Sister Aimee and the Birth of the Megachurch

Aimee Semple McPherson built America’s first megachurch, blended showbiz with salvation, and vanished in a scandal that captivated the nation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:35Roman Mars?

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• 1:38Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the artsy neighborhood of Echo Park in Los Angeles, right across the street from Echo Park Lake, you'll find a building that begs to be noticed. It sits against the backdrop of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, and tattoo parlor/coffee shops. It's a colossal white structure that looks like an arena laced with archways. Its defining feature is an enormous concrete dome perched overhead. The building itself is a blend of classical and modern design elements, and has been described as, quote, "half Roman Colosseum, half Parisian Opera House."

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I mean, some people have described it that way. But if you ask me, I think it looks more like a concrete flying saucer landed on top of the Rose Bowl stadium.

• 2:30Roman Mars?

  That's reporter, actor, and frequent contributor Gillian Jacobs.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  One of my personal nerdier hobbies is driving around Los Angeles and looking up the history of buildings. It's what I do to relax. So of course, the first time I went to Echo Park Lake, I homed in on that building across the street. I had to know what it was. And luckily for me, there are tours available.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  The dome was also the largest freestanding dome of that size and shape, at least in the northern hemisphere, if not the world at the time.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Turns out this place is a Pentecostal church called the Angelus Temple. Dan Scott is head docent of the temple's Heritage Museum.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  It seated 5,300 people. It was also uniquely built. It's completely fireproof, so that's why it's never burned down all these years.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  The temple was designed by the church's founder, Sister Amy Semple McPherson. Her voice was actually playing through the museum speakers throughout the tour.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  What you hear in the background are live church services that were broadcast live from the temple. I'm going to turn her off for a while. Sometimes I feel like I'm competing with her.

• 3:46Roman Mars?

  As it happens, the Angelus Temple isn't just an architectural anomaly in Echo Park. It's regarded as the very first megachurch ever built in the United States. The temple was opened in 1923, which predates the modern megachurch movement by about a half a century. Today, when millions of Americans enter contemporary megachurches with all of their accompanying theatrical accoutrements, they unknowingly enter spaces pioneered by Amy Semple McPherson.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  So much about what you see in megachurches today and, you know, Christian broadcasting and entertainment, Christian fiction, all of that is, you know, these things that she started.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  This is Claire Hoffman, author of Sister Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson. As you can imagine from the title of Claire's book, there's a lot more to McPherson's story than just being a preacher.

• 4:43Roman Mars?

  McPherson transformed worship and at one point was arguably one of the most famous women in America. She built one of the largest churches in the country and filled it with thousands of people a week. She also stirred up one of the most salacious public dramas of the early 20th century.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  You know, she was making some decisions and mistakes that were pretty questionable themselves. And so here's a really complicated person who was incredible and powerful and also made some really weird choices.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Before she added the Semple and McPherson, Sister Amy was born Amy Kennedy in 1890. Here she is talking about growing up in rural Canada.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  It was some distance away on a Canadian farm in Ontario that I was born and brought up as a farmer's daughter. I was the only boy on the farm, the only girl on the farm.

• 5:40Roman Mars?

  By even her own account, Amy was an overachiever during her schoolgirl years. In her own writings, she describes herself as top of her class, a natural leader, debater, elocutionist, and always looking for an opportunity to perform.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Amy came from a religious family. Her mother, Minnie, was a devout member of the Salvation Army, and Amy had her own divine experience when she was 17 years old.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  She met this super-hot preacher named Robert Semple, who was an early convert of Pentecostalism.

• 6:12Roman Mars?

  Amy fell deeply in love with the super-hot preacher, Robert Semple, and with Pentecostalism. In the early 20th century, Pentecostalism was a new Protestant religious movement that was beginning to spread across the US. At the time, it was viewed as fringe within mainline Christianity, mostly because of its more dramatic elements.

• 6:35Speaker 07

  Faith healing and the speaking in tongues.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  This is William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

• 6:44Speaker 07

  In back of those specific things is the general idea of Pentecostalism, which is that everyone needs an infilling of the Holy Spirit. You need to open yourself up to this force beyond you, the Holy Spirit, which will flow into you and transform you, make you an entirely new person.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Pentecostalism was looked down upon by many at the time. Followers were even disparagingly called "holy rollers" because when that infilling of the Holy Spirit took place, some worshippers would uncontrollably roll on the ground during services.

• 7:24Roman Mars?

