By the 1920s California already had a reputation for exoticism in spiritual matters. For example, in the late 1800s Mennonite pacifists settled on farms in the Central Valley, and in the southern reaches of the state mainstream Christians and Jews were joined by Mormons, Adventists, and Spiritualists (who believed in communication with the dead). As the 1920s unfolded and led into the hard times of the 1930s, the state’s reputation grew as a nesting ground for spiritual groups beyond the pale of the traditional Judeo-Christian denominations.
Aimee Semple McPherson was the state’s most charismatic and impactful evangelist of the times. “Sister Aimee,” as she was called, migrated from the East Coast, settling in Los Angeles in 1918. There she built the 5,000-seat Angeles Temple, headquarters of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel that she founded. At the temple she preached dramatic, radio-aired sermons and tended the sick and infirm. Her son Rolf McPherson later recalled: “Often Mother would. . . go down and pray for someone on a stretcher. They would get up off the stretcher and the stretcher would be carried off empty.”
In 1926 scandal rocked the new church. McPherson had disappeared after swimming near Venice Beach on May 18, only to resurface a month later in Mexico, claiming she had been kidnapped. Researchers have gathered considerable evidence to show that she had spent part of her time in “captivity” in a honeymoon cottage in Carmel, accompanied by her church’s radio station engineer, Kenneth Ormiston, a married man. Her charisma helped her weather the incident. Despite suffering a nervous breakdown in 1930, and eloping with a choir member and divorcing him several years later, she held herself and her church together well enough to provide meals for thousands of unemployed Angelinos during the depression-ridden 1930s. At the time of her death in 1944, reportedly from an accidental overdose of barbiturates, the Church of the Foursquare
Gospel counted 410 churches in North America, 29,000 members worldwide, and assets totaling $2,800,000.
Minister Robert P. Shuler, a rival and adversary of McPherson, increased his Trinity Methodist Church’s membership from 900 in 1920 to 42,000 10 years later. He, too, used radio to reach listening audiences. His messages scorned Jews, Catholics, movies, evolution, and dancing. A defender of the Ku Klux Klan, he stressed the importance of preserving the Anglo-Saxon purity of Los Angeles, “the one city in the nation in which the white, American, Christian idealism predominates.”
A different spiritual message - one of inclusiveness - appealed to some Angelinos who became followers of Paramahansa Yogananda. Born in India, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1925. There he established his temple and the international headquarters of the SelfRealization Fellowship, which blended Hindu and Christian teachings with yoga philosophy. Spiritual enlightenment, he preached, came through a process of self-realization of the divine that could be reached by practicing physical exercises, breath control, and meditation. Monks and nuns were expected to adhere to non-violence, chastity, obedience, and a simple lifestyle. Lush SRF meditation centers were located on prime real estate mostly along or near the coast in Pacific Palisades, Hollywood, Encinitas, and San Diego. With more than 600 such facilities in 62 countries today, this California-based religious movement has stood as an early link between the religions of the East and those of the West.
A stronger East-West, transpacific religious tie was exemplified in the continued growth of Buddhism in California. The port cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with their sizable populations of Chinese and Japanese, nurtured their respective Buddhist heritages in California, which reached back into the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1924, for example, Los Angeles’ Nishi Hongwanji congregation erected the largest Buddhist temple in North America.
World History
