Pod Insights What Now? with Trevor Noah 99% Invisible and the Megachurch (featuring Gillian Jacobs) About this episode Roman Mars and frequent 99% Invisible contributor, Gillian Jacobs, take us through the story of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson -- the captivating evangelist who built the blueprint for the American megachurch and then vanished in a scandal that gripped the nation. Hear more stories like this from 99% Invisible by listening and subscribing wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
0:06 Speaker 00 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 parlors/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 "half Roman Colosseum, half Parisian Opera House."
0:42 Speaker 01 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.
0:52 Speaker 00 That's reporter, actor, and frequent contributor, Gillian Jacobs.
0:57 Speaker 01 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.
1:16 Speaker 02 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.
1:27 Speaker 01 Turns out this place is a Pentecostal church called the Angeles Temple. Dan Scott is head docent of the temple's heritage museum.
1:34 Speaker 02 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.
1:44 Speaker 01 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.
1:53 Speaker 02 What you hear in the background are live church services that were broadcast live from the temple.
2:01 Speaker 02 I'm gonna turn her off for a while. Sometimes I feel like I'm competing with her.
2:08 Speaker 00 As it happens, the Angeles 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.
2:38 Speaker 03 So much about what you see in megachurches today and in, you know, Christian broadcasting and entertainment, Christian fiction, all of that is, you know, these things that she started.
2:50 Speaker 01 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.
3:04 Speaker 00 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.
3:22 Speaker 03 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.
3:38 Speaker 01 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.
3:49 Speaker 04 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.
4:02 Speaker 00 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.
4:17 Speaker 01 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.
4:27 Speaker 03 She met this super-hot preacher named Robert Semple, who was an early convert of Pentecostalism.
4:35 Speaker 00 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.
4:57 Speaker 05 Faith healing and the speaking in tongues.
5:00 Speaker 01 This is William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
5:07 Speaker 05 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.
5:31 Speaker 01 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.
5:46 Speaker 00 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.
6:02 Speaker 01 Pentecostalism would become a huge part of the rest of her life. Robert, however...
6:08 Speaker 03 He died within a month of them arriving in China.
6:12 Speaker 01 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.
6:30 Speaker 00 And in the midst of this traumatic period, she had an epiphany.
6:33 Speaker 03 She says that Jesus came to her and said, you know, you have to, you have to spread the word and this is your job.
6:40 Speaker 01 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.
6:52 Speaker 00 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.
7:05 Speaker 05 So with the Sawdust Trail, it's a really competitive marketplace. There are hundreds, thousands of itinerant revivalists. And so you are in a constant state of competition with other people.
7:23 Speaker 01 Many of these other preachers on the circuit evangelized in a sort of testosterone-laden, aggressive style.
7:29 Speaker 06 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.
7:51 Speaker 01 Sister Amy's message was nothing like that. She had all of the charisma and theatricality, but a gentler message.
7:58 Speaker 05 Amy packages, for lack of a better word, a really domestic style, which you don't see among many people on the Sawdust Trail.
8:09 Speaker 04 This is my task, to love someone more dearly every day.
8:16 Speaker 04 To help a wandering child to find his way, to ponder on a mobile thought and pray and smile when evening falls. This is my path.
8:28 Speaker 05 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.
8:52 Speaker 01 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.
9:13 Speaker 00 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.
9:31 Speaker 03 There's the sort of the white Pentecostal movement and the African American, and they're both pretty fringy.
9:38 Speaker 00 Amy Semple McPherson began ministering around the time of this split and popularized the predominantly white version of Pentecostalism to the masses.
9:47 Speaker 03 I have compared her both sort of positively and negatively to Elvis. And she made it a spectacle. She made it palatable. You don't 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.
10:11 Speaker 01 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.
10:21 Speaker 00 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.
10:41 Speaker 01 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.
11:06 Speaker 00 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.
11:17 Speaker 01 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.
11:31 Speaker 03 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 know, 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.
11:59 Speaker 01 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.
12:19 Speaker 03 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.
12:39 Speaker 04 That you might know the joy of it. They're preaching the gospel. They're seeing the thousands wending their way down the altar 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.
12:56 Speaker 00 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.
13:16 Speaker 01 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.
13:27 Speaker 03 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.
13:35 Speaker 00 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.
13:53 Speaker 01 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.
14:08 Speaker 03 You know, if you go to a megachurch today, like that this, this is what Amy sort of innovated, of bringing this big, rowdy, wild, mass worship inside and every Sunday.
14:22 Speaker 00 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.
14:32 Speaker 03 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.
14:45 Speaker 01 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 stage managers, set designers, lighting designers, and makeup artists to bring her vision to life.
14:59 Speaker 03 She would bring lions onto the stage, camels, elaborate sets, incredible costumes, huge musical theater productions.
15:09 Speaker 01 And Sister Amy herself was the riveting center of it all.
15:13 Speaker 04 But now that 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, "Hickey, Wicky, will you let me in?" He said, "By my chubby chin chin, I'll never let you in." And the wolf says, "All right, then, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."
15:44 Speaker 00 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 Angeles Temple. Sister Amy herself was becoming a Los Angeles institution.
16:05 Speaker 02 Are you familiar with the "Hooray for Hollywood" song?
