How Los Angeles Helped Make the U.S. an Evangelical Nation

Carey McWilliams once called Louis Adamic Los Angeles' greatest prophet, sociologist and historian of the 1920s. Adamic loved California not so much because of the famed climate, though that certainly didn't hurt, but more because he found it a source of endless entertainment and absorption, and not always toward the good. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place ... full of curious and wild and poisonous growths. For the skeptical Adamic, decadent religions and cults served as warning of such perils. Hardly a day passed that I was not stopped in the street and handed a religious tract, he noted. L.A. might be the essence of America but it was a cacophony of faiths, a veritable ecclesiastical jungle.[1]

For Louis Adamic, L.A. might be the essence of America but it was a cacophony of faiths, a veritable ecclesiastical jungle.

By the 1920s, Los Angeles hosted a particularly fervent strain of Christianity today referred to as evangelicalism, but it took decades to develop before reaching a true mass audience through the likes of Aimee Semple McPherson, Bob Shuler, and Los Angeles native Charles E. Fuller. The rise of Pentecostalism in the Azusa Street Revival during the first decade of the 20th century, the establishment of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola) near its second, and the ascension of the famed Aimee Semple McPherson and her Echo Park Angelus Temple in the century's third decade, the 1920s, demonstrate this arc.

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Of course, none shone brighter than McPherson. The first religious celebrity of the mass media era, historian Matthew Avery Gordon writes, she mastered, print, radio, and film for use in her evangelical mission. Her integration of the latest media tools with a conservative creed established precedents for the century's most popular ministers from Billy Graham to Oral Roberts to Pat Robertson. [2] McPherson embodied the contradictory impulses of modernism and tradition in her creed and through her showmanship. Yet to focus solely on McPherson ignores the longer trajectory of evangelicalism and Los Angeles' mighty contribution to its cultural and political power.

2016 marks the 90th anniversary of McPherson's most notorious scandal and that which brought her to national fame: her alleged 1926 kidnapping, which drew the country's attention and captivated the city's populace. However, the fame she enjoyed might not have been possible without the city's general religious diversity, which gave room for more fervent strains of Christianity outside mainline Protestantism.

Undoubtedly, Los Angeles has shaped and contributed mightily to the worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism (500 million adherents and counting), the numbers of American evangelicals nationally, the rise of mega-churches, and the evolution of celebrity religious leaders like Pat Robertson. While McPherson deserves credit for her pioneering efforts and her cultural influence, understanding the context in which she emerged provides greater insight into the countervailing forces of demography, modernity, and religion at the heart of the Los Angeles of the 1920s and today.

Congregants raise their hands inside Aimee Semple McPhersons Angelus Temple. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Angels of Varying Faiths All Around Us The multiplicity and diversity of faiths that flourish in the aptly named City of Angels probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth, noted the authors of the Works Progress Administration's guide to the city in 1940.[3] Alongside evangelicalism, congregations dedicated to mainline Protestantism, Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and even the occult existed simultaneously.

The cosmopolitan populace of Los Angeles became known far and wide for its susceptibility to the teachings of sects and cults embracing such philosophies as divine healing, occult science, spiritual and mental phenomena, reincarnation, and astrological revelations.

More traditional religions celebrated their respective beliefs knowing that more esoteric ones did so as well. The cosmopolitan populace of Los Angeles became known far and wide for its susceptibility to the teachings of sects and cults embracing such philosophies as divine healing, occult science, spiritual and mental phenomena, reincarnation, and astrological revelations, concluded the guide's writers.[4]

Religious diversity is what differentiated Los Angeles from places like San Bernardino, where, as Joan Didion once wrote, it was possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. [5]

To a certain degree, Los Angeles' multiplicity of faiths in the 20th century can be attributed to its diverse and expanding population; its strain of fundamentalism a function of and reaction to this growing racial and religious diversity.[6] It fueled the sense among L.A.'s evangelical set that they must spread the word further and with greater zeal, lest mankind's soul be lost. Clearly, the social and cultural transformation of Los Angeles during the 1920s drove local fundamentalists' fears as much as any doctrinal debate did, historian Philip Goff notes.[7]

In 1900, the homogeneity of Los Angeles earned the city the nicknames like Iowa by the Sea and Double Dubuque. Of its over 100,000 citizens, most derived their ethnicity from Europe and many had migrated from the Midwest.[8] To be clear, pockets of Afri

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