Okay, welcome to The Other People Show, a weekly podcast with today's leading writers.

My name is Brad Listy, and I am here in Los Angeles, California. It's great to be with you.

Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to hit the

subscribe button. Wherever you listen, you can also subscribe on YouTube, and you can follow me on

Blue Sky and Instagram. So my guest today is Claire Hoffman, author of a new book called Sister Sinner,

The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple-McPherson.

It is available from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, and it is a superb book about a quintessentially American figure. Never mind the fact that Amy Semple

McPherson is actually Canadian. I feel like there's something very American about her and her story

in its totality. For those of you who don't know who Amy Semple McPherson was, she was in the early

20th century America's most famous evangelist.

And she was in so many ways of visionary.

A woman who was having great success in a field that was and continues to be typically dominated by men,

she stood at the nexus of religion and entertainment and mass media

at a time when Los Angeles was the fastest growing city on earth and Hollywood was in its early

infancy. It was in its ascendance as a cultural capital. Amy Semple-McPherson,

with the help of her very shrewd mother, was an incredibly sophisticated marketer who used

spectacle and storytelling and the latest in technology, including her own radio station, to bring the gospel to the masses.

She also helped bring Pentecostalism into the mainstream.

She was a forbear to modern televangelists, and she shaped the future of American Christianity.

Her Angelus Temple in the Echo Park neighborhood

of Los Angeles can fairly be called the first megachurch, and her four-square church

continues to exist to this day with more than 8 million congregants around the world.

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