ABSTRACT
Louis Adamic, who Carey McWilliams called the “prophet, sociologist and historian” of Los Angeles, wrote after visiting Angelus Temple that “Mother Kennedy is the engineer who keeps the machine in good shape, sees that the wheels are well greased and the nuts screwed tight.”1 Minnie was also the engineer who “kept Aimee walking that straight little narrow path from Manse to Temple back to Manse.”2 Minnie was even more direct and to the point in describing their working relationship. Years later after she had left the temple for good, she mused to an inquiring reporter that “There was a day when I was needed at the Temple to keep Sister Aimee in the harness-to rein her back when she was inclined to scamper.”3 But in the process of her treadmill and tightrope existence, Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy had become far more than just her mother’s daughter-more than the extension of maternal dreams and fantasies. Aimee had become for her followers during “the continuous revival” what Emile Durkheim the French sociologist of religion called a “collective representation.”4 Durkheim believed that human communities tended to project their deepest feelings about their own collectivity on some person or emblem, because at an intuitive level they knew that their own lives depended on the survival of the group. The group itself, however, is too large and shapeless to become the object of such throbbing, surging energies, so they are focused instead on the collective representation.5 By early 1924 Aimee Semple McPherson clearly fit the concept of a collective representation.The “throbbing, surging energies” were most present on Sundays when Aimee’s treadmill existence began its weekly cycle. Those who knew her claimed they “never knew
“Sheep without a shepherd,” Angelus Temple members watch the surf being dragged in a search for Aimee’s body. The temple paid three hundred dollars for airplanes and forty dollars per day for drivers to search for her (used by permission of the Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library).
