American Literary Supernaturalism

Abstract

In 1923, Aimee Semple McPherson offered a new illustrated sermon titled “The Trial of the Modern Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ” at Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, arguably the nation’s first mega-church, which had opened its doors earlier that year and was already attracting thousands of visitors to each of its three daily services. Blending old-time religion with Hollywood-like spectacle, illustrated sermons were a large part of “Sister” Aimee’s appeal. A rising star in the Pentecostal movement that fanned out across the country following the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, McPherson—whom Sarah Comstock labeled “the prima donna of revivalism” in The Nation—would become even more widely known in subsequent years as a defender of traditional church teachings and values against what she and other evangelical leaders called modernism (qtd. in Sutton 74). Sister Aimee’s latest illustrated sermon cast this antimodernist crusade in particularly dramatic fashion— indeed, in the form of a courtroom drama. “In this sermon,” the historian Matthew Avery Sutton observes, “the evangelist played the role of prosecutor in a mock trial that focused on infiltration of modernism into American churches” (50). Large exhibits featuring biblical verses and quotations from prominent fundamentalist preachers (as well as Abraham Lincoln) were set off against other statements from leading professors of the day. “The jury’s job,” Sutton notes, “was to determine how such leading institutions of revivalism in previous centuries as Yale and Princeton currently stacked up next to the word of God” (50). Predictably, the jury returned a unanimous verdict, finding in favor of Jesus Christ and against the Modern Liberalist College Professor. Although Gregory S. Jackson makes no mention of Angelus Temple or McPherson in his book The Word and Its Witness: