Remembering... Aimee Semple McPherson

Born a Methodist in Canada on this day in 1890, in her short 53 years on Earth Aimee Semple transformed herself into a Pentecostal American, as well as one of the most famous women of her day. In the intervening years, however, she is credited with the enormous growth in popularity of the evangelical Pentecostalist movement in the United States and therefore at least partly to blame for that tyrannical and bigoted cancer currently devouring the American soul.

Her Foursquare Gospel church in Los Angeles was the Scientology Center of its day, attracting 5,300 worshipers three times a day, seven days a week, including nearly as many Hollywood devotees as did its nearest rival, the Seventh-Day Adventists.

She was also the first woman issued a broadcast license, and reached untold numbers of others via the radio waves of KFSG.

Yet it wouldn't be long before the temptations of both Mammon and the flesh undermined her ministry, as it often does for the holier-than-thou... A much-publicized incident in which she was reportedly abducted in 1926 has never been suitably explained, and her failure to explain what happened to her during her 35 days missing turned the press against her. In 1931 she married a man whose ex-wife was still living, in contravention of the rules of her own church. Through it all, there were allegations of financial malfeasance; even if they're untrue, McPherson never lived in anything less than luxury.

Still, she kept on preaching; it was after giving one such sermon in September 1944 that Aimee Semple McPherson was found dead in a Berkeley, California, hotel room of an overdose of barbiturates. Naturally, rumours of suicide abounded, but what really happened to her then (as what really happened to her in 1926) will now never be known.
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