materialized, albeit without her. But in 1952, the new leaders of the Foursquare denomination reapplied for membership in the National Association of Evangelicals. This time their application was accepted. McPherson's lifelong dream of permanently and institutionally linking her version of pentecostalism with mainstream evangelicalism was finally fulfilled. (64)
In sum, McPherson's work and organization undermine the "standard" narratives of evangelicalism in the first half of the twentieth century. She represents one of the major strands in pentecostalism as the founder of a significant denomination, the head of a Bible college that produced hundreds of new ministers, and an ally of many within the founding generation of pentecostals. McPherson's reevaluation of her experience with William Durham, her rocky relationship with the Assemblies of God, her affiliation with the Baptist and Methodist traditions, her work with leaders of the fundamentalist movement, and her relentless, highly publicized, and militant ideological opposition to modernism in the crucial years of fundamentalism's development force us to rethink essentialized categories that segregate "fundamentalists" from "pentecostals." Relationships between the two were not onesided and hierarchical, as some have argued. Nor can historians isolate pentecostals as fundamentalists with a difference, which wrongly presupposes a unified, clearly defined, fundamentalism. In fact, the relationship between pentecostals and other fundamentalists was constantly being contested both by the leaders of the movements and at the grass-roots level where hundreds of thousands of parishioners who attended nonpentecostal churches eagerly participated in pentecostal revivals. The sustained interaction between Aimee Semple McPherson and evangelicals of all sorts reveals a complex and ecumenical world of religious interchange in which ideas were shared, lost, and appropriated, constantly reshaping the face of American evangelicalism.
(1.) I am deeply indebted to Jane Sherron DeHart, Grant A. Wacker, Catherine L. Albanese, W. Elliot Brownie, e, and Carl Harris for their help on this article. The anonymous readers for Church History, participants at the Spring 2001 Meeting of the American Society of Church History, and UCSB's American Religion Study Group raised important questions and offered constructive suggestions on early drafts.
(2.) Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons, and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson, Evangelist, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Bridal Call Publishing House, 1921), 50.
(3.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Personal Testimony and Life of Aimee Semple McPherson" (Chicago: The Pentecostal Herald [1915?]), 13-14. Another significant difference in the accounts relates to the phone call made to McPherson's mother, Minnie Kennedy. In early editions Kennedy is told that her daughter is "lying on the floor in the Mission, before all the people, chattering like a monkey." In a parenthetical note McPherson writes, "my dear mother has her own baptism now, and spoke with other tongues--ON THE FLOOR, TOO! [emphasis hers]" Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons, and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson, Evangelist (Los Angeles: Bridal Call Publishing House, 1919), 52. In later editions, McPherson sanitized the story. By 1921, McPherson claimed that the caller told her mother that McPherson had simply "disobeyed" Minnie's orders by "shouting more than any of them." McPherson also eliminated all references to her mother trembling on the floor. Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That, rev. ed., 49; and Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons, and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson, Evangelist, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Foursquare, 1923), 47. McPherson eventually eliminated this piece of the story altogether. See "The Personal Testimony of Aimee Semple McPherson, 1928 Edition" (Los Angeles: Foursquare, 1928).
(4.) Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
(5.) George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5.
(6.) Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 94.
(7.) For example, Joel Carpenter cites Marsden's work as a defense of his virtual dismissal of pentecostalism's contribution to fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s. See Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth ignores pentecostals in her work on fundamentalism, citing Marsden's categories as justification and, therefore, is able to dismiss a group that might complicate some of her arguments. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 4-5.
(8.) George Marsden, "Fundamentalism," in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, ed. Charles Lippy and Peter Williams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), 2:947; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 94.
(9.) Vinson Syrian, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 207, 209; see also Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1972); Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army, Moves the Church of God, 1886-1955 (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Publishing House, 1955); and Klaude Kendrick, The Promise Fulfilled: A History of the Modern Pentecostal Movement (Springfield, Mo.: Gospel Publishing House, 1961).
(10.) Cheryl Bridges Johns, "The Adolescence of Pentecostalism: In Search of a Legitimate Sectarian Identity," Presidential Address, 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Pneuma 17 (Spring 1995): 3-17; Cheryl Bridges Johns, "Partners in Scandal: Wesleyan and Pentecostal Scholarship," Pneuma 21 (Fall 1999): 183-97; Frank D. Macchia, "God Present in a Confused Situation: The Mixed Influence of the Charismatic Movement on Classical Pentecostalism in the United States," Pneuma 18 (Spring 1996): 33-54; Terry L. Cross, "A Proposal to Break the Ice: What Can Pentecostal Theology Offer Evangelical Theology? Journal of Pentecostal Theology 10 (April 2002): 44-73; Dale M. Coulter, "What Meaneth This? Pentecostals and Theological Inquiry," Journal of Pentecostal Theology 10 (October 2001): 38-64; Kenneth Archer, "Early Pentecostal Biblical Interpretation," Journal of Pentecostal Theology 18 (April 2001): 32-70; D. William Faupel, "Whither Pentecostalism?" Presidential Address, 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Pneuma 15 (Spring 1993): 9-27.
