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cover of episode Sister, Sinner, Icon: Claire Hoffman On Aimee Semple McPherson’s Miraculous Rise & Disappearance

Sister, Sinner, Icon: Claire Hoffman On Aimee Semple McPherson’s Miraculous Rise & Disappearance

2025/5/22
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Claire Hoffman: 我在超验冥想运动中长大,这是一个介于健康和秘密崇拜之间的环境。在那个封闭的社区里,我的冥想甚至会被评分。这段经历让我对灵性和宗教有了独特的看法,也让我对人们不断尝试改变和提升自我的渴望很感兴趣。然而,领导者常常受到人性和弱点的影响,这通常会导致不良行为。在创作我的第一本书时,我对我的古鲁有了新的认识,开始思考公众人物的内心世界。通过研究,我开始看到古鲁的内心生活,并意识到他也是一个有欲望和抱负的普通人。

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The podcast opens by posing the question of what constitutes a genius, contrasting the 95% who are merely qualified with the exceptional 0.1% who are true geniuses. The host introduces his mission to find and interview these exceptional individuals.
  • Only 0.1% of people in any profession are considered real geniuses.
  • The podcast aims to interview geniuses across various fields.

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Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

are real geniuses. Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is Claire Hoffman. She's the author of a book called Sister Sinner, The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson. And I was telling her offline that I get books sometimes from guests. And thank you, by the way, Claire, for sending it. This one, my wife grabbed like the first day and reading it immediately. She loves it. So, you know, that's good news. But I haven't read it yet. Apologies, but we can still ask good questions about it, I think.

So, yeah, we'll go through all that stuff. But welcome, Claire. Thanks for coming. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks to your wife. I like that vote of confidence. So what do you do full time? Are you an author full time or do other stuff as a side project?

I'm an author full time, I would say. I spent about six years on this book. I mean, I was what is full time, you know, I was doing other things during that same time period, including, you know, living through a pandemic with young children. But yeah, I am a writer and a journalist. And yeah, I used to work in newspapers and worked in magazines and now I've kind of moved into book writing. Okay.

So is this your first book? This is my second book. Yeah, my first book is called Greetings from Utopia Park, Surviving a Transcendent Childhood. And it's a kind of mashup of two genres in that it's an investigative memoir. So it's a reported memoir on the Transcendental Meditation Movement, which was the religious community that I grew up in in the 1980s in Iowa. Ooh.

Is it okay to ask a few questions about that, Zer? For sure. I love talking about it. Was it a healthy environment in the aggregate or was it like a secret cult or what? Somewhere in between. You know, I sort of joke that I just say new religious movement, but you know, it's the Transcendental Meditation Movement today is something really different than it was in the 1980s. Today, it's something that has...

has kind of become much more mass and David Lynch became their sort of primary evangelist until he passed away this January. But, you know, it's something that you hear a lot of celebrities talk about and CEOs and they've just, it's really been kind of stripped down to the basic meditation, mantra-based meditation that they teach. But when I was growing up in the 80s, it was kind

kind of an insular community there was there was a our guru marishi mahashyogi was still alive and he really kind of controlled the ideology i would say so i went to the marishi school of the age of enlightenment and i had my meditations graded and the majority of graded yeah and i didn't do what you're not manifesting hard enough exactly wrong with you exactly it's weird

Yeah. So it was, you know, I mean, the adults in the community were meditating three to four hours a day together. So it was just, it was a funny moment in time and it's, it's mellowed. So, but it was, it was pretty intense, you know, it was, you know, it gave me kind of a perspective on spirituality and religion and even religion.

you know, self-improvement and the desire for people to always be kind of trying to transform. Since so much of my childhood, I was surrounded by adults who were, you know, trying to change their consciousness, trying to become enlightened. And so, yeah, there's a certain kind of, I wouldn't say cynicism anymore, but I definitely sort of am

I'm interested in it, but not a part of it. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, whenever there's people at the head of the, you know, the movements, they're just, they're subject to being people and all people's frailties and everything. And a lot of times it seems to lead to bad behavior, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, in a way, there's a real direct line between that book and this next book, Sister Sinner. You know, I finished...

working on Greetings from Utopia Park. And in the process, I had this sort of revelation about the guru that I grew up with, Maharishi. And, you know, I'd always seen him as this sort of all-knowing, omniscient,

you know, almost godlike character. I mean, he was quoted back to me day and night for, you know, more than a dozen years. And, you know, in doing the research and reporting for that book, you know, I was able to see more of his interior life and what his private life was like and get a sense of him as a regular person with his own desires and ambitions. It

