The radio church of Sister Aimee

**A church built to be heard at a distance.** Aimee Semple McPherson had preached on Los Angeles radio before owning a station, and her church's history credits her as the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio, on the Rockridge station in Oakland in April 1922. In February 1924 KFSG went on the air from Angelus Temple - a 500-watt Western Electric transmitter whose dedication named its reach, 'the people of the United States, Canada, Alaska, Mexico, Panama, Hawaii, South Sea Islands'. The congregation had raised the roughly $25,000 to build it. **The letters were the reply channel, and they were the audience.** In the early 1920s a station learned who was listening from the mail: cards, telegrams and letters reporting where the signal was received. The record kept for KFSG includes letters from Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New Zealand describing when the broadcast was heard and what it meant - 'We do hope to hear you soon again', one wrote, and a listener in Indiana asked who the woman preacher had been. The station answered its mail through volunteer church members, and it was sponsored day by day by listeners through the Radio Missionary Society, with patrons booked months ahead. **The mechanism is a congregational 'you' at a distance.** The church addressed the radio congregation as assembled even though the far end could not answer: in Angelus Temple the pastor asked 'Do you pledge to live clean Christian lives for God?' and the answer - 'We do' - came back from a room the radio listeners could not join. That is the presenter mechanism with a congregation in it: second-person grammar aimed at an unseen audience, engineered on a schedule. The competing placement, the idol, fails because the sermons were live and ongoing - an address from somebody who believed herself perceived, not a finished body of work. One honesty note is kept: the famous 'minions of Satan' telegram to Secretary Hoover over a wavelength dispute is recorded by radio historians as legend rather than fact, and KFSG was never actually taken off the air.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.