(11.) Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1979); Edith Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993); Donald Dayton, The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1987); and Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
(12.) This is very similar to what Grant Wacker argues regarding an earlier generation of Protestants. He writes, "To depict the movements in oppositional terms is to take their self-perceptions at face value. Thus creedal and denominational boundaries drawn by understandably partisan church historians have been allowed to set the terms of the discussion. The immediate result," he continues, "is to heighten the fences between the movements, making them more distinctive than they really were." Grant Wacker, "The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910," Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 49. Unfortunately Wacker does not dismantle partisan fences this aggressively in his work on pentecostalism. In a recent essay, he uses the metaphor of a "canyon" to describe the differences between pentecostals and other radical evangelicals, while in Heaven Below he writes that pentecostals' ecumenical "sentiments appeared heartfelt, but a shark lurked just below the surface. Pentecostals' ecumenism was the ecumenism of the carnivore. Everyone was welcome as long as they were willing to be devoured." Grant Wacker, "Travail of a Broken Family: Radical Evangelical Responses to the Emergence of Pentecostalism in America, 1906-1916," in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant Wacker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23; Wacker, Heaven Below, 178.
(13.) To say that McPherson sought good working relationships with other evangelicals is not to say that other pentecostals and evangelicals necessarily did the same. Each of the groups that made up the fundamentalist movement was combative; everyone fought everyone else, turning faith into a kind of blood sport. On similar battles between various nonpentecostal fundamentalist groups see, for example, Philip Goff, "Fighting Like the Devil in the City of Angels: The Rise of Fundamentalist Charles E. Fuller," in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 220-51.
(14.) Methodologically this paper borrows from historian Catherine L. Albanese who argues, "The shape and operation of American Religious life--all of it--is best described under the rubric of religious combination." Rather than treating religious systems as "relics to be admired in a taxonomy of the sacred that comes with museum shelves," Albanese contends that American religions are in a constant state of evolution resulting from centuries of contact between competing groups of religious peoples. Catherine L. Albanese, "Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls," in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 224-25.
(15.) Prominent historians have recently made the same point. Jon Butler has written, "by ignoring her [McPherson] and the religiosity she shaped, historians have misunderstood and undervalued powerful forces in modern American culture." Jon Butler, "The Faith of Narrative," The Yale Review 82 (July 1994): 145. Vinson Synan argues, "The advent of Aimee Semple McPherson marked a turning point in the history of the Pentecostal movement in the United States. The first Pentecostal well known to the public at large, McPherson did much to gain tolerance and respect for a religion generally associated with the lowest social strata." Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 203. Grant Wacker makes a strong case for McPherson's significance as well. Wacker, Heaven Below, 145.
(16.) See Nancy Barr Mavity, Sister Aimee (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931); Lately Thomas, The Vanishing Evangelist: The Aimee Semple McPherson Kidnaping [sic] Affair (New York: Viking, 1959), and Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Robert Bahr, Least of All the Saints: The Story of Aimee Semple McPherson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979); and Alvyn Austin, Aimee Semple McPherson (Don Mills, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1980).
(17.) Edith Blumhofer enjoyed access to this item as well.
(18.) See Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Daniel Mark Epstein, Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). Blumhofer suggests many of the issues that I will address, writing, "For her [McPherson], the lines that later historians have drawn distinguishing mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Pentecostals were not nearly so visible." She concludes, "Scholars have perhaps been sidetracked by polemical literature to overemphasize the controversies and underestimate the continuities [between pentecostals and traditional Protestant churches]. Sister's story suggests far less conflict--and considerably more convergence--than is commonly assumed." Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 17, 388. I augment Blumhofer's arguments in several critical ways. First, Blumhofer rarely addresses issues of reciprocal pentecostal-fundamentalist influence, focusing primarily on the movements that influenced McPherson. Second, at times she argues that boundaries between pentecostals and fundamentalists were fluid, but at other times she falls into older paradigms. This is clear in the McPherson biography and is even more apparent in her Restoring the Faith in which she cites Marsden and then writes, pentecostals "formed a growing segment of the evangelical subculture, but they were not accepted by fundamentalists." Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 220-23; Edith Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 181. And third, Blumhofer elides the very pervasive ideological "militant anti-modernist" impulse in McPherson that links her with one of the deepest aspirations of the evanglical-fundamentalist coalition.