  But Amy was deeply moved by this form of worship. She converted to Pentecostalism, and soon she and Robert Semple were married and expecting a child. Together, they embarked on an evangelical tour to China, hoping to spread Pentecostalism to the other side of the world.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Pentecostalism would become a huge part of the rest of her life. Robert, however...

• 7:46Speaker 05

  He died within a month of them arriving in China.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Amy married again a couple of years after returning to the United States, becoming Amy Semple McPherson. But she quickly realized that this second marriage wasn't her path. She fell into a depression that severely impacted her mental and physical health, to the point that she was hospitalized.

• 8:07Roman Mars?

  And in the midst of this traumatic period, she had an epiphany.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  She says that Jesus came to her and said, "You have to, you have to spread the word, and this is your job."

• 8:18Speaker 03

  So McPherson answered the call. She left husband number two, packed her kids and her mom into her car, and began a new life as a traveling preacher on what was called the Sawdust Trail.

• 8:30Roman Mars?

  The Sawdust Trail wasn't a literal trail with a set path. Rather, roving pastors, who were almost exclusively men, would travel from city to city and town to town, holding boisterous revival meetings.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  So with the Sawdust Trail, it's a really competitive marketplace. There are hundreds, thousands of itinerant revivalists. And so you're in a constant state of competition with other people.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Many of these other preachers on the circuit evangelized in a sort of testosterone-laden, aggressive style.

• 9:06Speaker 08

  America needs to be taken down to God's bathhouse and the hose turned on her. And I want to take a pledge in this audience to join me in a pledge that you will never rest until this old God-hating, Christ-hating, whiskey-soaked, Sabbath-breaking, blaspheming, infantal, bootlegging old world is bound to the cross of Jesus Christ by the golden chains of love.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Sister Amy's message was nothing like that. She had all of the charisma and theatricality, but a gentler message.

• 9:36Speaker 07

  Amy packages, for lack of a better word, a really domestic style, which you don't see among many people on the sawdust trail.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  This is my path, to love someone more dearly every day, to help a wanding child to find his way, to ponder on a mobile thought and pray and smile when evening falls. This is my path.

• 10:06Speaker 07

  She emphasizes her connection with people. This image of a simple country person, a milkmaid, who has been infused with this divine power. And this might be the thing which allows Amy to rise out of this very competitive religious marketplace.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  McPherson intuitively knew how to reach people and used whatever mass media tools were at her disposal. At first, she used a megaphone and then started a monthly magazine. With her success, she wasn't just popularizing her ministry, she was popularizing Pentecostalism itself.

• 10:51Roman Mars?

  One of the foundational leaders of American Pentecostalism was a black pastor named William Seymour. Seymour wanted to create an interracial church where congregants of any race could worship together. But by 1914, segregation caused the denomination to split.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  There's the sort of the white Pentecostal movement and the African American, and they're both pretty fringy.

• 11:15Roman Mars?

  Amy Semple McPherson began ministering around the time of this split and popularized the predominantly white version of Pentecostalism to the masses.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  I have compared her both sort of positively and negatively to Elvis. She made it a spectacle. She made it palatable. You know what I mean? She made it white. So all the things that like kind of popularizing does in the way that Elvis did with the blues, right? So it's like, you know, the origins are very much elsewhere, but she was sort of this bridge.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  In 1918, after three years of making a name for herself on the sawdust trail, McPherson's profile had grown, but the endless traveling was beginning to wear on her.

• 11:59Roman Mars?

  After her daughter nearly died from the 1918 flu, McPherson claimed that she was called by God to head west and build a permanent church, and that church would be in Los Angeles. It was a decision that ultimately would reverberate, not just through the city, but the future of American Christianity.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Los Angeles, in many ways, was the perfect fit for Amy Semple McPherson. For one, the city was playing a pivotal role in the rise of Pentecostalism because it's where William Seymour's revival was located. But also, LA in 1918 was a small but rapidly growing city packed with Christian migrants from the Midwest and South. It was a place looking for spiritual guidance.

• 12:44Roman Mars?

  Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, McPherson and her mother found an empty lot for sale across from Echo Park Lake. She felt this was where her church should be built.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  She imagined her temple to be a grand Colosseum-like neoclassical structure with a soaring dome overhead. And while those combination of words generally conjure a very specific type of macho architecture, she built this structure to mirror her femininity.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  It looks like a wedding cake to me. It's got a lot of gilded, soft floral edges to it. It's a version of power, you know, like you see some buildings and it's obvious that they are supposed to be signifying like power and permanence. But I think there is this thing where you don't see that many buildings that have so much money poured into them that are so female.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  McPherson and her mother Minnie were able to work out a unique deal with a construction company that was famous for building movie palaces around the city. They allowed her to pay in installments and build whatever they could afford incrementally. McPherson would travel around, holding revivals to raise funds, and they would construct parts of the temple piecemeal as the money came in.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  I believe she bought the property by Echo Park in 1921. There was a little story in Los Angeles Times that was like, lady evangelist has big ideas, you know? And yeah, two years later, she opens the largest church in America.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  Oh, I wish that you might know the joy of it. The preaching the gospel, the seeing the thousands wending their way down the altars to kneel at the feet of Jesus the crucified. And now, after all of these years, they've come to crown our labors, beautiful Angeles Temple.

• 14:33Roman Mars?

  On New Year's Day of 1923, McPherson opened the Angeles Temple, home to the ministry that she named the Four Square Church. Inside, there was a room for performing miracle cures, a watchtower that acted as a round-the-clock prayer room, a room dedicated to speaking in tongues. People dubbed it the Million Dollar Temple.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Its auditorium sat 5,300 people in tiered stadium-style seating. The stage could accommodate a 100-person choir, a full orchestra, and elaborate stage sets.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  And when people would look up, they would see that the ceiling was painted blue to look like the sky or the heavens, and they were dotted with puffy clouds.

• 15:13Roman Mars?

  Of course, extravagantly-built houses of worship were not a new thing. They existed in many religions and many cultures. But in Protestant Christianity, there had been this belief since the 16th century that the church should be small and humble because that would signal a more intimate relationship with God.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  But Sister Amy wanted to bring the spirited energy and large congregation of the big, roving, tent-revival-style worship permanently indoors. And in doing so, she helped create the blueprint for all the megachurches that came after her.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  You know, if you go to a megachurch today, like that this is what Amy sort of innovated, bringing this big, rowdy, wild, mass worship inside and every Sunday.

• 16:00Roman Mars?

  From the moment the temple opened, Sunday services at the Angeles Temple were an instant hit, mostly because McPherson put on the best show in town.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  She incorporated a lot of vaudeville, a lot of Hollywood into her sermons. So she would do these, they were called illustrated sermons, but they were essentially, you know, I mean, like, early Christian entertainment.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Because this was Los Angeles, and LA was at its core a small town at the time, Sister Amy had access to people who worked in the movie business. She tapped Hollywood's stage managers, set designers, lighting designers, and makeup artists to bring her vision to life.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  She would bring, you know, lions onto the stage, camels, elaborate sets, incredible costumes, huge, you know, musical theater productions.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  And Sister Amy herself was the riveting center of it all.

• 16:51Speaker 06

  But now that it'll take, he goes in his house. He goes, "Well, I see the wolf coming, but I'm not afraid." And as he rises to the house, he says, "Picky, wiki, will you let me in?" He said, "By my chubby chin chin, I'll never let you in."

• 17:11Speaker 06

  And the wolf says, "All right, then, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll..."

• 17:19Speaker 09

  Blow your house in.

• 17:22Roman Mars?

  McPherson was preaching to a packed house regularly. There were so many congregants that Foursquare had to add a third service on Sundays. And even though the temple already fit 5,300 seats, sometimes over 7,000 worshippers would cram into the Angelus Temple. Sister Amy herself was becoming a Los Angeles institution.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Are you familiar with the "Hooray for Hollywood" song?

• 17:47Speaker 03

  This is Dan Scott, head docent of the Angelus Temple Heritage Museum again.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's actually in that song. So it's like, "Hooray for Hollywood." And then later it goes, "And Shirley Temple and Amy's temple is equally up. No one will try to knock you, maybe Donald Duck. Hooray for Hollywood."

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Despite her incredible popularity and status as a local celebrity, McPherson knew that she could reach far more people than a few thousand Angelinos a week. So the year after she opened the Angelus Temple, she also built her very own Christian radio station, where she could reach followers as far away as Hawaii.

• 18:35Speaker 09

  I'm very, very happy indeed to have the privilege of speaking to the radio audience. Angelus Temple, myself as pastor of the temple, was the first church in the world to own a radio station. And when those shining silver towers were lifted up above our temple dome and flashed the message east, west, north, and south, our opportunity and privilege was broadened by hundreds of thousands of people who united with our radio church audience. But now, with the

• 19:09Speaker 03

  In person, the services engaged with sets, costumes, and lighting changes. But McPherson understood that with the radio, she could communicate just as effectively because of the intimacy of hearing a voice speaking to you in your home.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  I read it somewhere about this early theory of radio, which I loved. Somebody called it that you could have your hand on the doorknob of living rooms across America, which is kind of creepy. But like this idea of like, you know, people could be touched by media.

