How America’s most famous preacher made a fake megachurch in Tahoe – By Katie Dowd (SFGATE) / Oct 11 2020
Even today, it is a captivating image: a lovely woman, dressed in long white robes with a pretty, crimped bob, surrounded by an ecstatic congregation calling out to her.
It’s perhaps no wonder that Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of one of America’s first megachurches, has come back into style. Avid television watchers will recognize her in two recent shows: “Perry Mason” and “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.” In both shows, main characters clearly draw inspiration from the powerhouse evangelist.
In “Perry Mason,” it’s Tatiana Maslany’s Sister Alice, the inspirational — if not financial — head of a Los Angeles Pentecostal temple in the 1920s. The show’s striking shots of Sister Alice’s sermons are near-identical to services staged by McPherson in which she reenacted biblical parables, complete with costumes and tambourines. Like McPherson, she performs faith healings and speaks in tongues.
In “City of Angels,” it’s Kerry Bishé’s Sister Molly, figurehead of her Los Angeles evangelical church in the late 1930s. Sister Molly draws heavily on McPherson’s famed charitable image, serving in soup kitchens herself in between radio broadcasts, another medium employed by McPherson.
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