Spiritual celebutante

Today’s celebrity pastors seamlessly transition between pulpits, social media platforms, and prime-time TV. They treat sermons like TED Talks, and churches become part of their personal brands. We often associate these religious leaders with televangelists and the prosperity gospel, but evangelicalism has its share of viral superstars who end up as cautionary tales. Mark Driscoll, once a towering figure of the “young, restless, and reformed” movement, notably flamed out under the weight of ego, scandal, and mismanagement.

In a nation that glorifies reinvention and performance, the line between spiritual leadership and mass-market entertainment has blurred, perhaps even beyond recognition. What once was ministry has, for many, become choreography, packaged for maximum reach, engineered for emotional and financial payoff.

These figures don’t just reflect the culture: They shape it. They mirror America’s endless appetite for charisma and characters, platforms and performers. For many, these preachers fill a void; however, in doing so, they often make it deeper.

But this phenomenon is not new, far from it. The modern religious marketplace, where pastors chase influence one minute, salvation the next, has roots that run deep into America’s past. Our digitally connected world has merely made it louder, shinier, and more accessible. Before there was a Hillsong or a megachurch livestreamed to millions, a barefoot woman stood on a stage, transforming sermons into expansive exhibitions and faith into an orchestrated act of mass persuasion.

Claire Hoffman’s book Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp.) tells the remarkable story of a pioneer in the realm of celebrity religion, while holding up a mirror to American culture, asking why so many turn to these figures. The biography is a work of profound empathy, dogged investigation, and genuine relevance.

Sister, Sinner Claire Hoffman

One of the most influential women in American religious history, McPherson didn’t just anticipate the era of Christian influencers; in many ways, she helped invent it. Hoffman, much to her credit, doesn’t flatten her into a parable or punch line. Instead, she reveals a woman who seemed to live five lives at once: preacher, performer, prophet, media mogul, and mysterious runaway.

Known to the masses in the 1920s as “Sister Aimee,” McPherson was at one point more famous than the president. She filled 5,000-seat auditoriums every day of the week. She healed the sick on stage, dropped leaflets from planes, and founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which now has millions of members worldwide. She was also a radio pioneer, perhaps the first woman in the United States to hold a broadcast license, and a master of media campaigns. McPherson referred to the radio as the “cathedral of the air,” and she commanded that cathedral with considerable flair. Charlie Chaplin once suggested that half of her success was due to “magnetic appeal,” while the other half was because of “props and lights.” In her hands, revivalism became a form of entertainment. The pulpit became a stage. And America, still half-suspicious of female authority, couldn’t look away.

And then, in 1926, she vanished.

That disappearance, and her equally baffling reappearance weeks later in the Mexican desert, became a national obsession. Semple claimed to have been kidnapped, but the police, the press, even members of her own family seemed convinced she had faked it. It was much more than a tabloid story. It was, according to Hoffman, a national crisis of faith.

Preachers preached against her. Editors crucified her. Her own mother wanted nothing to do with her. And through it all, McPherson stood firm. Or deluded. Or perhaps both. The biography doesn’t resolve the disappearance, because to do so would be to pretend that clarity is always available to us. Instead, Hoffman excavates the event with precision and restraint, refusing both hagiography and hatchet job. The result is a story with the tension of a political thriller.

What makes Sister, Sinner so intriguing is not just Hoffman’s access to unreleased archival materials but her refusal to smooth over what remains jagged. As the author notes, McPherson’s “relationship to reality was different from that of those around her.” Readers will come away not with answers but with a disquieting sense of recognition that this is what it means to live inside a performance so convincing that even the performer may forget where the act ends.

Aimee’s rise from Salvation Army child prodigy to international revivalist star was powered by more than divine calling. It was branding, hustle, and an insatiable appetite for the limelight. Her sermons borrowed from vaudeville and silent film. Her publicity rivaled that of major Hollywood studios. As H.L. Mencken dryly observed, she “had a plant almost as big as that of Henry Ford.” She understood the American obsession with the often absurd and catered to it expertly. Flashbulbs, press releases, sacred operas. She wasn’t just preaching Jesus; she was selling Him like a blockbuster. But if McPherson was ahead of her time as a religious entrepreneur, she was also a casualty of it.

Hoffman, who has profiled stars like Prince and Amy Winehouse, sees McPherson’s life as a cautionary tale about how fame distorts truth and reality. McPherson’s death in 1944, likely from an accidental overdose, echoes the tragic fates of modern celebrities overwhelmed by expectation. She died alone in a hotel room with pills by her bed. An evangelist who once had 50,000 people greet her at a train station passed away without a single person at her side.

Sister, Sinner is not a modern morality play. It is richer than that. Hoffman places McPherson in the context of early Pentecostalism, the rise of Los Angeles as the capital of American mythmaking, and the cultural schizophrenia of a nation craving both salvation and sensationalism. Hoffman suggests that the “spiritual landscape of Los Angeles was ready-made for her,” as it was “a breeding ground for radical ideas on how to connect to God and self.” Sister, Sinner is more than a story about religion; it’s a story about media, gender, capitalism, and how America sometimes turns belief into a business.

If the book has one weakness, it’s that Hoffman’s empathy occasionally softens her scrutiny. The disappearance, despite all the documentation, never gets the cold, clear dissection it may deserve. But that may be the point. McPherson always knew how to keep something hidden behind the smile, behind the spotlight. In the end, she escapes us, just as she escaped her own, at times, suffocating existence.