• 19:46Roman Mars?

  Amy Semple McPherson blended entertainment with religion and broadcasted out to the world, creating a template for American televangelism.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  You know, she's not the founder of televangelism.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  William Schultz again.

• 20:01Speaker 07

  It would, I think, be very proper to say televangelism and radio evangelism would be unthinkable without the path blazed by Amy in the early 20th century.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Within just a couple of years of establishing her ministry, the Four Square Gospel Association already had 32 church branches in Southern California, with dozens of other churches applying to become affiliates of the Angelus Temple.

• 20:28Speaker 07

  She also feels the need to just constantly keep the church growing. This is one of the defining features of the megachurch movement, the idea that growth itself is a positive good. If your church is growing, you're spreading God's kingdom, and you need to grow in order to continue growing because people want to be part of something that seems to be booming.

• 20:55Roman Mars?

  But all of that growth came with an immense amount of pressure. McPherson kept an utterly grueling schedule. If she wasn't expanding the church, she was preaching at the temple. And if she wasn't preaching at the temple, she was on the radio. And if she wasn't on the radio, she was tending to her congregants.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  She was also under a very intense kind of scrutiny as a woman in a position of power.

• 21:17Speaker 07

  She was trapped by the role she had created, that she constantly has to put up this front, that she constantly has to sell herself as a perfect woman, that ultimately becomes so destructive.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And that self-destruction manifested in some truly bizarre ways.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  As we make our way into her bedroom, this wall here represents her kidnapping, which I'm sure you've heard about or read about too.

• 21:54Roman Mars?

  After the break, Sister Amy's story takes a turn for the scandalous. Stay with us.

• 22:02Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all, exhilarating.

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• 24:53Roman Mars?

  In 1926, the Angeles Temple had been a Los Angeles institution for about three years. Amy Semple McPherson was at the height of her fame in preaching to thousands of devoted worshippers a week.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  I think there was a USC survey where students named her as one of the top three most famous women that they could think of.

• 25:14Roman Mars?

  That's Claire Hoffman again.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  So, you know, and really a household name.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  But all the pressure she was under to grow the ministry, to shepherd its members, to keep them entertained, was beginning to take a toll. McPherson made herself available at all hours to the church and had no privacy or solitude.

• 25:32Speaker 05

  So she is starting to feel the stress of her celebrity and the burdens of her job. She's got 10, 15,000 people coming to see her preach on a lot of days. And so she starts to do this routine where she drives down to Venice Beach from downtown and she sits in the sun and she swims in the ocean and she works on her sermons.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Which is exactly what she did on May 18, 1926.

• 26:05Roman Mars?

  On this particular day, McPherson was writing a sermon called "Light and Darkness" when she was approached by a man and a woman that she had never seen before.

• 26:13Speaker 05

  And they say, "Mrs. McPherson, you know, we have a baby in the car who's sick. Will you please come and pray over her?"

• 26:21Speaker 03

  As a faith healer, McPherson was very used to getting these kinds of requests. The Angeles Temple even had a dedicated room for all of the crutches and wheelchairs left behind by people who had been miraculously healed. So she followed the couple to their car to heal their sick child.

• 26:37Speaker 05

  In the backseat, she sees like a pile of blankets and she thinks, oh, this must be the baby. And they open up the door and she thinks she's gonna pray for the baby, but instead she gets hit on the head and she has something put over her mouth and she passes out.

• 26:54Roman Mars?

  McPherson disappeared in broad daylight without a trace.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Sister Amy's thousands of followers were stricken by her sudden disappearance and launched a massive search to find her. Fearing she may have drowned in the Pacific, divers combed the shallows of Venice Beach and Santa Monica. They even blasted the waters with dynamite, hoping it might surface her body.

• 27:16Roman Mars?

  One diver tragically died trying to find her. Another grieving church member became so distraught that she drowned herself.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  But McPherson was very much alive.

• 27:27Speaker 05

  She wakes up, she doesn't know how much later, in, you know, some kind of awful bedroom chained to a bed.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  She quickly realized that she had been kidnapped by that couple who had approached her on the beach.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Somebody that she said was called "Mexicali Rose," which happened to be a famous song at the time, and a guy named Steve.

• 27:46Roman Mars?