(19.) William Durham, "Warning," Pentecostal Testimony 1 (July 1, 1910): 9-10.
(20.) "A Prophetic Message, Given by Mrs. R. J. Semple, in Belfast, Ireland, while en route to China," Pentecostal Testimony 1 (July 1, 1910): 12.
(21.) William McLoughlin, "Aimee Semple McPherson `Your Sister in the King's Glad Service,'" Journal of Popular Culture 1 (Winter 1967): 216, n. 6.
(22.) McPherson asked converts at her revival services to fill out cards listing their names, contact information, and the church or denomination that they would like to attend. She would distribute the cards to the local pastors of the denominations indicated. "Thousands See Evangelist Bring Relief," The Evening Repository (Canton, Ohio), 6 October 1921; "Forget Jazz and Dust Off Bible is Plea of Evangelist," Wichita Daily Eagle, 10 May 1922; McPherson, This Is That, 2nd rev. ed., 240, 319; Aimee Semple McPherson, "Bringing Back the Ark," Bridal Call 5 (July, 1921): 3-5.
(23.) "Minnie Kennedy to Minnie Andrews, 14 November 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, The Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Assemblies of God, Springfield, Mo. (hereafter FPHC). In a letter E. N. Bell explained that McPherson was "opposed to the pentecostal movement on the ground that it established assemblies and had work apart from the regular churches, that they [McPherson and her mother] were in favor of the converts going to the churches." "E. N. Bell to W. E. Opie, 29 July 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC. This position is consistent with the way McPherson ran her revival services.
(24.) On the history of the Assemblies of God, see Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith.
(25.) "Robert J. Craig to J. W. Welch, 12 March 1919," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(26.) On the Assemblies 1919 convention see Stanley Frodsham, "The Recent Great Convention in Springfield, Mo.," Pentecostal Evangel (October 16, 1920): 1-6; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 121.
(27.) Bridal Call 4 (September 1920).
(28.) McPherson, This Is That, 2nd rev. ed., 232; Aimee Semple McPherson, "Trial of the Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ," Sermon Transcript (October 14, 1923), Heritage Department, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Los Angeles, California (Hereafter ICFG).
(29.) Dayton and Blumhofer both demonstrate the historical continuity between pentecostalism and Methodism. See Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 35-60; and Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 202, 220-21.
(30.) Aimee Semple McPherson, Divine Healing Sermons (Los Angeles: Biola, 1921), 131, 145. Stewart later severed his partnership with McPherson when she began to threaten some of Los Angeles's most powerful clergy. He wrote, "While I think our position in reference to Mrs. MacPherson [sic] is right, it would be impossible to convince even many of our friends of the fact." See "Lyman Stewart to T. C. Horton, 22 March 1922," Personal Papers of Lyman Stewart, Biola University, Los Angeles, California.
(31.) McPherson, This Is That, 2nd rev. ed., 242-47; Methodist Episcopal Church, "Exhorter's License" (Philadelphia, December 19, 1920, photocopy), Personal Papers of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(32.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "Methodism and Pentecost," Pentecostal Evangel (January 8. 1921): 1, 3.
(33.) "Mrs. A. M'Pherson is Ordained Here," San Jose Mercury Herald, 28 March 1922; "M'Pherson Ord'nation `Hasty,'" San Jose Mercury Herald, 1 April 1922; "J. H. Sparks to E. N. Bell, 28 March 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(34.) Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1999), "Exchanging Selves," in Retelling U.S. Religious History, and "Refusing the Wild Pomegranate Seed: America, Religious History, and the Life of the Academy," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (Summer 1995): 205-29.
(35.) "M'Pherson Ord'nation `Hasty,'" San Jose Mercury Herald, 1 April 1922; "Orthodoxy of Faith Healer is Challenged," San Francisco Chronicle, 1 April 1922; "Baptists Split on Ordination of Faith Curer," San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1922.
