Book of the Month:

Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
Review by Brandi Denison


As I was reading Sutton’s rich history of the first media mogul of American Christianity (published by Harvard University Press in 2009), my campus was prepping for the Florida Republican Presidential primary debates. Wolf Blitzer and Erin Burnett were camped out on the campus green and the student union was closed off to students to allow the candidates prep for their TV time.

I’m not one to read the present back into the past, but through his biography of McPherson, Sutton narrates the emergence of the entangled relationship of evangelical personalities, politicians, and mass media.  Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) was a prominent Pentecostal evangelist whose life was marked by extraordinary success, celebrity status, and scandal. Sutton effectively argues that McPherson helped to shape evangelicalism, one of “the twentieth century’s most explosive religious movements” (4). Her contribution was made by embracing developments in mass media, first through radio broadcasts and then through employing the expertise of Hollywood set designers to create visually stunning sermons. She used her popularity and flair for the dramatic to support political causes that lined up with her desire to make a Christian nation.

Of interest to the readers of this blog, though, is the way in which Sutton locates the rise of the evangelical mass media in the West. After spending her early years holding revivals across the country, McPherson and her mother decided to build a temple in Los Angeles, because her church should be “where tourists coming constantly from all parts of the earth, could receive the message, then return like homing pigeons, bearing the message in their hearts” (27).

Thus, the West provided McPherson a place from which she could transcend regionalism. Sutton's narrative locates the rise of McPherson’s popularity in LA, but as McPherson's influence extends, the significance of the West recedes. McPherson used the tools and expertise of Hollywood in order to transcend place and to imagine a nation unified under Christianity. Thus, the West became the ideal place from which McPherson could launch a national (and later on, global) message.

Sutton’s text gives us a tangible reminder that some “Western” stories are not regional, but instead are national and transnational. Scholarship on Pentecostalism has not fallen into the same regional trap as has Mormonism. Perhaps this is because of conflicting perceptions as to way each group moved West. Mormons, so the story goes, removed themselves from the world (although as Maffly-Kipp notes, this is historically inaccurate), whereas Pentecostals went west in order to enter the world more fully. Sutton allows us to imagine a West that is not the outskirts of civilization, but rather the producer of it.

I highly recommend this book for researchers and students alike. It could be easily incorporated into an undergraduate classroom, as Sutton’s writing style is clear and engaging. I suspect students will love the text, as it sometimes reads as a celebrity-tell-all piece.

I’ll leave you with this video of McPherson speaking on prohibition. The video captures her the way in which she navigated a Hollywood lifestyle (check out her fur) and her religious aspirations.

Editors’ note: Have you read this book?  What do you think about it?  Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments!  If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Stay tuned for next month’s book of the month, from Anne Blankenship!