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PNEUMA 39 (2017) 105–122
Aimee Semple McPherson Gender Theory, Worship, and the Arts
Linda M. Ambrose*
Laurentian University, Sudbury,on, Canada
Abstract
Because so many people have contributed analyses of Aimee Semple McPherson’s significance, one might well ask what more there could possibly be to say. The purpose of this article is not to break new ground on McPherson herself, but rather to apply a gendered lens to the existing McPherson scholarship in order to suggest three ways to use theories from gender studies to think about Aimee Semple McPherson, worship, and the arts. These theories prove fruitful for the case of McPherson, and there is every reason to think it would be a useful exercise to apply similar approaches to our study of other pentecostal, charismatic, and revivalist leaders.
Keywords
gender – Aimee Semple McPherson – Foursquare – women – history – biography
“Our God is a dramatic God … rolling back the Red Sea … Elijah on [the] moun- taintop, Crucifixion, resurrection, ascension … tongues of fire on Pentecost.” That is what Aimee Semple McPherson said when a journalist asked her, in 1931, to justify the elaborate stage productions that had come to characterize her ministry.1 In fact, that journalist was pressing the famous evangelist to explain how she reconciled her preaching about being separate from the world with
* The author would like to acknowledge the help of skilled research assistants Alissa Droog,
Charlene Heydon, and Samantha McPherson (no relation to Sister Aimee), whose work
proved very important in the preparation of this paper. Jim Craig, Archivist at the Pentecostal
Assemblies of Canada, Mississauga, Ontario, was also very helpful, as always.
1 The Boston Post, October 12, 1931.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03901005
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her illustrated sermons. What place did dramatic skits, physical props, and broadcasting systems have in church? Even a casual observer could not help but notice the ways in which Sister Aimee enthusiastically embraced creative modern methods of delivering her message. How did this woman of God rec- oncile her message with her obvious mastery of seemingly “worldly” ways? It was a good question. What is the relationship between reverence for the Cre- ator of the world and creative expression using the world’s techniques? When creativity has been captured and seconded for serving the worldly purposes of staging spectacles, titillating human sensualities, and amusing the mind, how can it be redeemed and put to a higher purpose? In the battle between Holly- wood and holiness, how can the church reappropriate the arts for the kingdom of God? Aimee Semple McPherson’s dramatic performances on the stage, her commanding physical presence, and her captivating storytelling ability bore the undeniable imprint of her close proximity to Hollywood. And yet she saw no contradiction between her devoted acts of worship and her clever methods of delivery. “Our God is a dramatic God,” Sister Aimee asserted. And in response, the pentecostal community might echo, “Our Sister was a dramatic Sister.”
To begin with a disclaimer: I am not a biographer of Aimee Semple McPher- son. This article does not pretend to add yet another version of her life to the pile of books that have already been written about the famous Foursquare founder. Others have already capably written her life story.2Edith Blumhofer’s Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister and Matthew Sutton’s Aimee Sem- ple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America are just two of the best-known academic treatments. Add to those some pentecostal scholarship contributing to the literature on McPherson: for example, the work of Estrelda Alexander and that of Jack Hayford and David Moore, who have assessed McPherson’s legacy in the context of the larger story of pentecostal women’s history, the Foursquare Church tradition, and American religious history more generally.3
2 Robert Bahr, Least of All Saints: The Story of Aimee Semple McPherson (Lincoln, ne: Authors
Guild Backinprint.com Edition, 2000); Edith L. Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Every-
body’s Sister (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1993); and Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple
McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
3 Estrelda Y. Alexander, “Aimee Semple McPherson: The International Church of the Four-
square Gospel,” inLimited Liberty: The Legacy of Four Pentecostal Women Pioneers(Cleveland,
oh: The Pilgrim Press, 2008): 89–117; and Jack W. Hayford and S. David Moore, “Aimee,
America, and Pentecostalism,” inThe Charismatic Century: The Enduring Impact of the Azuza
Street Revival (New York: Warner Faith, 2006): 131–158.
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Because so many people have contributed analyses of McPherson’s signifi- cance,onemightwellaskwhatmoretherecouldpossiblybetosay.Thepurpose of this article is not to break new ground on McPherson herself, but rather to apply a gendered lens to the existing McPherson scholarship in order to suggest three ways to use theories from gender studies to think about Aimee Semple McPherson, worship, and the arts. If these theories prove fruitful for the case of McPherson, there is every reason to think it would be useful to apply simi- lar approaches to our scholarly conversations about other pentecostal, charis- matic, and revivalist leaders.
The Performer
McPherson was dramatic: She was a performer. She used her body. She was a story teller. Those statements encourage thinking about her relationship to the arts. The reflections that follow are framed around three key theories that are familiar to scholars of gender studies: the performed self, embodiment, and narrative discourse. These three theories provide insight into how McPherson related to the arts and how women’s history becomes richer through case studies that approach pentecostal foremothers with a critical inquiry from the interdisciplinary field of gender studies.
