Live Wires: The Angelus Temple and the Timbre of Power

This article is a media history and contemporary case study of The Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. My analysis of the Angelus insists upon the centrality of a hyperaudible paradigm of worship that uses media to maximize the legibility of a Christian message, and, more than this, imagines that media itself as a living soul in need of redemption. Many contemporary megachurches employ savvy applications of sound and sound transmission as instruments of belonging as well as action, and these rely on high-budget investments in church infrastructure, software and personnel. I argue that churches make such large investments because it is specifically sacrotechnotimbre, or, the timbral grain of expensive audiovisual infrastructure and labor, that aligns megachurches’ theology of “growth”—the church’s and the individual’s—with their dual ambitions of local resonance and global relevance, and their perceived obligation to save as many souls as possible. I show how Foursquare continues to negotiate the worldliness of audiovisual media and recruit it as part of the transformative power of Christian worship. This article theorizes sacrotechnotimbre to mean a range of sound qualities that indicate the embrace and professional implementation of state-of-the-art audiovisual technologies and techniques—from architectural design, to sound processing software, to in-ear monitors, to trained performance—in the service of sacred worship. The coinage is meant to evoke the unresolved tensions that persist between the “sacro” and the “techno,” and suggest the ongoing theological and political economic negotiations churches make to bridge them. It is also meant to suggest that media studies and religious studies scholarship, and beyond, would benefit from thinking of these two seemingly distinct realms as related, if not mutually-reliant, and might do so through studies of sound and music.