(36.) "J. H. Sparks to E. N. Bell, 28 March 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(37.) "Aimee Semple McPherson to E. N. Bell, 5 January 1922;" "E. N. Bell to Aimee Semple McPherson, 22 February 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC; E. N. Bell, "Questions and Answers Conducted by E. N. Bell," Pentecostal Evangel (December 24, 1921): 8. McPherson owned the Temple well into the 1930s. See "Minutes of the Executive Council Meeting In the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel," Corporate Minutes (January 7, 1937), ICFG. McPherson's mother, Minnie Kennedy, spent most of the late 1910s and 1920s as McPherson's lead organizer and administrator. In a postcard explaining her daughter's withdrawal from the Assemblies of God, Kennedy claimed that McPherson "never wanted to be tied to any sort of movement labeled `Pentecost.'" "Minnie Kennedy to W. D. Taylor, ca. 17 July 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(38.) "Replies to Attack of Opponents," Wichita Daily Eagle, 16 May 1922.
(39.) "Paul H. Ralstin to E. N. Bell, 5 May 1922," and "E. N. Bell to Paul H. Ralstin, 23 May 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(40.) The anonymous letter in the article was most likely created by Bell based on information that he had received from Ralstin, J. R. Buckley, and Herbert Buffum. "E. N. Bell to W. D. Taylor, 24 July 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC. "Is Mrs. McPherson Pentecostal?" Pentecostal Evangel (June 10, 1922): 9; "E. N. Bell to G. Kirkland, 19 December 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(41.) "Anonymous to E. N. Bell, c. July 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC; Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Narrow Line or `Is Mrs. McPherson Pentecostal?' No? Yes?" Bridal Call 6 (October 1922): 7, 10. This article was later reprinted in the form of a tract: Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Narrow Line or `Is Mrs. McPherson Pentecostal?' No? Yes?" (Los Angeles: Foursquare Gospel [1923?]). Aimee Semple McPherson, The Holy Spirit (Los Angeles: Challpin, 1931), 189. Kennedy explained to a concerned disciple that her daughter joined the Assemblies of God "on the understanding ... that it was not to be organized, but simply cooperative and fellowship with others who had the same faith." Since it was not, McPherson now "stands in a unique position between the churches with their coldness and worldliness on the one hand, and the [Assemblies of God] Missions, which in so many cases ... have run to excess and fanaticism." "Minnie Kennedy to Sister Minnie Andrews, 1 July 1922," Ministerial File of Aimee Semple McPherson, FPHC.
(42.) "Great Temple is Dedicated," Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1923; and Aimee Semple McPherson, "Dedication of Angelus Temple," Bridal Call 6 (January 1923): 12-15.
(43.) Caps hers. The sermon is identified in Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Bridal Call Family Visits the Angelus Temple Revival," Bridal Call 7 (June 1923): 9; and is printed in McPherson, This is That, 2nd rev. ed., 779-93.
(44.) McPherson, This is That, 2nd rev. ed., 530.
(45.) Membership Records, Angelus Temple, Los Angeles, California.
(46.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Four-Square Gospel," Bridal Call 6 (January 1923): 3-6; On Thompson see "R. Bryant Mitchell to Gary B. McGee, 14 November 1987," Personal Papers of Frank Thompson, FPHC; and "Nathaniel Van Cleave to Matthew A. Sutton, 21 November 2000," collection of the author. Although the Thompson Chain Reference Bible received the bulk of McPherson's magazine advertising, she also promoted the Scofield Reference Bible, a standard in fundamentalist circles. See Bridal Call 12 (November 1928): 32, and Bridal Call 12 (December 1928): 34. McPherson made a similar decision years later when in 1933 she hired Rheba Crawford Splivalo to be her assistant pastor. Splivalo had worked for the Salvation Army as a teen before being ordained and ministering in San Francisco's First Congregational Church. She did not seem to be explicitly pentecostal.
(47.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "Outside My Window," Bridal Call 12 (July 1928): 7. See also "Aimee Semple McPherson to the Official Board of Angelus Temple, 22 April 1927," Personal Papers of Aimee Semple McPherson, ICFG.
(48.) L. W. Munhall, "Tribute of Praise," Bridal Call 8 (November 1924): 2-3. This article was reprinted as a tract entitled "A Tribute to Angelus Temple and Aimee Semple McPherson" (Los Angeles: Echo Park Evangelistic Association [1924?]); Bridal Call 8 (December 1924): 8. Church Bulletin announcements advertising Munhall's Angelus Temple campaign read, "What a combination it will be! Doctor Munhall of the Old Methodist School and Sister McPherson, who belongs to the new order of things, and yet whose principles and teachings run true to the `faith of our fathers.'" "Angelus Temple Bulletin, 21-27 September 1924," ICFG.