The first approach to consider is one that is well known in scholarship on gender: theories of performativity. Sociologists might recognize a familiar strain here, going as far back as the work of Erving Goffman from the 1960s and later. Goffman’s classic texts such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life comprise his work on self-presentation, expression and impression, and the conceptual framework know as “role theory.”4 How individuals present them- selves and how others perceive them is at the heart of this social exchange. Several decades after Goffman, influenced by feminist politics and sexuality studies, Judith Butler’s writing gripped researchers in the fields of women’s and gender studies. Butler’s theories, which continue to dominate those fields today, are premised on the concept of social construction, the idea of adopt- ing or challenging roles and behaviors that are deemed culturally appropriate to one’s prescribed gender. One of Butler’s best-known works is her 1990 book
4 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1959); Goffman, Where the Action Is: Three Essays (London: Allen Lane, 1969); and
Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Harper & Row,
1971).
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GenderTrouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,5and perhaps her most widely cited work is an article from the field of theater studies, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist The- ory.”6 In this work Butler challenges essentialist views and explains, “Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxi- ety and pleasure …”7Butler draws upon theatrical, anthropological, and philo- sophical discourses to assert that “what is called gender identity is a perfor- mative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified sta- tus.”8
Aimee Semple McPherson is probably the most familiar pentecostal char- acter from the past who knew about social sanction, taboo, and performance. Her unmatched flair for the theatrical and her contested legacy are well known and widely debated. I do not wish to revisit or reopen the controversies around her publicity trials or her tragic end, but, rather, to think about how McPher- son established authority for herself despite those controversies and especially how she relates to the questions that arise around worship and the arts. For that reason, Butler’s theory is a particularly useful way to think about Aimee Semple McPherson and her discursive as well as her literal performances.
Many scholars have written about Sister Aimee’s stage presence and dra- matic productions.9Indeed, when writing about McPherson and the arts, how could onenot turn attention to her famous “illustrated sermons”? Some of her better known sermons, based on episodes from her own life, included “Heav- enly Aeroplane,” where she preached using two small model airplanes to illus- trate her truth. In crafting this sermon, she capitalized on her narrow escape from a plane crash to explain that if one allowed the devil to be the pilot of one’s life, one was on a flight to destruction by way of “the theatre, the dance hall, card parties, … [and] riches and popularity.” On the other hand, if Jesus was the pilot of one’s life, he would shuttle the believer to the Heavenly City,
5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1990).
6 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory,”Theatre Journal40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–531.
7 Ibid., 531.
8 Ibid., 520.
9 Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 66–76; Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 260–261.
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because “the engine was the Holy Spirit, the propeller faith, and the wings obedience and love.”10
Another unforgettable message was entitled “Stop! You’re Under Arrest.” In that sermon, the evangelist created an elaborate “object lesson” in the form of a spectacle that was inspired by her own experience of having been stopped by a traffic cop for breaking the speed limit. Creatively, McPherson turned that personal experience into a stage spectacle in which she brought a motorcycle onto the stage of her temple and “flipped on the motorcycle siren, letting it wail while the audience gasped.” As Sutton recounted, “Nobody dozed off during that service focusing on the individuals’ need for salvation.”11
Sister Aimee also staged elaborate productions to illustrate Bible stories; one of her favorites was the story of the Twelve Virgins, based on Matthew 25:1–13. (While the biblical account was about ten women, McPherson’s stage produc- tion added two extras because it filled the stage better.)12 These illustrated sermons and dramatizations of Scripture are one of the main reasons for her notoriety, and they help to explain why people lined up to get into her church services the way they lined up for the theater.
Matthew Sutton devotes several pages of his 2007 biography of McPherson to observing how she embraced the performing arts and the ways of the theater for her ministry. Sutton described her Sunday evening services at Angelus Tem- ple as occasions when people lined up to get good seats, and those who arrived early were treated to musical and visual presentations while they waited for the service to begin. According to Sutton, “McPherson was at times forced to print free tickets (which were sometimes scalped) to limit the crowds. She also reserved a section for ‘first-timers,’ to ensure that those who had never heard the gospel could get into the temple to enjoy the show.”13And indeed, a “show” it was. With all the trappings of the “front of house” associated with the theater, people flocked to see a new spectacle each week in the form of “illustrated ser- mons” cleverly staged to resemble theater performances, but with free admis- sion. These productions were often based on McPherson’s own experiences, and Sutton asserts that “they revealed the ways in which her messages inter- sected with her growing stardom and her penchant for publicity.”14
10 11 12
13 14
Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 68–69.
Ibid., 72.
Leah Payne, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109–110.
Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 71.
Ibid., 72.