16:09 Speaker 01 This is Dan Scott, head docent of the Angeles Temple Heritage Museum, again.
16:14 Speaker 02 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 sample is equally understood. No one will try to knock you, maybe don't do that. Hooray for Hollywood."
16:38 Speaker 01 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 Angeles Temple, she also built her very own Christian radio station, where she could reach followers as far away as Hawaii.
16:57 Speaker 04 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
17:31 Speaker 01 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.
17:46 Speaker 03 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, I mean, people could be touched by media.
18:07 Speaker 00 Amy Semple McPherson blended entertainment with religion and broadcasted out to the world, creating a template for American televangelism.
18:17 Speaker 05 You know, she's not the founder of televangelism.
18:21 Speaker 01 William Schultz again.
18:23 Speaker 05 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.
18:36 Speaker 01 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.
18:50 Speaker 05 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.
19:17 Speaker 00 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. If she wasn't on the radio, she was tending to her congregants.
19:34 Speaker 01 She was also under a very intense kind of scrutiny as a woman in a position of power.
19:39 Speaker 05 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.
19:59 Speaker 01 And that self-destruction manifested in some truly bizarre ways.
20:04 Speaker 02 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.
20:16 Speaker 00 After the break, Sister Amy's story takes a turn for the scandalous. Stay with us.
20:27 Speaker 00 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.
20:40 Speaker 03 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.
20:48 Speaker 00 That's Claire Hoffman again.
20:49 Speaker 03 So, you know, and really a household name.
20:52 Speaker 01 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.
21:06 Speaker 03 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.
21:33 Speaker 01 Which is exactly what she did on May 18, 1926.
21:39 Speaker 00 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.
21:47 Speaker 03 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?"
21:55 Speaker 01 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.
22:12 Speaker 03 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.
22:29 Speaker 00 McPherson disappeared in broad daylight without a trace.
22:34 Speaker 01 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.
22:51 Speaker 00 One diver tragically died trying to find her. Another grieving church member became so distraught that she drowned herself.
22:58 Speaker 01 But McPherson was very much alive.
23:01 Speaker 03 She wakes up, she doesn't know how much later, in, you know, some kind of awful bedroom chained to a bed.
23:08 Speaker 01 She quickly realized that she had been kidnapped by that couple who had approached her on the beach.
23:13 Speaker 03 Somebody that she said was called "Mexicali Rose," which happened to be a famous song at the time, and a guy named Steve.
23:21 Speaker 00 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.
23:33 Speaker 01 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.
23:43 Speaker 03 And she escaped by taking the ropes around her wrist and sawing them on a serrated edge of a can.
23:52 Speaker 01 McPherson fled through a window and ran 20 miles through the blistering Mexican desert.
23:57 Speaker 00 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.
24:07 Speaker 01 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.
24:23 Speaker 03 And so, yeah, that's, that's her kidnapping.
24:28 Speaker 03 Can I ask a follow-up question? Yeah, of course.
24:31 Speaker 01 At this point, my producer Vivian chimed in with a question.
24:35 Speaker 03 Like, that's the story. What are, what do you think are the chances of that happened? 1%? I mean, I'm a journalist, so I never like to say anything definitively.
24:49 Speaker 05 I mean, you can never say never, but it didn't happen.
24:56 Speaker 01 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.
25:07 Speaker 00 It turns out, there was a lot to investigate.
25:10 Speaker 03 Law enforcement immediately was just like, this doesn't add up.
25:15 Speaker 00 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.
25:27 Speaker 03 You know, she wasn't sunburned. She wasn't cut. She wasn't bruised. She didn't ask for water.
25:33 Speaker 01 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.
25:45 Speaker 03 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.
26:08 Speaker 01 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.
26:22 Speaker 03 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.
26:40 Speaker 01 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.
26:54 Speaker 00 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.
27:06 Speaker 03 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.
27:23 Speaker 01 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.
27:38 Speaker 04 I wasn't 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, they seem to get into the headlines.
27:51 Speaker 00 Through 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.
28:01 Speaker 01 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.
28:13 Speaker 00 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.
28:23 Speaker 03 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.
28:44 Speaker 01 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.
29:01 Speaker 03 And Amy's like, fantastic, great.
29:04 Speaker 01 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.
29:17 Speaker 00 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.
29:44 Speaker 01 And it truly was a circus with all sorts of unhinged details that we couldn't even get into for this story, such as...
29:52 Speaker 03 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.
30:12 Speaker 01 See what I mean?
30:14 Speaker 00 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.
30:26 Speaker 05 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.
30:58 Speaker 03 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, um, at the same time, she accomplished so much.
31:29 Speaker 01 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.
31:48 Speaker 00 On September 27th, 1944, McPherson was in Oakland for a series of revival meetings when it all came to an end.
31:56 Speaker 03 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.
32:17 Speaker 00 Even after McPherson died, her church continued to live on and grow. There are thousands of Foursquare 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.
32:40 Speaker 03 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.
33:04 Speaker 02 So we can go down the methanene 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.
33:20 Speaker 01 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.
33:56 Speaker 02 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.
34:09 Speaker 00 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.
34:39 Speaker 00 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.
35:23 Speaker 00 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.
Previous The Real Malala: Jeans, Crushes, & Healing Next Roy Wood Jr. Gets Real About Fear, Fame, & Fatherhood Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated