Calling Sister Aimee/ What Can I Do About My Dreams?

It's difficult to blockquote something from an NPR audio clip, but this interview with Matthew Avery Sutton, author of a new bio of Aimee Semple McPherson, is worth a listen. Here's the nut graf from a book excerpt:

Although many men and women from a variety of different traditions contributed to the regeneration of evangelicalism, none compared with McPherson. As the most famous minister in America during the interwar years, she became the personification of the old-time religion, by transforming a conservative religious creed into something as exciting as a swashbuckling Hollywood adventure. Yet the rapid expansion of this culturally attuned faith was not without its pitfalls, for McPherson constantly blurred the boundary between the sacred and the profane. Many critics despised the seeming irreverence of combining show business with an ancient creed. Others questioned the creation of all-powerful celebritypreachers who marketed little more than their own personalities to the masses. Still others who decried the mixing of faith and politics warned that the First Amendment was under siege. And there was an even darker side to this evangelical culture, fueled by McPherson and her allies' constant search for signs of the impending rise of the Antichrist. Like the Puritans before them, they tended to interpret daily events within the framework of a continuous cosmic struggle between good and evil. Because they never knew when and where the devil might strike, they remained very suspicious of "outsiders." Regardless of how successful such believers became, they saw themselves as a besieged minority, a faithful remnant, charged with holding back the forces of the apocalypse. This ideological commitment, which kept them constantly on the defensive, fueled a nativist tendency that occasionally surfaced in damaging ways. But the greatest controversy affecting McPherson centered not on her religious innovations or her sporadic xenophobia but on her personal life. When, at the peak of her fame, she became embroiled in what appeared to be a major sex scandal, she nearly landed in jail. She discovered that the same publicity tools that had helped her create a religious empire could just as easily destroy her. Ultimately, however, she rebounded from the controversy and returned to the national spotlight during World War II to solidify the marriage between evangelicalism and patriotic politics.