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But McPherson’s performances were more than just another spectacle in- spired by her proximity to Hollywood. Indeed, she claimed that these messages “simply came to her” or, as she put it in her autobiography, “a drama was all worked out in the Spirit.” As early as 1917 during her tent meetings in Maine, she recorded that the various scenes she would need to stage in order to present the story of the Ten Virgins and the Bridegroom were but “one of many wonderful messages worked out in our midst which were beyond description.”15While Sister Aimee credited the Spirit as her inspiration for this, her experiences in Ontario, Canada were clearly formative, particularly those of her mother, Minnie Kennedy, who spent her teenage years in ministry with the Salvation Army as a traveling officer before settling in to the community of Ingersoll, Ontario, where she assumed the title of Sergeant Major.16 As Blumhofer points out, female evangelists’ use of illustrated sermons can be traced back to forerunners such as Evangeline Booth, one of eight children born to the the founders of the Salvation Army.17 The Booths’ granddaughter, Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest, who was a contemporary of McPherson’s, also followed in this tradition, including drama and musicals as part of the regular fare of her evangelistic meetings.18
Perhaps it was in her genes because of her mother’s work in the Salvation Army, but when Aimee Kennedy was a child, her inclination for drama was already clear. She took great delight in her participation in school plays and was in high demand as an entertaining elocutionist for community events and Methodist church fundraisers.19 Aimee Kennedy’s father’s church was the stately Methodist Church in Salford, Ontario, built in 1890, the same year Aimee was born. Indeed, her early penchant for performance is reminiscent of
15
16 17 18
19
Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings (Los Angeles,ca: Echo Park Evangelistic Association, Inc., 1923), 111.
Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, 39.
Ibid., 50–51.
Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest played an important part in several communities in Canada through her evangelist crusades. Of particular note is her role in sparking a revival connected with the growth of Newfoundland Pentecostalism. See David Lorne Newman, “The Eschatology of Newfoundland and Labrador Early Pentecostals: ‘Jesus is Coming Soon’, 1900–1949” (St. John’s, nl: Unpublished ma thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2012), 21, 100–103.
Blumhofer goes into some detail on the early episodes of McPherson’s life when, as Aimee Kennedy, she built a reputation for herself as a precocious young entertainer. See Aimee Semple McPherson, chaps. 1 and 2. McPherson recounted many of these same events in her autobiographical writing, especially her bookThis Is That.
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another young Canadian, albeit a fictional one: Anne Shirley, the incorrigible creation of Canadian author Lucy Maude Montgomery in the classic children’s tale Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. Anne was in high demand for her performances of such literary classics as “The Highwayman” and, a bit less successfully, “The Lady of Shallot.” Later in life, McPherson was disdainful of the early dramatic performances she had delivered as a teenager, dismissing them as “worldly” and vacuous. In part, she made these criticisms because she was remaking her own identity as a Pentecostal, which involved finding ways to distance herself from her father’s Methodist church and her life before Spirit baptism. But there is no denying that the performer in Aimee was born early. Later, when she was born again and baptized in the Spirit, Sister Aimee’s talent as a performer was also redeemed and, in her mind, set apart for holy purposes.
As theatrical as she was, and as arresting as her sermons could be, the point of McPherson’s performances after her Spirit baptism was to communicate a particular message that emphasized Jesus’s love for people and the need to respond to that love. She knew that dramatic performance would speak to her audiences at the level of the heart and that the arts were a way to communicate to the soul, not merely to the mind. For McPherson, worship was an act—a performance—of loving God with the heart. Her performances called believers to worship with their hearts and their emotions, and therefore she encouraged her audiences to move beyond worshipping merely with their ideas and minds.
Beyond the stage on which she preached and acted out her sermons, another aspect of McPherson’s life that further illustrates the theory of performativity is the unorthodox way in which she played out her womanly roles in her marriages and her motherhood. In telling the story of her life with her first husband, Robert Semple, Aimee emphasized that theirs was a tale of marital bliss. Robert and Aimee Semple settled into pastoral ministry in Stratford, Ontario, and by all accounts, particularly Aimee’s own, these were very happy times and she was deeply in love with her Irish husband. But very soon after the newlyweds had responded to a call to become missionaries in China, their wedded bliss was cut short with Robert Semple’s death on the mission field. At nineteen years of age Aimee was a widow. And she was pregnant. She had had no preparation for that role, but later in life she leveraged her widowhood and the memories of her passionate love for Semple to envision the affection and ecstasy she could anticipate when she imagined herself as the well-loved bride of Christ.
By contrast, Aimee recounted in detail the turmoil of her second marriage to Harold McPherson. That period of her life was filled with misery because
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the marriage itself had been a mistake. Sister Aimee emphasized in telling her story that she had entered into that second marriage only on the condition that if her calling from God surfaced again, it would trump her marriage vows and she would have to give preference to her calling over the traditional role of wife, homemaker, and mother. She could not continue to perform the roles of wife and mother when God was asking her to return to the role of evangelist. For Aimee, her call narrative included the rationale for why it was still within the will of God for her to step outside the usual constraints that framed the lives of married women with children. She performed the roles of wife and mother in very unorthodox ways during that second marriage. Indeed, under the cover of night, McPherson made a dramatic escape from her Rhode Island home, abandoning her husband and abducting her own children, in order to return to her parents’ farm in Canada. She was escaping the marriage in order to return to ministry.
