Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson. - book reviews

National Review, May 24, 1993 by Marc Goldblatt

AIMEE Semple McPherson, the evangelist, healer, and prophetess who won international fame in the years between the First and Second World Wars, was viewed by the media of her day as, variously: a shameless though charismatic fraud; a naive but well-meaning popularizer; a genuine vessel of the Holy Spirit.

In this sympathetic biography, Daniel Mark Epstein dismisses the first alternative but hedges, perhaps inevitably, between the second and third. Any secular treatment of a subject who claims divine inspiration must sooner or later confront The Question: did God actually speak to her? Epstein's hedge is that Sister Aimee believed He did--and it is the psychic power drawn from this unwavering belief, according to Epstein, that might account for the apparent miracles credited to her. It is a clever but unsatisfying sidestep: something akin to mass hypnosis might explain induced glossolalia or remission of certain physical ailments, but Epstein reports instances of mending fractures and disappearing skin lesions. His recreations of these events are vivid but too self-consciously agnostic; the disclaimers begin to grate. On the whole, however, the book is a lively read. That it is neither hagiography nor expose is its strength as well as its weakness. Sister Aimee emerges as an unlikely yet compelling heroine.