When the influencer Katie Sorensen posted on Instagram about the less than “clean cut” Latino couple who she said tried to kidnap her children outside a Bay Area Michaels in 2020, she credited her kids’ safety to “the absolute grace of God.” The video, viewed more than 4 million times, was eventually found to be a hoax: The accused couple had not interacted with Sorensen’s children at all.
The Sorensen scandal seems, on the surface, to be a uniquely contemporary event—involving social media, child-trafficking panic, and even essential oils (Sorensen was an “independent wellness advocate” who sold products through the multi-level marketing company doTERRA)—but a similar incident occurred almost 100 years earlier.
In May 1926, the world-famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished; she was last seen ducking into the ocean near Santa Monica for a swim. Weeks later, she turned up in Mexico with a sordid tale of abduction. Like Sorensen, McPherson was a white woman living in California who’d built a career on her openness and accessibility. She also blamed the kidnapping on a Latino couple, in this case invented characters named Felipe and Mexicali Rose, who, along with a white man named Steve, she said kept her locked in a shack in Mexico for more than a month. After her return, McPherson claimed that the devil had arranged her kidnapping to thwart her good works, but God had intervened.
Sorensen’s story ended tidily: She was given a short jail sentence for making a false report of a crime. But obscurity wasn’t an option for McPherson. She was too famous—and too good at being famous—to fade.
Claire Hoffman begins Sister, Sinner, her new biography of McPherson, with a play-by-play description of the day the evangelist went missing. The hoax was probably the most significant event in McPherson’s action-packed life, and the intricacies of the ensuing legal proceedings (a grand jury investigated the incident, and McPherson faced three charges, including conspiracy to “pervert or obstruct justice”) make up the bulk of Hoffman’s fascinating, frustrating book.
More than the eerie parallels of their hoaxes kept me thinking about Sorensen as I read Sister, Sinner. In some ways, McPherson’s whole life seemed to me like the tale of a proto-influencer: As a multihyphenate (mega-church founder, writer, radio star), she was keenly ambitious, technologically adventurous, aware of her brand but studiously authentic. She showed enough vulnerability to make her followers feel connected to her, to feel that with her guidance they might be able to shed illness, sinful habits, and psychic malaise. A better world was possible for those who liked and subscribed.
McPherson was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in rural Ontario, Canada, in 1890 to a mother who was deeply involved in the fledgling Salvation Army, the temperance-focused British missionary movement that had recently arrived in North America. When she was 17, she married a Pentecostal missionary from Ireland named Robert Semple and traveled with him to evangelize in China, where they both contracted malaria. McPherson, who was at that point eight months pregnant, survived, but Semple died, leaving her a widow and new mother stranded halfway around the world from anyone she knew.
McPherson raised money preaching and used it to travel to New York, where her mother, by then separated from McPherson’s father and working full-time for the Salvation Army, lived. While her mother stayed home with baby Roberta, McPherson rang the organization’s brass bell in the lobbies of Broadway theaters, asking members of the crowds “Are you saved?” One day, a man named Harold McPherson stopped to answer her, and not long after, the two married. As Hoffman writes, Harold believed that once they had a child together, McPherson would put the energy that once went to sidewalk preaching into domestic life. Their son, Rolf, was born in 1913. And Harold was wrong.
Experiencing what might today be diagnosed as postpartum depression, McPherson was hospitalized and given a hysterectomy. As she fought to regain strength, Hoffman writes that McPherson heard a divine voice telling her “GO! Do the work of an evangelist: Preach the Word.” McPherson waited until Harold was out of the house one night, grabbed her children, and left. For the next five years, she toured the country as a tent revivalist, sharing the good news.
In McPherson’s age, preaching—not unlike the work of an influencer today—was a way for people, especially women, to gain social power and financial success without working a conventional job. McPherson also had the smarts to control the means of production. For instance, while canvassing the American South in her “Gospel Car,” she published and sold her sermons in her proprietary magazine rather than letting other companies print them. As Hoffman writes of the rise of the steam-powered printing press: “The creation of a mass media opened up the public sphere—suddenly anyone could be famous.”