Historian Priscilla Pope-Levison explains that for women who opted into ministry and out of traditional roles as wives and mothers to answer a call to ministry, “there remained an illicit element to their decision to venture forth as evangelists.” This was all the more true for women like McPherson because “to leave home, to forsake their domestic duty, was to face the accusation of being a prodigal son of Jesus’s parable.”20In Sister Aimee’s version of events, however, her “prodigal” performance was not at all delinquent. Indeed, in her mind it was the marriage and the homemaking that were the acts of disobedience. In her case, to run away from the marriage and homemaking was, ironically, to run back to a path of obedience to her calling. But for a woman at Aimee’s stage of life with a recent second marriage and two young children, to dash off with the children, cross the border, and return to her family farm and her parents’ welcome was a clear transgression of the roles of wife and mother. And yet, she maintained that her unorthodox decisions should not be understood as acts of defiance, but rather as acts of obedience, albeit to a very unorthodox calling. There is no question that this was a very dramatic performance, and theories of performance provide a useful way to critique and explore McPherson’s acts and explanations, both on the stage and off.
20
Priscilla Pope-Levison,TurnthePulpitLoose:TwoCenturiesof AmericanWomenEvangelists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 14.
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The Embodiment
McPherson embodied her faith—literally—“before her constituency’s very eyes.”21 For that reason, a second piece of gender theory, that of embodiment, is a helpful way to consider how Aimee Semple McPherson connected worship with the arts. The theories of gender as a performative act are tied very closely to thinking about the body. Judith Butler recognized that there are “Christian and Cartesian precedents which … understand ‘the body’ as so much inert mat- ter, signifying … a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin …” and that “these problematic dualisms” of nature/culture must be addressed by schol- ars of gender. But building on the work of Mary Douglas, Butler makes the important point that “the very contours of ‘the body’ are established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence.”22
In the case of Aimee Semple McPherson, the physicality of her stage pres- ence resulted in sometimes confusing messages that did not conform either to the dominant culture or to the wider church subculture. The “specific codes of cultural coherence” that she projected clearly proclaimed “Hollywood” and “worldliness” to many observers, including journalists like the one I cited ear- lier. That is why observers asked McPherson to account for the embodied mes- sage she was giving and to reconcile the dualism of “flesh versus spirit.” Yet, for McPherson there was no contradiction because she consciously reinscribed her physicality with what Douglas would call new “codes of culturalcoherence.” These codes lined up with her messages of evangelism and consecration.
AsLeahPaynesoeffectivelydemonstratesinherimportantbookGenderand Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the EarlyTwentieth Century, McPherson claimed that she embodied the bride of Christ.23 When she acted out this particular role, she did it with all the props that one might expect of a bride, including the white dress, the floral bouquet (roses were her common choice of flower), and the swooning tone of her love-struck voice when she declared her love for her heavenly bridegroom, Jesus. As Payne argues, McPher- son was a definite physical presence. She filled the stage with her movement and relished the way her body moved when she gestured to model the physi- cality of worship. With the poise of a well-trained and well-rehearsed leading lady, Sister Aimee swept to the stage with impeccable timing, a flair for the exaggerated gesture, and lines she had rehearsed delivered confidently with a
21 22 23
Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 69. Butler,Gender Trouble, 131.
Payne,Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism.
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voice shaped by coaching. McPherson pined for her heavenly lover and did so with the confidence of a woman who was very comfortable in her own body.
The fact that McPherson expressed her love for Jesus in such physical ways makes her very much a product of her times. As Canadian historian Jane Nicholas writes, the 1920s produced the phenomenon of the “modern girl.” Sometimes called “flappers,” modern girls were influenced by their culture of consumerism and the urge to embody modernity in their very selves. Nicholas argues that in the 1920s, “when women engaged in processes of making their bodies modern and feminine, they opened themselves to becoming allegories, sites of intervention and debate,” and that the body therefore “serves as a central site for the collection of meaning from wider historical processes.”24 Nicholas’s work, informed by attention to studies of the physical body and of consumer culture as depicted in visual history texts such as advertisements, is suggestive as a way to think about McPherson’s embodied performances.
The sheer physicality of Sister Aimee’s stage presence was surely part of what caused secular media to take note. Payne refers to McPherson’s “sexy intimacy with Jesus” that audiences found so riveting, and she argues that many of the gestures that McPherson adopted actually mimicked a Hollywood “starlette” who swooned for her leading man. In McPherson’s case, the leading man was none other than Jesus himself, and her heavenly romance adopted all the same postures as those of a love-struck movie star. It is no wonder, then, that the journalist cited earlier wanted to question McPherson on how she reconciled her faith and her dramatic acts. That line of questioning is particularly valid because many evangelical churches with ties to the Holiness movement developed dress codes and rules about female clothing, hairstyles, and makeup as means of disciplining female bodies. Yet, McPherson defied those restrictions by the way she dressed and used her body to express her religious devotion in ways that were explicitly sexualized.
Embodiment, for the Christian worshipper, is more than just a theoretical construct, and this is particularly true for pentecostal/charismatic worship, which encourages particular postures and gestures such as bowing, kneeling, lifting up hands, dancing, and even marching. While the Scriptures admonish the believer to “present your body as a living sacrifice to God” as a “reasonable act of worship,” most religious traditions also emphasize the need to discipline the body (especially the female body) and strive to define and reinforce purity standards, especially for women. Yet McPherson’s physicality in worship took
24
Jane Nicholas, The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, The Body and Commodities in the 1920s(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 8.
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her beyond the limits of what is usually deemed appropriate, even in the most expressive kinds of worship. When she emphasized that she was the embod- iment of the Bride of Christ dressed in white, McPherson did not pretend to be a virgin with no sexual past. Indeed, her status as a widow and divorcee meant that she was expressing her desire for Christ as a woman with sexual experience who knew and appreciated the rapture and passion associated with married love. In that regard, McPherson pushed the limits of decorum and offended conservative sensibilities, but at the same time, she made herself and her performances more appealing to audiences who were used to the titillation offered on stage and screen by Hollywood. On the authority of her widowhood, McPherson could legitimately claim knowledge of sexual intimacy that would have been been deemed inappropriate for an unmarried woman.
The Storyteller
A third theory that relates to McPherson is the work of narrative discourse the- ory and literary theorists’ work on women’s conversion and call narratives.25 These theories are appropriate for thinking about Aimee Semple McPherson because she told stories: stories about herself, stories about her faith, and sto- ries about her calling. I have argued elsewhere that pentecostal women’s writ- ings have served to establish their own authority, and McPherson is a classic example of this phenomenon.26In making that argument, I build on the work of Virginia Lieson Brereton, especially her book From Sin to Salvation: Stories
25
26
With specific regard to pentecostal ecstatic experiences, the work of folklorist Elaine Lawless is particularly insightful. See Elaine Lawless, “Rescripting Their Lives as Narra- tives: Spiritual Life Stories of Pentecostal Women Preachers,” Journal of Feminist Stud- ies in Religion 7, no. 1 (1991): 53–71; and Elaine J. Lawless, “‘The Night I Got the Holy Ghost …’: Holy Ghost Narratives and the Pentecostal Conversion Process,” Western Folk- lore 47, no. 1 (1988): 1–19. See also Katie Fielding, “A Crash Course in Literary Theory: Gendered Readings,” http://katiefieldingliterature.weebly.com/gendered-readings.html (accessed March 12, 2017); and Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocino P. Schweikart, eds.,Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers,Texts, and Contexts(Baltimore,md: John Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1986).
Linda M. Ambrose, “Gender History in Newfoundland Pentecostalism: Alice Belle Gar- rigus and Beyond,”PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pente- costal and Charismatic Movements 15, no. 2 (2016): 172–199; and Ambrose, “Establishing a Gendered Authority through Pentecostal Publications: The Writings of Zelma Argue, 1920–1969,”Historical Papers: Journal of the Canadian Society of Church History(2009): 69– 80.
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of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present, which considers how women have recounted the stories of their faith journeys.27 Brereton’s work explores what she called “the formulaic quality of conversion narratives and religious lan- guage,”andbecauseBrereton’sstudydrawsuponhundredsof suchtestimonials over a broad sweep of time, she is able to trace patterns to the ways in which those stories were told. She observes, for example, that with the emergence of Holiness and Pentecostalism, “the ability to testify to conversion gives women a new authority; indeed, claiming the experiences of holiness and Pentecostal- ism expands that authority.”That authority, Brereton emphasizes, came neither from the twentieth-century women’s movement nor “from enhanced political or economic status.” “Rather,” she asserts, “it stems from the convert’s close con- nection with the source of all ‘true’ authority: God.” At the center of this is the question of legitimacy, particularly if that woman was convinced that her con- version was accompanied by a call to ministry in roles that twentieth-century gender politics had come to define as being reserved for men only. Because women like Aimee Semple McPherson recounted their stories of conversion and call as tales of submissive obedience to God, they were infused with an ironic sense of authority. Authority born of submission sounds like an oxy- moron. As Brereton put it, when a woman recounted how she came to follow God, “the surrender of control resulted in a greater control.” Legitimizing her escape from culturally defined gender roles gave a called women indisputable claims to authority on the stage and behind the pulpit.
