A closer look
Long before influencers were staging fake apologies for clout, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was laying down the blueprint for religious grifting. As America's first true celebrity evangelist, she built a megachurch and dominated early radio. But when she mysteriously vanished at a beach in 1926, the nation mourned. Weeks later, she stumbled out of the Mexican desert claiming she had been tortured by a criminal mastermind. Police quickly realized she had likely just run off for a romantic tryst with her married radio engineer. Naturally, the scandal only boosted her ratings.
