Where My Mother’s Name Didn’t Come From

Aimee Semple McPherson preaching at her Angelus Temple, Los Angeles

My mother once told me that her mother, Jeanette, had named her Amy after the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I didn’t give this statement much thought at the time, but it would have been odd that my conflicted Jewish mother had inherited something from a Pentecostal evangelist.  When I did think about it, however, I figured that religion had nothing to do with Jeanette’s choice. In Jeanette’s world, men, even weak ones, held power. A few exceptional women, like Aimee Semple McPherson, did have power.

How any woman in America came to power in the second decade of the 20th century was certainly a conundrum. Women couldn’t even vote in federal elections until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 – and this only after 50 years of ceaseless suffragette effort. Middle class women gained organizational and leadership experience through the burgeoning women’s clubs movement (social clubs, civic leagues, improvement societies), but although the hinges were being loosened on the doors to public power, the patriarchy successfully kept them closed.

There were, however, two fields of endeavor where women could shoot to national renown: entertainment and religion. Aimee Semple McPherson amassed enormous success at the intersection of both when she ended her wandering life as an itinerant preacher to settle in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism was pretty fringe-y at that time (faith healing, speaking in tongues), but McPherson eschewed the fire and brimstone delivery for a softer (more feminine?) approach, and it was enormously successful. 

It would take McPherson only a few years to reach the heights of power. She built and founded America’s first megachurch, the Angelus Temple, with a seating capacity of 5300. Multiple services and other programming went on all day, every day, and her dazzling approach of combining theatrical spectacle with the gospel made her a pioneer of Christian entertainment. 

McPherson presented salvation through her legendary “illustrated sermons,” renting costumes and scenery from nearby Hollywood studios. The temple boasted a 14-piece orchestra, a brass band and a hundred-voice choir, two-thirds female, all dressed in white. She used live camels, tigers, lambs, palm trees — whatever it took to bring biblical truth to the hearts of her listeners. 

Her critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity, but she built massive and lasting institutional power in a system designed to exclude women. She founded an entire denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. 

The year after the opening of the Angelus Temple, McPherson broke ground for the televangelists of the later century when her church acquired a broadcast license, and she sent her sermons over the airwaves, making her the first religious figure to gain a national audience. By 1926, she was one of the most charismatic and influential women of her time, her fame on par with Charles Lindbergh, Rudoolph Valentino, and Babe Ruth. Yet she gave up nothing of her femininity. She worked through glamor, fashion, emotional expressiveness, and maternal imagery. 

All this hoopla was far removed from my grandmother’s quiet domesticity in Hyde Park, Chicago. McPherson was so famous that even Jeanette would have known of her in her heyday. What did the content of Aimee’s message matter when Jeanette was considering a name for her only daughter? What my grandmother wished for her daughter in bestowing her that name, I hypothesized, was a kind of masculine agency that Jeanette may have wanted but was certainly beyond her ken. Her middle class aspirations as a Jewish woman – a servant, nice material things, social prominence in the “right” temple – were even more constricting than those of her Gentile counterparts. The only power she knew was exercised through charm, seduction, and an attractive appearance. 

Unfortunately, the dates for this invented origin story didn’t work out. When my mother was born in 1920, Aimee’s fame was still confined to Pentecostalism and Angeleno circles. It’s unlikely that Jeanette knew of her. Still, my mother thought that was where her name came from, so the retrospective feminist gloss I came up with may have applied to Amy, if not to Jeanette.

N.B. McPherson also anticipated the waystation of outsized religious figures blemished or brought down by scandal when she disappeared for five weeks in the summer of 1926. After an enormous funeral service for her, she stumbled out of the Sonoran desert near Arizona with a far-fetched story of how she’d been kidnapped and held captive. The subsequent media frenzy and grand jury investigations wounded her reputation but did not bring her down. She continued leading (and growing) her denomination until her (accidental?) death by an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944.

— Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in How the Women of the Classic Blues Got the White Patriarchal Erasure.

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