  Mexicali Rose and Steve told her that she was being held captive in a shack near Aguaprieta, Mexico, and that they were demanding $500,000 ransom for her return.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  For weeks, McPherson found herself restrained to a bed, growing more and more delirious. But at one point, her captors left her alone to get groceries and she saw her chance.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  And she escaped by taking the ropes around her wrist and sawing them on a serrated edge of a can.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  McPherson fled through a window and ran 20 miles through the blistering Mexican desert.

• 28:23Roman Mars?

  She eventually ended up stumbling across a small home where she found help and then immediately fainted. She was taken to a hospital on the American side of the border.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  McPherson had been missing for over a month and already presumed dead. Her mother Minnie had even held a memorial service for her at the Angeles Temple. But three days after that service, McPherson reappeared alive, mostly unscathed, and ready to tell her story.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, that's, that's her kidnapping.

• 28:54Speaker 10

  Can I ask a follow-up question that?

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  At this point, my producer Vivian chimed in with a question.

• 29:02Speaker 10

  Like, that's the story. What are, what do you think are the chances of that happened?

• 29:08Speaker 05

  1%? I mean, I'm a journalist, so I never like to say anything definitively.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  I mean, you can never say never, but it didn't happen.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  When McPherson returned to Los Angeles, she trumpeted her harrowing journey of abduction, captivity, and escape. But it didn't take long for people to start questioning her account.

• 29:34Roman Mars?

  It turns out, there was a lot to investigate.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Law enforcement immediately was just like, this doesn't add up.

• 29:41Roman Mars?

  There were a number of holes in her kidnapping story. By her own account, she had been walking 20-plus miles in the blazing hot Sonoran desert. Yet, when she was rescued, she was in suspiciously good physical shape.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  You know, she wasn't sunburned. She wasn't cut. She wasn't bruised. She didn't ask for water.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  There was also the fact that law enforcement was never able to locate the shack in Aguaprieta that she claimed she escaped from. Instead, they found other evidence that suggested something else.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  They spent days looking for the shack that she said she was trapped in, and they, you know, they never found it. They found tire marks more like a half a mile from where she showed up with footprints that matched, you know, the slippers she was wearing. So it looked like she had gotten, somebody had gotten out of a car and kind of walked over to the yard where she appeared.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  There were also longstanding rumors that McPherson was having an affair with a married radio engineer at her station K F S G, which led to a theory that she hadn't been in Mexico at all, but hiding out with her lover in California.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  Soon witnesses started to kind of come out of the woodwork and say like, actually, we saw Amy not in Mexico, but in Northern California in Carmel by the Sea, you know, where she was wearing a disguise and living in what the press called a love shack.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  There were several other witness sightings and pieces of evidence. And as other details were uncovered, it became more and more likely that McPherson had concocted the kidnapping story in order to conceal her affair and protect her reputation.

• 31:20Roman Mars?

  This alleged affair became the focal point of an investigation against her, and the district attorney ended up charging McPherson with fabricating evidence, lying under oath, and conspiracy to commit a hoax.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  So they do this pre-trial hearing, which takes months, and set records for its cost. It was the most expensive trial in Los Angeles's history until the Manson murders. And it was just every day on the front pages.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  During her ascent, Sister Amy had been a darling of the media. But by this point, newspapers all over the country had turned against her in cruel and misogynistic ways. They scrutinized her appearance, her divorce, the size of her ankles.

• 32:04Speaker 06

  I'm completely happy, however, this time there are shadows in the sky. But I'm sure that many people out there have their own particular troubles. Only mine always somehow, unfortunately, seem to get into the headlines.

• 32:17Roman Mars?

  To it all, McPherson stuck by her story, claiming the seedy gangster underworld corrupt politicians, Satan, and the Catholics were all plotting to take her down.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  McPherson suffered an onslaught against her credibility and things were looking pretty grim. But surprisingly, about a month into the investigation, McPherson was presented with an unusual defense to her story.

• 32:39Roman Mars?

  Unfortunately for McPherson, the defense would come in the form of one of the least credible witnesses in legal history, a woman named Lorraine Weisman Seeliff.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  And Lorraine Weisman Seeliff is like a character that I feel like could only exist in the 1920s. You know, she had had a railroad accident and kind of lost her mind. She'd been in, you know, lunatic houses and was like a, you know, kind of hustler, scam artist who maybe also was schizophrenic and who had a twin sister.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  The district attorney's leading theory for McPherson's whereabouts was that she had been hiding out in Carmel with her lover. But Weisman Seeliff showed up to the Angeles Temple claiming that the mysterious woman spotted in Carmel wasn't McPherson, but Weisman Seeliff herself.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  And Amy's like, fantastic. Great.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  This was such a convenient counter story that McPherson leapt at the opportunity. She actually moved Weisman Seeliff into the parsonage of the Angeles Temple so that she could coach Weisman Seeliff on ways to make her appear more convincing.