(49.) William Jennings Bryan, "He Calleth Thee," Bridal Call 7 (November 1923): 10-14, 23; Bryan's statement to Munhall was quoted in a letter Munhall sent to Angelus Temple, printed in "Angelus Temple Bulletin, 16-22 November 1924," ICFG; "Is the Bible True?" Bridal Call 8 (November 1924): 4-15, 30; and "Is the Bible True?" Bridal Call 9 (August 1925): 4-10, 27-29.
(50.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "Trial of the Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ," Sermon Transcript (October 14, 1923), ICFG. She quoted from and expanded this message in another sermon years later. See "Blast Spiritual Bottlenecks," Sermon Transcript (September 21, 1941), ICFG.
(51.) "Aimee Semple McPherson to William Jennings Bryan, 12 July 1925," Folder 5, Box 47, and "William Jennings Bryan to Aimee Semple McPherson, July 1925, dictated by Bryan and transcribed after his death," Folder 7, Box 47, Papers of William Jennings Bryan, Library of Congress.
(52.) The King's Business 15 (September 1924): 540.
(53.) Paul Rader, "The Midnight Cry," Memorial Souvenir (Chicago: Chicago Gospel Tabernacle [1938?]). Divine healing also became very important to Rader, as his next book revealed. See The Man of Mercy (Chicago: Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, 1928). Rader later chose to clarify that he had not "spoken in tongues" to quell the criticisms of some polemical antipentecostal agitators. The Dawn (August 15, 1926): 211. Douglas Abrams further illustrates McPherson's influence on Rader. See Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 32.
(54.) Aimee Semple McPherson, "What's the Matter?" (Los Angeles: Echo Park Evangelistic Association, 1928); see also Aimee Semple McPherson, "March of the Bible" (Los Angeles: Foursquare [1926?]).
(55.) William Black, "Breakers Adrift! A Plea to Save Our Children from the Dangerous Rocks of Modernism," Bridal Call 8 (July 1924): 27. Most advertisements for the college carried this same message. One example, implicitly critical of higher criticism, featured a picture of an open Bible in the center of the page with the statement "The Open Book, No Pages Out, No Corners Off." Another advertisement called for students to "enlist" under the "commander: Jesus Christ" in the fight against higher criticism, modernism, evolution, and infidelity, and yet another advertised that sending students to the college would be "helping enthrone the Bible" in America. Foursquare Crusader (February 12, 1927), 8; Bridal Call 10 (August 1926): 36; Bridal Call 8 (July 1924): 34.
(56.) "There is a God! Debate Between Aimee Semple McPherson, Fundamentalist, and Charles Lee Smith, Atheist" (Los Angeles: Foursquare [1934?]), 9. On Smith's other debates, see Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 339.
(57.) "America Awake!" Bridal Call Foursquare 17 (February 1934): 18; Aimee Semple McPherson, "America Awake!" Bridal Call Foursquare 17 (January 1934): 17; and "Awake America!" (Los Angeles: Foursquare, [1934?]).
(58.) "Allied Churchmen to Hold Mass Meeting for Merriam," Los Angeles Examiner, 29 October 1934; "Churchmen Aid Merriam," Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1934; and "Churchmen's Rally Hears EPIC Plan Excoriated," Los Angeles Examiner, 3 November 1934.
(59.) "J. Elwin Wright to Stanley H. Frodsham, 18 September 1942," "J. Elwin Wright to J. Roswell Flower, 13 April 1943," and "Harold J. Ockenga to J. Roswell Flower, 28 May 1943," National Association of Evangelicals, Corporate Papers, FPHC.
(60.) "Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors," Corporate Minutes (June 21, 1943), ICFG.
(61.) "Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors," Corporate Minutes (June 22, 1943), ICFG; "Minutes of a Meeting of the First Corporate Session," Corporate Minutes (June 22, 1943), ICFG. On Shuler's old animosity towards McPherson see Robert (Bob) Shuler, McPhersonism (Los Angeles: published by the author, 1924), and Miss X (Los Angeles: published by the author, 1926).
(62.) "A Few Comments on Policy and Actions for Decisions to be Brought Up Before the Executive Committee of the Association," National Association of Evangelicals, Corporate Papers (undated), FPHC. In this document discussing the Foursquare denomination's application for membership, the author cites criticism of the NAE for "accepting questionable church denominations" by Carl McIntire and James Buswell as a reason to think carefully about admitting Foursquare to membership.
(63.) "Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Directors," Corporate Minutes (February 25, 1944), ICFG.
(64.) "Ernest S. Williams to J. Roswell Flower, 4 October 1946," National Association of Evangelicals, Corporate Papers, FPHC.
Matthew A. Sutton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.