Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Florence Nightingale Meets P.T. Barnum
Tuesday, June 12, 2007

My friend Christine Rosen has a wonderful review in the WSJ about a new a book about early evangelical Aimee McPherson. A reader stopped me at BEA, the book convention, last week and raved about this book, too. Here's some of the review:

McPherson -- or "Sister Aimee," as she was known -- was the doyenne of the Angelus Temple, a spiritual palace that opened in 1923 in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. For years she witnessed to a crowded flock, staging "illustrated sermons" complete with props and costumes. Her trademark white dress and flowing white cape lent a Florence Nightingale air to her sermons, not to mention a bit of P.T. Barnum. She frequently spoke of her devotion to Christ as that of a bride to a bridegroom. Despite having a "high-pitched, nasal, singsong voice," Mr. Sutton writes, McPherson became "the first religious celebrity of the mass media era," embracing "print, radio, and film for use in her evangelical mission..."
McPherson has been the subject of other biographies; Mr. Sutton has wisely decided not to write another, strictly speaking. Instead, he gives an account of McPherson's life within the cultural currents of her time. He argues that she had an almost preternatural ability to tap her audience's social fears -- about immigration, for instance, or the changing role of women -- and offer reassurance in the form of simple spiritual storytelling. He also portrays her, less persuasively, as a brave transgressor of gender norms.

True, 50 years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, McPherson cast aside her apron (and rid herself of a pesky second husband) to pursue her calling. "God, she believed, wanted her to exchange domestic life for the pulpit," Mr. Sutton writes. But she also deployed traditional feminine wiles, exploiting personal details to win public approval. Broadcasting live from her nuptial boudoir just a day after marrying her third husband, for example, she treated radio listeners to the sound of their enthusiastic kisses. When the marriage failed, she churned out "sacred operas" whose lyrics read like lachrymose sympathy cards: "Do you live in a castle of broken dreams, / Where Giant despair and his dark horde teems?"
McPherson's life story tells us less about flouting gender norms than about navigating celebrity's treacherous terrain. As Mr. Sutton demonstrates, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines helped to make McPherson famous and to disseminate her message. But their appetite for sensationalism also worked against her -- not that she didn't give them help.

Labels: Religion in America

Posted by B Feiler at 7:01 AM
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