Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
The Miracle Woman
By Caleb Crain
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
by Matthew Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press, 351 pp., $26.95
In photographs, the face of the early-twentieth-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson has an uncanny way of changing, as if she were played by a different actress in each image. That's fitting, because her contemporaries saw in her several different people. The pious saw a preacher with a gentle manner and intense energy, a Pentecostalist who 'spoke in tongues' and could heal the sick through prayer. The secular saw a reactionary who wanted to bring religion into politics. The cynical saw an opportunist who put herself on the radio and tried to get into the movies. And the young saw a person bold enough to defy the proprieties that had once hemmed women in—a woman unafraid to have a career, a daringly short haircut, and maybe even a lover.
Review, 3980 words
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