Matthew Avery Sutton knows how to spin a yarn. His new biography of the Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson beautifully evokes the allure of this early-twentieth-century charismatic revivalist, and manages as well to capture the boosterism and bravado of Los Angeles in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. One can easily understand why the Public Broadcasting Service chose this book as the basis for an episode of the American Experience. Sutton's tale has all the pathos of a soap opera, while speaking at the same time to central issues of American cultural life, including gender, celebrity, sexuality, and the volatile mix of religion and politics. When Sutton harnesses his gift for storytelling to the task of critical analysis, the book is a model of what narrative history can be at its best. Only occasionally does he let the story get the best of him.

And what a story it is. McPherson rose to fame in Los Angeles in the 1920s as a theatrical preacher who made the most of new media to build a huge following at her Angelus Temple. Not only did McPherson break new ground as a preacher; she also founded an entire denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and did so while embracing many of the characteristics of the 1920s New Woman, including fashionable styles and an overt sexuality. Yet her fame was as much a product of her tabloid-fueled scandals as her homiletical skills or proto-feminism. Most notorious was McPherson's 1926 disappearance and a series of related legal battles, in which she claimed she was kidnapped and her detractors claimed she had absconded with a lover. This incident, and constant speculation about other lovers and troubles with drink, kept her personal life in the headlines for two decades. Her death of a drug overdose in 1944 meant that scandal followed her even to the grave.

Sutton writes of these turbulent years in rich detail, based on solid research in the sources, though at times he seems too forgiving of her obvious machinations and hucksterism, including her probable blackmailing of William Randolph Hearst and her sale of burial plots in her private cemetery, “where the evangelist promised disciples that together they would rise from the dead at the Second Coming…” (163). Sutton's sympathies lead to further, more significant troubles — most especially to outsized claims about his subject's political importance. Sutton argues, repeatedly, that McPherson's story is central to the story of conservative Protestantism and American politics in the twentieth century, that somehow she was a progenitor of the new Religious Right. He writes, for example, that McPherson “brought conservative Protestantism back from the margins to the mainstream of American culture” and that she laid the foundation for the later success of “pentecostal activists, including Christian Coalition founder and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson…” (4, 278).

Yet the math connecting McPherson's politics to the present doesn't quite add up. McPherson was indeed politically active, supporting antievolution initiatives in the 1920s and working against Upton Sinclair's candidacy for governor of California in 1934. But in these matters her positions were rather commonplace for Christian conservatives — as was her rhetoric about America's decline from its purportedly Christian roots, a sermonic tradition dating to the Puritans themselves. Furthermore, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, and the new Religious Right sold their souls to a single political party and tried to link Christian faith to particular matters of policy. McPherson, in contrast, was neither a partisan — she supported Hoover in 1928 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 — nor concerned in the least with the workings of government. “McPherson had little interest in the specifics of economic policy or in assumptions about the role of the federal government,” Sutton observes. “Rather, she trusted that if Christianity occupied a central place in national life, everything else would fall in place” (223). This is the very opposite of today's Religious Right, who contend that if political power is exercised properly, Christianity — or at least God's favor — will fall into place.

A final vexing aspect of Sutton's book is his frequent use of the phrase “old-time” to describe McPherson's beliefs and practices. He writes, in one of many similar locutions, that McPherson “wed the old-time religion with Hollywood pizzazz” (65). In truth, not only were her uses of media, and her prominence as a woman revivalist, modern innovations, but her Pentecostal theology itself was also thoroughly modern, as modern as the theological liberalism that constituted the yin to the fundamentalist yang. Dispensationalism, speaking in tongues, and divine healing certainly had precedent in the Christian past, but the explosion of Pentecostalism at the dawn of the twentieth century marked a new development in religious history. A faith born at Asuza Street in 1906 was not “old-time” by the 1920s.

Sutton's book masterfully recounts the life of Aimee Semple McPherson, and captures the dynamics of gender, celebrity culture, and modern Los Angeles in vivid color. As strict biography, the book succeeds admirably. But Sutton frequently succumbs to narrative overreach when aiming to make larger cultural and historical claims. Like McPherson herself, this is a compelling and graceful book prone to fits of dramatic self-indulgence.