When she was 18 years old, Aimee gave herself to Christ in response to the preaching of Robert Semple, an Irish Pentecostalist. This was the first of many answered prayers in Aimee’s life. Minnie Kennedy resented her husband for taking her away from evangelical work, but she told God that if He would send her a baby girl, she would raise the child to fill her place.
Still, he tells her story with insight, empathy and lyrical power, without ever losing a sense of what a strange tale it is.Īimee Kennedy was born in 1890 to a middle-aged Canadian farmer and a member of the Salvation Army 34 years his junior.
Poet and novelist Daniel Mark Epstein does not say anywhere in “Sister Aimee” what his own religious inclinations might be, though it is a safe bet that he is not a member of her Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Moreover, in these days of bomb-planting Muslims and Branch Davidians, anyone odd is open to the charge of cult-by-association.
Nevertheless, her life is a hard sell, for scandal touched it, and her Pentecostalist brand of Christianity is as remote from the religious experience of most Americans as it is from the prejudices of scoffers and skeptics. Aimee Semple McPherson was an evangelist, a faith-healer, and a star-a peculiarly American combination.
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