Aimee Semple McPherson Ministered To the Poor

Aimee Semple McPherson is remembered as a flamboyant female evangelist from the first half of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, she promoted very progressive social programs from her church in Los Angeles, the Angelus Temple, the cornerstone of of the Foursquare Gospel movement.

She ministered to the poor during the depths of the Great Depression. According to biographer Daniel Mark Epstein:

When the schools stopped feeding children free lunches, Aimee
took over the program. When city welfare agencies staggered
under the load of beggars, the women of Angelus Temple sewed
quilts and backed loaves of bread by the thousands. When bread
lines stretched for city blocks . . Angelus Temple was the only
place ANYONE could get a meal, clothing, and blankets, no
questions asked.

She brushed aside the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, and that between legal and illegal residents. One Mexican, the actor Anthony Quinn, who as a teenager acted as a translator for her, told an interviewer, “During the Depression . . the one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and within an hour there’d be a food basket there for you. . She literally kept most of that Mexican community . . alive.”

In an era when anti-black racism was freely expressed, not least loudly by fundamentalist white Protestants, she persistently tried to make interracial revival a reality at Angelus Temple. She brought a series of black leaders to its pulpit and welcomed into the congregation poor Southern blacks who had recently immigrated to a Los Angeles of increasing racial tensions.

The same week of the Detroit race riots, in June of 1943, McPherson publicly converted the notorious black former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson on the Temple stage, and embraced him as she raised his hand in worship.