Kate Chisholm

Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?

Plus: Samuel West, Olivia O’Leary and Fi Glover on what makes a good radio voice in The Essay on Radio 3

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.

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