Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?

She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of the wireless, long before Billy Graham and co. But who now has heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, the radio evangelist? Born in 1890 and raised on a farm in Canada, she was converted as a teenager by a Pentecostal preacher whom she married and joined on his missionary travels. When he died she took up preaching herself, moving to Hollywood and becoming enormously popular as a great healer of the sick and saviour of souls, dressed up for the part in a long white figure-hugging gown adorned with a huge glittering cross. Naomi Grimley told her story for the World Service’s The Documentary.

Sister Aimee had a huge temple built in Echo Park, designed on the outside like a white wedding cake with a huge neon cross on top. Inside she created not a church but a theatre with three levels, balconies, an orchestra pit and a stage. But that wasn’t enough for Sister Aimee. She may have been in Hollywood, home of the movies, where she could hire its designers to help her create each week a dramatised version of Moses on the Mountain or Noah in his Ark. But she also understood the power of radio, of the bond created between unseen speaker and listener at home. On top of her theatre were two radio masts, beaming her words into the homes of millions of Californians.

At the height of her fame, though, on 18 May 1926, Sister Aimee disappeared from the beach where she was last seen going for a swim, only to reappear as if by magic five weeks later. The newspapers, sensing a scandal, slaughtered the reputation of this bright, glamorous woman who had made her fortune and taken religion out of the church and into the home.