When Aimee Semple McPherson told her own story, she emphasized several things: that her calling predated her birth; that God himself had intervened to make way for her personal Pentecost; and that outside of her calling, she was absolutely miserable in the culturally dictated roles of wife and homemaker. Each of these elements of McPherson’s testimony illustrate what literary the- orists and folklorists have maintained, namely, that stories told in particular ways serve to legitimate women’s claims about their calling to the roles of evan- gelist, pastor, and worship leader. Moreover, because those stories were told in person and in print, it is helpful to consider the published text of McPherson’s testimony as part of the “cultural script” that has characterized Canadian reli- gious publications, especially publications authored by women.28
27
28
Virginia Lieson Brereton, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
On the idea of the cultural script, see Robyn Sneath, “Imagining a Mennonite Community: The Mennonitische Postand a People of Diaspora,” Journal of Mennonite Studies22 (2004): 217–218. On religious publishing in Canada, especially women’s writings, see Brian Hogan, “Print and Organized Religion in English Canada,” in History of the Book in Canada, vol. 3,
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The first part of Aimee’s story points to her understanding of how the calling she answered came from forces and circumstances beyond her control. By pointing out that she was merely acting in deference to a plot line that predated her own choices, she hoped to reinforce that her unorthodox circumstances were actually set in motion by events that predated her lifetime. In other words, she did not choose to live this unorthodox life; she was simply acting in step with her destiny. McPherson recounted how her mother had prayed for her even before she was born. Mildred (Minnie) Ona Pearce, a teenage Salvation Army worker in southern Ontario, left off her own itinerant ministry to take a job as a domestic servant and eventually to marry her employer, James Kennedy. Recounting the life that followed that marriage, Aimee explained that for her mother, Minnie Kennedy, “realizing ever that she had failed the Lord, who had redeemed her and set her apart for His glorious purpose, life grew more and more dreary; her spirit grieved sore, with no ray of hope to rectify herself toward God, and the souls she had been called to win.” Telling that part of her mother’s story, Aimee recounted that after getting married, her mother was decidedly unhappy, and “[s]horn of her usefulness, fettered by circumstances, she truly did grind in the prison house; but, strange as it may seem, during all the time that her body was fettered, her soul was turning Heavenward.” As part of that repentant turn, Minnie Kennedy knelt by her bed as a young bride one day after reading the story of Hannah, and made this bargain with God: “if You will only hear my prayer … and give me a little baby girl, I will give her unreservedly into your service, that she may preach the word I should have preached, fill the place I should have filled, and live the life I should have lived in Thy service.”29
Baby Aimee was the answer to her mother’s prayer. And the story of that prenatal dedication to the Lord became the foundation of the story that Aimee Semple McPherson told about her life. The iconic cradle in which her mother laid that baby is now on display in the local museum in Ingersoll, Ontario. With that prenatal dedication of her life, McPherson convinced herself and her audiences that she was indeed made for the unorthodox role of female minister. The power of her story, and her mother’s story before her, meant she was made for ministry.
That story of calling that even predated Aimee herself stands as part of a long line of call narratives that have been the subject of study by scholars interested
29
1918–1980, ed. Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 287; and Carole Gerson, “Publishing by Women,” in History of the Book in Canada, vol. 3,1918–1980, ed. Gerson and Michon, 319.
McPherson,This Is That, 16.
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in the history of women in ministry.30 Historian Sandra Beardsall contends that women’s conversion to Methodism was part of a “romantic conquest” that attracted women from their day-to-day lives. Since Minnie Kennedy could not see a way to escape her own mundane life, she prayed that God would make a way for her daughter to do so. The heritage of answering the call to ministry was not lost on Aimee or her listeners as she retold it. Joanna Bowen Gillespie explores how women “following the clear leadings of providence” wrote auto- biographical accounts of their lives that were tales of “self-construction and self-empowerment.” According to Gillespie, when these women pointed to sto- ries of calling in their lives, they demonstrated that Providence was “a means of legitimizing new possibilities” for women as they personally took the call to evangelize.31 Aimee’s heritage of a praying mother who had set her apart for ministry formed the basis of her life story and legitimized her unusual call- ing.