It made me really curious about that experience, like what it's like. You know, we always think about like, oh, we're watching somebody on the stage or we're watching somebody melt down. But what's it like to be on the stage? You know, I mean, it's not something I have any interest in personally doing, but I think it's really interesting what happens to people who are in the public eye and who become these kind of prophetic people.

figures that we deify. Yeah, I thought it would be funny. It wouldn't be an insult, but it would be. You go up to one of them and you say, you're a prophetic. And they're like, what? I mean, try it. You know, it's the ego. I don't know if gurus like dad jokes. Yes. No, I don't know if they do. I don't know.

I mean, but so Amy Semple McPherson, you know, who this book is about, she's really interesting because she was this really important and powerful religious leader, you know, who should have been part of our history. But she started to make some really bad decisions when she was at the height of her fame. And, you know, part of the story is, is that kind of breakdown that that

that can happen to people when they're in that position or they achieve that position. Yeah, I'm sure it's tough. There's a lot of pressures. And I don't know if you should feel sorry for those people. I guess that's what they want. But yeah, I'm sure it's not all smiles and rainbows and easy stuff. No, I mean, to me, being famous has always seemed like the worst curse, you know? Yeah. So what is the Sister Sinner book about? What's the context of that? Yeah, so Amy...

Amy Semple McPherson was born just before the turn of the century, and she came to Los Angeles in the early, you know, right after World War I, and in the early 1920s built the Angelus Temple, which was, is considered the first megachurch. And in 19...

24, she started one of the first Christian radio stations. And she was Pentecostal, which was a fairly new denomination. I mean, at that point, it probably would have been called a cult, but a fringe Christian religious movement that emphasized the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues. It's that new? Yeah, it was 1906. What's the other name for Pentecostal? Similar? Charismatic? Charismatic, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, there's like, I think all Pentecostals are charismatic, but not all charismatics are Pentecostals. That might be the way it works. But yeah, so she converted to Pentecostalism as a 17-year-old in 1907. And she's just an incredibly important figure in the history of American religion and religion globally. I mean, at the time, Pentecostalism was

fairly fringe. And, you know, her church today has 8 million members. But more importantly, there are 650 million charismatic and Pentecostal Christians in the world. And it's a quarter of the world's Christians. And that is like it's the fastest growing religion. It's just it's a she helped shape the future of belief. And she's forgotten because at the height of her fame, she had this bizarre belief

thing take place, Richard. Okay. Sounds odd. Yeah, so... Oh, you're saving it for the book. You don't want to... Is that what you're saying? No, no. I can say it. I just didn't know if you wanted me to keep going. Yeah, go. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so...

May of 1926, you know, at the height of her fame, she goes down to Venice Beach and is working on a sermon about light and darkness. And she sends her assistant away to make a phone call, and she goes down to the ocean where she swims laps, and then she vanishes. And it's like pandemonium. You know, people are freaking out. Within hours and days, tens of thousands of people are on the beach screaming.

you know, searching for her, keeping vigil. Two people die looking for her. It's just a massive, it's a massive citywide search and news story. And right away, there's just like a

a lot of questions about what happened. Like, did she drown? You know, where did she go? Did she run away? And 35 days later, 600 miles away, she walks in from the desert of Mexico and she tells this kind of unbelievable story of being kidnapped. She uses the term white slavery. She says she was kidnapped by the underworld to punish her for her, you know, vocal sort of

politics and evangelizing. And she comes back to Los Angeles and very quickly the district attorney's office

And it was the largest charge.

trial in Los Angeles's history until the Manson murders. And it's like to understand how big and important it was, you could compare it to the OJ trial. Like people have said, it's like the OJ trial of the first half of the century. You know, like Black Dahlia, that kind of stuff. Yes. Yeah. It just was absolutely like riveted the city and the nation. I mean, it was front page news on the New York Times, Los Angeles Times. It was, you know, people knew everything about her.

So it also becomes this story of, you know, this woman that in a lot of ways people should know, like she was a really foundational figure in American history and shaped a lot of the ways that people worship. You know, I mean, she really basically created Christian entertainment. She, you know, did these illustrated sermons and plays. People called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity. You know, she just would create these incredible spectacles. But she's forgotten because this situation

scandal and these trials kind of made her a joke, like people that she'd came up a point of mockery. And it's also this kind of cautionary tale on the back half of what happens to, you know, as we were talking about these religious leaders who sort of lose their way and she kind of is almost devoured by her public. She really sort of falls apart.

