By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel which has a worldwide membership of over 8.8 million with 67,500 churches in over 150 countries.
In the early 1900s, Aimee was taught Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in high school. Her introduction to Darwinism came as a rude awakening.
She then asked her science teacher, Mr. Pearson, to help her deal with her concerns about evolution. Unfortunately, he dismissed her questions with the assurance that evolution was fact “based on good authority.” Gradually, Aimee found herself captivated by the atheistic implications of Darwinism.
To sort out her conflicts, she asked the religious authorities in town about her concerns. Several of them accepted Darwinism as fact.
They explained it must be fact because the school textbooks supported evolution, describing the origin of life in sea slime, which evolved into seaweed, then into insect life from which came animal life, and through the processes of evolution, man appeared.
To Aimee, it was obvious that these teachings taught that God did not create mankind. Instead, we came about by the process of evolution via damage to the genes cause by mutations and the “survival of the fittest” struggle.
In her words, evolution was arrayed against the Word of God, evolution against Genesis, and mundane chance against the miraculous. She reached the point where, if the Bible is mistaken in one place, it is very apt to be mistaken in others.
This school experience also caused her to quiz local pastors. She was very unhappy with most of the answers, which was that humans evolved from some animal primate was a well-supported scientific fact. Ironically, in the 1900s, the only fossil evidence was Neanderthals, now known to be another people group, i.e., “race.”
Although reared in a devout Methodist household, the churning sands of the quagmire of disbelief eddied now about her. Her mother, “dismayed by her daughter’s skepticism, argued and pleaded with her, without effect.”
As a result, when she was still a teenager, she had a brief lapse into Darwinism. Aimee finally got an answer to her questions about evolution, not from her mother, or the local pastors, but from pondering the clear evidence of nature in support of intelligent design.
When gazing out at the clear sky with countless stars, she thought—could it be possible that there was no divine, directing will behind their immensity?
She later explained that what converted her to the creationist worldview was the beauty and wonder of nature, such as the “white mantle of snow which covered the fields and the trees” that glistened in the clear, frosty air.
She thought how big the Moon looked and how ten million stars seemed to wink and blink and twinkle! She sat looking up at the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, reasoning that surely a divine hand must hold and control this wonderful solar system. As she studied nature, she saw her doubts melt away.
Although her experience with Darwinism shook her Christian foundations, her study of nature proved God. While still in high school, she began her lifelong passion against evolution.
She then sent a letter to the Family Herald, asking why taxpayers supported public schools that were teaching Darwinism as fact.
The letter Aimee wrote: The teaching of high school undermines faith in God as Supreme Being and Creator. Its doctrine is at direct variance with that taught in our Holy Bible.
It leads us to believe that neither Earth nor man were created by God, but by a process of evolution; man being a product of the animal kingdom.
In response to the letter, her Methodist Bishop wrote to Aimee, explaining that it appeared to him that textbooks were deliberately attempting to weaken or destroy the Christian faith of students.
A major reason she aggressively opposed Darwinism was that the popular strains of Social Darwinism, combined with nationalism, formed a “seedbed of entrenched racism and pernicious injustice.”
She was very concerned that Darwinism presented some humans as more biologically, intellectually, and morally evolved than others.
Dangerous forms of thought, including racism and Nazism, fit nicely into the great chain of being wherein some people groups were more evolved than others.
In her most famous, and often repeated church service, she preached against those she regarded as the worst evil men of her day, namely Darwin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin.
The popularity of the Ku Klux Klan grew then as Americans responded to the many leading race scientists that pushed the supposed social dangers of integration and miscegenation between what they considered to be “superior” and “less-evolved” races. The Bible, however, taught that we are all children of Adam and Eve, all equal before God.
Aimee was an active supporter of William Jennings Bryan during the 1925 Dayton, Tennessee, Scopes Trial. They both believed that Social Darwinism undermined morality and that evolution had poisoned the minds of the nation’s children.
She once sent Bryan a telegram exclaiming that, “Ten thousand members of Angelus Temple with her millions of radio church membership send grateful appreciation of your lion-hearted championship of the Bible against evolution.”
Aimee, Bryan, and others resisted Darwinism in no small part because of its link to eugenics rooted in notions of biological superiority and ‘survival of the fittest.’
By early 1926, Aimee had earned a reputation as one of the most charismatic and influential women of the day. She had also made personal crusades against anything she felt threatened her Christian ideals, especially evolution.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. All 60 of Bergman’s books are on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other bookstores.