On a second aspect of her story, McPherson invoked the description of a Canadian winter snow storm that literary scholars would recognize as pathetic fallacy—where a paralyzing snow storm was supernaturally and sympatheti- cally timed to McPherson’s first session of tarrying as she sought the baptism of the Holy Spirit. For Aimee and her story, however, that storm was more than simply a literary technique or a divine coincidence. In fact, as she told it, the storm was literally an answer to her prayers and proof that her calling was orchestrated by forces beyond her control. Aimee’s parents had forbidden her to continue associating with the evangelist Robert Semple and the small band of believers who were hosting him at a pentecostal mission in Ingersoll. But Aimee Kennedy was hungry to seek a deeper experience of the Spirit and she prayed that God would make a way for her out of the impasse between spir- itual hunger and parental constraints. In her autobiography This Is That she recounted that God manipulated not only the weather, but entire transporta- tion and communication networks in order to make way for her encounter of Spirit baptism. Here Aimee’s own words still tell it best: “My heavenly Father sent out His angels to stir up some of those big, old, fleecy clouds of His, and
30
31
Kimberly Ervin Alexander, “Pentacostal [sic] Women: Chosen for an Exalted Destiny,” Theology Today 68, no. 4 (2012): 404–412; Sandra Beardsall, “I Love to Tell the Story: Women in Outport Newfoundland Methodism,”CanadianWoman Studies17, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 26–30; Elaine Lawless, Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
Joanna Bowen Gillespie, “‘The Clear Leadings of Providence’: Pious Memoirs and Prob- lems of Self-Realization for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic5, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 197–221.
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down came the snow and—causing the window-panes to rattle, and one of our old-fashioned Canadian blizzards was on.”32
YoungAimeeresumedhertarryingandpleadinginprayer,andsheexplained that while she was “storming heaven” seeking with all her might to do her part in her quest for spirit baptism, outside “[t]he storm increased, and as fast as the men endeavored to open a pathway, the Lord filled it in with moun- tains of white snow, until at last all thought of getting through while the snow lasted was abandoned.”33According to McPherson’s narrative, that the divinely arranged “snow day” was proof of God’s direct intervention to arrange particu- lar weather conditions served to reinforce the authority of her call. In her own words, “After praying thus earnestly, storming heaven, as it were, with my plead- ings for the Holy Spirit, a quietness seemed to steal over me, the holy presence of the Lord to envelop me.”34 It was the quiet after the storm. And it was also the quiet before she had her first experiences of bodily sensations of the Spirit’s indwelling—her initial evidence of her baptism. According to her account, immediately after the quiet fell she experienced her first episode of embodi- ment with the Holy Spirit as “the Third Person of the Trinity coming into my body in all His fullness, making me His dwelling, ‘the temple of the Holy Ghost.’ Was it any wonder that this poor human frame of mine should quake beneath the mighty movings of His power?”35Those physical evidences of baptism were soon accompanied by shouting, singing, laughing, and talking in tongues “until it seemed that I was too full to hold another bit of blessing lest I should burst with the glory.”36
When the God of the universe had gone to such lengths to arrange Sister Aimee’s encounter with the Holy Spirit, who could doubt the authenticity and her resulting authority? Her dramatic story was a parallel to the epic tales of Old Testament characters like Moses, for whom God parted the Red Sea, and Elijah, for whom God intervened to withhold rain and then send rain. Recounting her own miracle of God orchestrating atmospheric conditions, McPherson was deliberate in her attempt to use that story as a way to instruct her readers and listeners to worship God just as her initial episode of Spirit baptism had caused others in the house to worship: “the dear Sister of the home in which I stayed, came down stairs and into the parlor, weeping and praising the Lord with me. Soon Brother Semple and other saints gathered in. What shouting
32 33 34 35 36
This Is That, 43. Ibid. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46.
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and rejoicing! Oh hallelujah!” McPherson expected that every time she retold the story, her audiences would do the same—gather in, and begin to rejoice.37 Artful storytelling, then, was a prompt for fellow believers to worship. But literary theorists will recognize that by analyzing the narrative that McPherson crafted to recount that snow storm and her personal Pentecost, we see not only her own process of meaning-making but also a skillful literary maneuver. Anna Stewart, Helen Mo, and Saliha Chattoo point out that when women tell their stories by “attributing all agency and credit to God [it] has the ancillary effect of legimizing [their] own actions” and thus reinforcing their authority.38When McPherson told the story of how God orchestrated a snow storm in order to intervene in the life of a teenage girl, she reinforced the authority behind her own calling.
A third episode from McPherson’s story served a similar purpose. By retelling and justifying her unorthodox choices around marriage and motherhood, Sis- ter Aimee returned to the part that her mother played in her story, reinforcing that her life was unfolding according to the divine plan that was prearranged for her. When she left her second husband and arrived back in Ingersoll with her children, her mother was waiting to receive them. Indeed, it was Min- nie Kennedy who had sent the money to finance the travel back home, and of course she was pleased to see that the daughter she had prayed for was returning, not just to her Canadian home, but, more important, to her calling. McPherson’s mother quickly took matters into her own hands, explaining that she had arranged for Aimee to leave the children at the farm so that she could go off to a series of nearby camp meetings at which she could tend to her own spiritual care. For Aimee, the reunion with her mother amounted to a reunion with her calling. A series of southern Ontario camp meetings became the site for Aimee’s rededication to ministry and in short order, she was back to the lead role of helping others pray through to Spirit baptism. All trace of her previous domestic misery subsided, and in the story it mattered not whether that unrest had stemmed from post-partum depression or a Jonah-like refusal to serve. Her mother was standing by to endorse her call to ministry and to provide the prag- matic support she need to resume her obedience to that calling. Within a few short years, Sister Aimee’s crusades both in the United States and back home in Canada were making headlines. Two of her most famous in Canada were the 1920 Winnipeg and Montreal meetings, which are regarded as key events
37 38
Ibid.