But just because anyone could be famous didn’t mean anyone would be. McPherson distinguished herself by creating her own feminine, even romantic, brand of proselytizing. “Her tone was often girlish and innocent,” Hoffman writes about McPherson’s magazine, The Bridal Call. “Her prose was amorous, adjective-laden, and woozily swooning.” McPherson “emphasized her fallibility, always—she was prideful and prone to make foolish mistakes, but all of this made her more adorable and magnetic.” As a mother, she was relatable to many women, and her habitual white nurse’s costume conveyed both a purity and a medical training that she did not possess. Over the top yet self-aware, giddy, and relatable, McPherson was what today’s TikTok user might call a “Gospel Girly.”
As McPherson’s fame grew, she eventually decided to settle down in a city that she could tell was on the rise: Los Angeles. Although McPherson often encouraged a return to a simpler, more traditional way of life—she spoke in her sermons about her wholesome upbringing on a farm—she wanted to be in the middle of the cultural and technological revolution sweeping Southern California. In L.A., McPherson became one of the first women to hold a radio license in the United States. Using giant radio towers perched above the Angelus Temple, the megachurch she founded, she gave sermons, administered faith healing over the air, and invited powerful political figures to join her in bemoaning the degeneracy of modern life. Broadcasting content about how good things used to be on a thoroughly modern communication platform represents a paradox readers might find familiar—consider the rise of the social-media tradwife.
The centerpiece of Hoffman’s book is the kidnapping scandal itself, and the frenzied grand-jury hearing that resulted. As holes appeared in McPherson’s story, the prosecution discovered her close relationship with her married audio engineer, and found witnesses who reported seeing them in a secluded beachside cabin. Hoffman’s recounting of the hearing is meticulous, but the deeper the book delved into the proceedings, the more I noticed something surprising about her approach—a notable reluctance to offer an opinion of McPherson’s conduct or character. Despite the plethora of detail, the book has a curious and, to me, unnerving lack of perspective.
A certain amount of empathy for one’s subject might be of value in a biographer, and Hoffman conveys a sense of the difficulties that McPherson faced leading up to her disappearance. Her revival services were attended by enormous crowds, all hungry for her personal touch. She would stay onstage for hours, exhausting herself to minister to all. At times, Hoffman blames the pressures McPherson experienced on the uniquely difficult position of being a woman in the public eye—the book has, with good reason, a certain “Leave Aimee Alone” energy—but it refuses to pass any judgment on her actions.
McPherson’s stunt, whatever its motives, had real human costs. During the search for her body in the Pacific, a diver died of hypothermia; another woman, a disciple of McPherson’s, drowned in the ocean, hoping to meet her spiritual leader in death. McPherson also weaponized anti-Latino racism, calling to mind the actions of Katie Sorensen and Sherri Papini, another Californian who claimed in 2016 to have been kidnapped by two Latina women while actually visiting an ex-boyfriend. (Papini pleaded guilty to mail fraud and making false statements, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.)
After she returned to Los Angeles, McPherson gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times, in which she described the way she had been treated by the press with regard to the hoax: “Either I am a good woman, or I am the most terrible, unspeakable person in the whole world. There is no half-way ground in a situation like that.” The idea that famous women tend to be either lionized or vilified certainly hasn’t grown less accurate over the past century. But because Hoffman refuses to condemn McPherson, her book sometimes implies, whether intentionally or not, that she is too fragile to withstand scrutiny. There is indeed a halfway ground in a situation like this, and I wish Hoffman had pushed harder to find it.
The charges against McPherson were ultimately dropped. In the years following the scandal, McPherson continued to preach, while also building a career as a celebrity who appeared at events and on the radio. She tried to work in the movie business but had to settle for something closer to being a reality star.
In an interview with Mockingbird magazine, Hoffman said that she “thought a lot about grace” while writing her book. Grace, in contemporary internet parlance, often means forgiveness. Influencers ask to be “given grace” when they screw up in the ways that are perhaps inevitable when you are sharing your emotions around the clock for money. But in Christian theology, grace isn’t something you receive as a result of your contrition or your sincerity. It is free and undeserved, impossible to earn. Grace can’t be given by people online, or by authors to the people they write about. It is God’s job alone. The rest of us can stand to be more opinionated.
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