Megachurch: An American Original (Almost)

Megachurches are not a new phenomenon; in fact, they have been around for a long time in some form. We trace their history back to the beginning of the Christian faith and describe their trajectory through key historical figures, examining how the Wesley brothers, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, Charles Grandison Finney, Russell H. Conwell, and Aimee Semple McPherson produced and nurtured megachurch forms. We describe and argue that Christian churches, and megachurches in particular, are particularly potent in illumining American religious history, and that congregational studies reveal and explain core attributes of American social life.

Aimee Semple McPherson’s Pentecostalism, Darwinism, Eugenics, the Disenfranchised, and the Scopes Monkey Trial

This article posits that the cultural battle waged by Aimee Semple McPherson in concert with William Jennings Bryan over evolution and modernism was largely focused on a popular social theory linked to eugenics. On July 21, 1925, in the city of Dayton, Tennessee, a twentieth-century watershed event became a harbinger of the age: The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, popularly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The public remembers the event as spotlighting the fundamentalist-modernist controversy with respect to the teaching of evolution in the public-school curriculum against the protests of fundamentalist Christians who advocated Creationism. The historical event was far more complicated than the popular recollection. By revisiting primary materials, this investigation will demonstrate that much of the protest voiced by McPherson and Bryan involved Social Darwinism and eugenics and a concern over the impact of these popular theories upon the Social Gospel.

Aimee Semple McPherson

Because so many people have contributed analyses of Aimee Semple McPherson’s significance, one might well ask what more there could possibly be to say. The purpose of this article is not to break new ground on McPherson herself, but rather to apply a gendered lens to the existing McPherson scholarship in order to suggest three ways to use theories from gender studies to think about Aimee Semple McPherson, worship, and the arts. These theories prove fruitful for the case of McPherson, and there is every reason to think it would be a useful exercise to apply similar approaches to our study of other pentecostal, charismatic, and revivalist leaders.