Anna Stewart, Helen Mo, and Saliha Chattoo, “Introduction: Gender and Agency in Spirit- Filled Christianity,”PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pente- costal and Charismatic Movements15, no. 2 (2016): 123.
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in the growth of Canadian pentecostal history.39 Implicit in McPherson’s per- sonal testimony was a justification of her gender transgressions. Although her lifechoiceswereclearlyoutsidethe societalgendernorms foramarriedwoman with children, the ministry successes that she enjoyed offered proof that what looked like deviance was actually extreme obedience to an unorthodox call- ing.
These three episodes of Sister Aimee’s life, including the prenatal promise that her mother made to dedicate Aimee’s life to ministry, the epic Canadian snow storm that made way for her Spirit baptism, and the dramatic abandon- ment of her marriage and homemaking roles, are central parts of her testi- mony. This carefully crafted personal narrative served to reinforce McPherson’s authority in the pulpit not only because it justified her gender transgressions, but also because a trope about divinely orchestrated events reframed Sister Aimee as a woman destined for ministry who was fully submitted to God. More- over, the pentecostal cultural script that she constructed meant that she should not be questioned or condemned for her unusual life choices, but commended for her extreme obedience. Such is the power of a testimony well told and a narrative carefully constructed: narrative discourse theory reminds us that meanings are made and reinforced in the telling.
Conclusion
Theories drawn from gender studies suggest at least three productive start- ing points from which to frame a discussion about Aimee Semple McPherson and other pioneers of pentecostal and revivalist worship. First, McPherson is a prime example of the performed self. Theories about performativity invite us to reflect on how and why we act the ways we do when we worship. Sec- ond, Sister Aimee used her body to express her worship. Her example compels us to turn our attention to theories of embodiment and the physicality of reli- gious expression. And finally, with Sister Aimee, storytelling was an art. Believ- ers have always shared testimonies about their conversion and calling, but the particular ways in which Aimee Semple McPherson told her stories served to
39
Edith L. Blumhofer, “Canada’s Gift to the Sawdust Trail: The Canadian Face of Aimee Semple McPherson,” in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 387–402; Michael Di Gia- como, “Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in Canada: Its Origins and Distinct Cul- ture,” in Michael Wilkinson, ed., Canadian Pentecostalism: Transformation and Transition (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 15–38.
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reinforce her authority and justify her unorthodox life choices. Scholars of Pen- tecostalism might usefully reflect on how pentecostal/charismatic discursive traditions have been incorporated as acts of worship.
There is no question that Aimee Semple McPherson adopted what others saw as “the ways of the world.” While the line between Hollywood and holiness was clear in Sister Aimee’s own mind, that clarity is rendered more complex when her actions and her words are viewed through the lens of gender theo- ries. The theory of performativity helps us to see that although Sister Aimee claimed that her popular illustrated sermons were just lessons she learned from her own life, those object lessons were carefully scripted performances that sometimes pushed the limits of respectability. Moreover, while McPherson insisted that her unhappiness during her second marriage was alleviated only when she escaped back to Canada with her children, she looked like a prodigal wife and mother abdicating from her socially acceptable roles. Yet, McPher- son justified her unorthodox performances as acts of obedience to God. Sec- ond, theories of embodiment help to unpack the ways in which McPherson’s devotion was infused with a degree of sensuality that communicated mixed messages about how spirituality and sexuality comingled in her preaching and dramas. Sister Aimee embodied her love for Jesus with a degree of physical- ity that offended some observers, while titillating others; her embodied acts of worship are fraught with ambiguities. Finally, by considering McPherson’s per- sonal narratives with attention to narrative discourse theory, it becomes clear that when she recounted her story as a simple “testimony” she was actually pre- senting a carefully scripted rendition of her calling that was crafted to establish her authority and legitimize her unusual biography. Sister Aimee told her story in ways that reframed the events that were outside her control as well as the decisions she personally made as acts of obedience to God. Thus, a prenatal dedication and a series of supernatural weather events pointed to God’s calling on her life. At the same time, her decisions to escape her unhappy marriage and to delegate the care of her children were reframed as acts of submission to God. In doing so, the trope of obedience allowed her to explain her unconventional paths and behaviors in ways that fit the cultural script of a pentecostal respond- ing to divine intervention in one’s life. McPherson insisted that it was entirely appropriate to use her drama, her body, her stories, and indeed every possi- ble art form to worship God. As scholars of Pentecostalism explore the history of how worship and the arts have been entwined, gender theories prove to be useful tools with which to think more deeply about pentecostal performances, bodies, and narratives.
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