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Interesting. How did you do the research for this story? You know, I have worked as an investigative reporter for years. So I went and obtained court records and trial records.

papers. I did a ton of archival research in terms of newspapers, old sermons. There's a huge collection of her published materials. You know, she was incredibly prolific. She wrote six or seven memoirs in her lifetime. So, you know, kind of an aggregation of all of that. And she's been written about over the last century. Like every few decades, people kind of take her on.

So there's plenty of material about her. Yeah, but I just always wondered and was amazed that people could write novels about historical figures. And I would guess the older the material, the harder, the less of it there is. But how difficult is that process? What are some of the tough things about getting information about something that happened a while ago? Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. One of the things I really enjoy doing as a journalist is being able to interview people. And in this story, everybody's dead. So...

number one that well what about family like the grandchildren or something you know children wouldn't be alive but yeah there's a granddaughter or a great-granddaughter who is in her late 90s who wouldn't talk you'd never she had never met Amy anyway so it was it wasn't such a thing there are you know I mean in terms there are a fair amount of archives and interviews that were done with family members in the 70s and 80s that I had access to so you

You know, that was helpful. You know, I mean, the newspapers were just absolutely obsessed with this story. So there's, you know, I mean, in 1926, I would say like half of the Los Angeles Times and half of the LA Examiner every day was dedicated to AMA.

Amy's story, at least during the summer. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was just like a fixation. So there's even, you know, there's a lot of reporting and records in that of what was happening and all these crazy subplots. You know, I mean, it was it is this kind of I don't know how you would describe it, like the cyclone in a way where just like more and more people got caught up in it. And there were like people who died. And you have seen the island. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. But, you know, I mean, there's like a blind lawyer who drowns in a ditch, like filled with a foot of water. And, you know, an abortion doctor who leaves burned papers in a trash can and is dead by suicide when the cops show up to interview him. You know, like it's just this incredible kind of. So it is like Epstein-Ireland. Yeah.

Yeah, I know it is a little. There is this kind of sense that the darkness, that there were a lot of untruths that spread across the city. And it's pretty, it's a crazy story. Why did you write it? Did you feel like you had to or it was just so interesting to you? Or what was your motivation? I mean, I had a couple of different motivations. One of them was I felt a little bit like this is a really important female story.

figure in American history who's been forgotten. And part of why she's been forgotten is that she was flawed, that she made mistakes, that she was complicated. She wasn't just, you know, a role model. Like she did some really screwed up stuff. But at the same time, you know, she did, she was an incredible pioneer and innovator. She did incredible outreach to the city of Los Angeles during the Great Depression. She fed over a million and a half families. So just this really mixed,

I think that's important to kind of have in our collective memory and history is somebody, especially a woman who, you know, has this insane ambition and success, but is also flawed. You know, I think it is. Mother Teresa, very similar. Mother Teresa, you know, we'll never...

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

That's why I think cancer culture is so short-sighted. It's like they say in the Bible, that he who is without sin cast the first stone. I'm not saying everyone of stature, but a lot of people of stature are very mixed. Dave Ruth and Frank Sinatra and there's anyone. I mean, none of these people seem to be totally clean. Thomas Jefferson or whatever. Just say, I'll throw them away because it's one thing they did. And then you know all the other stuff they did. I think, again, it's short-sighted. So it's nice that you're sharing this. Yeah.

No, and it's been really interesting. Like, I've, I mean, overall gotten like really wonderful, amazing reviews for the book, but there has been a little bit of this undercurrent and thread where people are frustrated with me for not condemning her for her mistakes. And I just, I find it like a little bit of that kind of hot take. I don't want to say cancel culture because that's, that in itself is like becomes such a political term, but I think we have gotten...

somehow through social media, we've gotten to this place where we really want to have things be on one side of the line or the other. Like you want to be right on. And this was such an incredible case in that, you know, I think she made some really big mistakes, but also the people who were screaming at her and accusing her were making mistakes too. Like you just see how the water is from a hundred years later. And there's some clarity for me on that of like,

I'm not going to be quite so convinced of my righteousness or people's lack of righteousness. You know, how has it affected your faith? I mean, did you have faith before or after? Is it just another, like, ball of a guru to you? Like, how does the story change you? Yeah, I mean...

I think it has created some softening, which is also probably just coming with age. You know, I mean, when I left the spiritual community that I grew up in, I was pretty cynical, you know, and had a real sense of like, you know, people, you know, people in power are abusive and, you know, people without power have been victimized. And while that is true, I think there's also a sense after working on this book of like powerlessness.

power has its own costs. You know, there's ways in which it creates victims in and of itself. And I think people just being gentler with each other, you know, I mean, that's what I feel like I've internalized from the story is like, you know, there's, I mean, we're at a point in the world where we're so divided politically and there's so much accusation of evil doing, you know, I mean, that's a word that gets thrown around a lot. But

I think, you know, trying to be more empathetic, trying to connect with people on shared values, you know, it can't, I can't figure out the way forward, but that seems like a start. Okay. So do you feel like maybe it's made you more patient and more understanding of people, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly? I think I really try to, when I feel myself outraged, which seems to be the primary emotion from, you know,

consuming news and social media, you know, outrage. I interrogate it a little more, I would say, you know? It's good. And I think, and I'm trying to figure out a place that sort of posts outrage since it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

You know, and I mean, I'm like, I mean, I grew up in like a quasi Hindu community, but I am from Iowa. Like I did grow up in a place that is like it's a purple state. You know, they voted for Obama twice and Trump twice. Like it's it's a place that's kind of a weird melting pot or a mix of American values. And so I think I did grow up with that sense of like, oh, you have to understand the other side because because you live together and that.

There's been some erosion of that, I think. Well, you have a partner and stuff? If so, how has this affected your relationship with your partner? Has it helped? You mean in terms of the book or in terms of my political feelings? Well, you have a husband, wife, etc. Personal life stuff. Has this improved how you relate to your kids that you have and a partner and stuff like that? Or friends? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean... You don't have the answer. I was just curious if it hurt and weighed it down to a person in a good or a bad way. Yeah, I mean, I've been married for 16 years, which is crazy. Yeah, and I have two daughters, and I

I think it's been helpful to have, especially during this really tumultuous time in the world, to have a really complex story to be invested in and to talk with them about. And I mean, history is actually just this incredible mirror to hold up as we want to understand our present moment. And I feel like as Americans, myself included, you know, I mean, we have so little understanding of the past and we think of it as...

long ago. But I mean, I think if you read this book and you think about 1920s Los Angeles, it's incredibly contemporary feeling. And yet at that moment, Los Angeles was transforming from being like a sort of, you know, dusty outpost at the end of the railroad line into the fastest growing city in the history of the world. Wow. Oh, that's cool. You can tell your kids and your husband, they're

Now remember, mom is perfect. These people forget it.

But, you know, thank God mom's not like that, you know? Well, yeah. So I guess in answer to that question, I think there is, I think I feel a little less defensive about my mistakes. I would say. That's good. Yeah. Writing about a woman who made such kind of wild swings for good and for bad, I think it has made me embrace that flawedness, you know? Like, I'm not going to win it all. I'm not going to pretend like, you know.

I'm winning at the mall and it doesn't, it isn't necessary. And I think that is a good message for kids. Yeah, excellent. Well, how long has the book been out now? It's been out three weeks. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So people can get it on Amazon and everywhere books are sold? Yes. Everywhere where books are sold. And you have the audiobook version? Yeah, there's one. It's on Spotify and Audible. Okay. Yeah, no, I mean, like I said, I can't speak for myself yet.

But my wife loves it, and this sounds like a very fascinating story. So I think a lot of listeners will want to go listen. I've told people it's like even, like, my husband isn't particularly interested in religion, but he loves, like, the Wolf of Wall Street, like crazy ambition stories where, like, the cost of ambition, and this is 100% that. Okay. Well, very good. So I guess, you know, you've told this through the book subtly, not so subtly, but is there any message you want for...

people listening to the podcast, before they've read it, should they read it with a certain mindset or anything, or just go read the thing and leave a review and then see what they think about it? I mean, sure, that would be great. I mean, I think that there's, I would embrace the contradictions in the story, you know, like to not try and decide whether you think she is good or bad, but just think about why she's making the decisions that she is, because it's much more interesting than

than just passive judgment. Okay. Well, very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and for authoring the book. Maybe it was something really interesting to look into, you know? Yeah. Thank you, Richard. And I'm honored to be a part of this. Excellent. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.