• 33:45Roman Mars?

  It eventually came out that McPherson and Weisman Seeliff had been conspiring with one another, which caused yet another media storm. But in the end, it didn't really matter. The charges against McPherson were dismissed before they ever went to trial because there wasn't quite enough evidence to prove that she wasn't kidnapped and officials in Los Angeles were desperate to be rid of this case because of the media circus it had caused.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  And it truly was a circus with all sorts of unhinged details that we couldn't even get into for this story, such as...

• 34:18Speaker 05

  The sole alleged other witness to her kidnappers was, first of all, a blind attorney who was related to President McKinley, but that then he dies just as he's about to give like further evidence in a car accident where he drowns in a ditch of like one foot of water.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  See what I mean?

• 34:40Roman Mars?

  As for Sister Amy and America's first megachurch, oddly enough, even with her name being dragged through the mud in every headline, the whole debacle ended up being great for the church.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  Angela's Temple actually grew during the scandal. Put that in the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" files. But in terms of her fame, I mean, this was an era where you start to have the emergence of these figures who come to embody like a single type, like Babe Ruth, right, as the athlete, or Charles Lindbergh as the adventurer. Amy was the preacher.

• 35:24Speaker 05

  You know, and just to pause, like, the outreach is incredible. You know, I mean, there were, there was a year in the early 1930s where she spoke to over 2 million people. You know, she was, you know, the Angela's Temple and Amy were at the center of public service during the Great Depression. They, you know, helped house people. I mean, it was, it was incredible. But she, she definitely screwed up, like mega, you know? But at the same time, she accomplished so much.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  For the next couple of decades, the Foursquare ministry expanded, but McPherson herself struggled. She suffered from poor health, poor financial decisions, lawsuits, a questionable third marriage, and ultimately became estranged from her own mother and daughter, the two closest people in her life.

• 36:14Roman Mars?

  On September 27th, 1944, McPherson was in Oakland for a series of revival meetings when it all came to an end.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  She gives one of her most famous sermons, "The Story of My Life," and she goes home that night to the hotel. She's with her son and had bottles of prescription medicine that they can't trace to where she got them. And she took the whole bottle, or a lot of it, and she died.

• 36:43Roman Mars?

  Even after McPherson died, her church continued to live on and grow. There are thousands of four-square churches around the world today with millions of members. But while followers may remember Amy Semple McPherson as an important religious figure, for those not in the church, she is more likely to be remembered for the scandal and tragic end to her life, if at all.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  You really have to understand, she was like a forerunner of getting that from like kind of the fringe of religion into the mainstream. You know, now there are 600 million Pentecostals in the world, it's a quarter of the world's Christians. It has moved from the absolute fringe, the mainstream, and she's a big part of that story.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  So we can go down the mezzanine here, watch your step. Let me just show you what it used to look like though, when Sister was here. Now it's very plain Jane. But when she was here, it was quite lovely.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Walking around the Angelus Temple, it's clear that the building itself is a long way from its opulent beginnings. The church has had to evolve with modern culture, but modernization in many ways has sanded away some of the details that made this building singular. The prayer tower is now an HVAC room. The iconic K F S G station was sold to help pay for a parking structure. The 100-person choir has been traded in for contemporary music. Even that heavenly, sky-blue dome designed to evoke the outdoor revival is now obscured by sound-absorbing panels.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Because with the newer, modern drums and keyboards and electric guitars for the music and the worship, this room was terrible. It just caused a lot of noise.

• 38:36Roman Mars?

  It may be a bit more subdued these days, but the Angelus Temple makes for a fitting monument to the woman who built it. Enormously influential, half-forgotten, and even after all these years, still begging to be noticed.

• 39:05Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs, produced by Vivian Le and edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and George Langford, fact checking by Graham Hesha. And special thanks this week to Bix Davis and Richard Florrie. Claire Hoffman's book is called Sister Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson. It is such a fun read. It's packed with lots of juicy details that we couldn't fit into this episode, so you should definitely check it out. Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeón, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, LaShma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars.

• 39:49Roman Mars?

  The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 40:30Speaker 11

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