This is Marjoe Gortner, an evangelical child preacher in the 1950s who later became a faith healer in his twenties. After an attack of conscience, he hired a camera crew and filmed a documentary exposing himself as a fraud who used clever, age-old manipulation techniques to convince the audience that he had the God-given power to heal people’s ailments. (The documentary, titled Marjoe, was filmed in 1972 and it’s excellent. So I highly recommend you Netflix that bitch, post haste.)

What I respect about Marjoe is that he at least had the cojones to come clean and admit to being full of shit. I don’t think we’ll be getting that any time soon from assholes like Kenneth Copeland or Benny Hinn (even though Hinn has been exposed as a fraud with questionable business practices for quite some time), but it’s nice to know that at least some of these mother fuckers have a conscience.

If you still don’t believe that faith healing is utter bullshit, check out the stuff after the jump.  I’ve got priceless video of James Randi–a personal hero of mine–exposing some dipshit faith healer named Peter Popoff, who was driven to bankruptcy shortly after Randi exposed his methods live on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Watch and be disgusted…

There’s some televangelists doing things that I do not agree are right. A lot of what they do is very similar if not exactly the same as what hypnotists do.

Check out this article: http://siasaduni.blogspot.com/2008/06/benny-hinn-healer-or-hypnotist.html

It’s about Benny Hinn. I don’t like talking about specific people, but I thought it was a good read. This isn’t just something with this one person. A lot of televangelists do this. Also, I have looked up more information on this subject beyond this article in the past. Just a note to say I’m not trying to act like I know something based off this one little resource.

Check this out too:

This is about a televangelist named Marjoe Gortner. He lied and did a lot of what televangelists do. Turns out, he didn’t even believe in God.

(I’m Speaking Truth h/t)

I’ve questioned the validity of “child preachers” for some time – especially since they often mimic poor “preaching and teaching” that they’ve seen in their lives. Now, we see a clear example of guardians pimping a child preacher from birth – essentially grooming a golden goose that will lay golden eggs for them for some time. May God have mercy on this debacle.

Commentary can be found on my blog: http://imspeakingtruth.wordpress.com

Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, generally known as Marjoe Gortner (born January 14, 1944 (1944-01-14) (age 65) in Long Beach, California), is a former revivalist who first gained a certain fame in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four, and then outright notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in an Oscar-winning, behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name “Marjoe” is a portmanteau of the names “Mary” and “Joseph“.

When Marjoe was three, his father, a third generation minister, noticed his son’s talent for mimicry and overall fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed Marjoe had received a vision from God during a bath and began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time Marjoe was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios, referring to him as “the youngest ordained minister in history.” Like much in Marjoe’s early life it is hard to say for sure who exactly ordained him, if his father ordained him, or if he was even ordained at all.

Until the time he was a teenager, Marjoe and his parents traveled the United States, holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, Marjoe’s parents also taught him several money-making tactics, involving the sale of supposedly “holy” articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time Marjoe was sixteen, he later estimated, his family had amassed maybe three million dollars; shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Marjoe’s father absconded with the money, and a disillusioned Marjoe left his mother for San Francisco, where he was taken in by and became the lover of an older woman. Marjoe spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. Marjoe made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California, surviving on the previous six months’ earnings.

In the late 1960s, Marjoe suffered a crisis of conscience — in particular about the threats of damnation he felt compelled to weave into his sermons — and resolved to make one final tour, this time on film. Under the pretense of making a documentary detailing a viable ministry, Marjoe assembled a documentary film crew to follow him around revival meetings in California, Texas, and Michigan during 1971. Unbeknownst to everyone else involved — including, at one point, his father — Marjoe gave “backstage” interviews to the filmmakers in between sermons and revivals, explaining intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. After sermons, the filmmakers were invited back to Marjoe’s hotel room to tape him counting the money he collected during the day. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for best documentary.

After leaving the revival circuit, Gortner then attempted to break into both Hollywood and the recording industry. He cut an LP with Columbia Records, entitled “Bad, but not Evil” (Gortner’s description of himself in the documentary), which met with poor sales and reviews. Gortner began his acting career with a featured role in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 pilot for the Kojak tv-series. The following year saw him featured in the disaster film Earthquake as a psychotic National Guardsman, and in the television movie Pray for the Wildcats. Oui magazine hired Gortner to cover Millennium ‘73, a November 1973 festival headlined by Guru Maharaj Ji who was sometimes called a “boy guru”.^[1]

During the late 1970s, Marjoe attempted to self-finance another film, this time a pseudo-fictional drama about an evangelist con-man and based in part on his real-life experiences. The film began shooting in New Orleans, Louisiana, but went bankrupt less than six weeks into production. The film was never completed.

Gortner was married briefly to Candy Clark, from 1978 to December 14, 1979.^[2]

Gortner’s most memorable film performance was as the psychopathic, hostage-taking drug dealer in Milton Katselas’s 1979 screen adaptation of Mark Medoff’s play When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, also starring Peter Firth, Lee Grant, and Hal Linden. He also starred in several B-movies such as the television film The Gun and The Pulpit (1974) {also released onto home video as The Gun and the Cross}, The Food Of The Gods (1976), and Starcrash (1978). He appeared frequently on the 1980s Circus of the Stars specials. He hosted an early-1980s reality TV series called Speak Up, America and appeared on Falcon Crest as corrupt psychic-medium “Vince Karlotti” (1986-87) before ending his movie career in 1995 with an appearance in the western Wild Bill in which he played a preacher.

Today he sponsors charity golf tournaments and other events, as well as working as a public speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe_Gortner

Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, generally known as Marjoe Gortner (born January 14, 1944 (1944-01-14) (age 65) in Long Beach, California), is a former revivalist who first gained a certain fame in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four, and then outright notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in an Oscar-winning, behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name “Marjoe” is a portmanteau of the names “Mary” and “Joseph“.

When Marjoe was three, his father, a third generation minister, noticed his son’s talent for mimicry and overall fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed Marjoe had received a vision from God during a bath and began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time Marjoe was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios, referring to him as “the youngest ordained minister in history.” Like much in Marjoe’s early life it is hard to say for sure who exactly ordained him, if his father ordained him, or if he was even ordained at all.

Until the time he was a teenager, Marjoe and his parents traveled the United States, holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, Marjoe’s parents also taught him several money-making tactics, involving the sale of supposedly “holy” articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time Marjoe was sixteen, he later estimated, his family had amassed maybe three million dollars; shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Marjoe’s father absconded with the money, and a disillusioned Marjoe left his mother for San Francisco, where he was taken in by and became the lover of an older woman. Marjoe spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. Marjoe made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California, surviving on the previous six months’ earnings.

In the late 1960s, Marjoe suffered a crisis of conscience — in particular about the threats of damnation he felt compelled to weave into his sermons — and resolved to make one final tour, this time on film. Under the pretense of making a documentary detailing a viable ministry, Marjoe assembled a documentary film crew to follow him around revival meetings in California, Texas, and Michigan during 1971. Unbeknownst to everyone else involved — including, at one point, his father — Marjoe gave “backstage” interviews to the filmmakers in between sermons and revivals, explaining intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. After sermons, the filmmakers were invited back to Marjoe’s hotel room to tape him counting the money he collected during the day. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for best documentary.

After leaving the revival circuit, Gortner then attempted to break into both Hollywood and the recording industry. He cut an LP with Columbia Records, entitled “Bad, but not Evil” (Gortner’s description of himself in the documentary), which met with poor sales and reviews. Gortner began his acting career with a featured role in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 pilot for the Kojak tv-series. The following year saw him featured in the disaster film Earthquake as a psychotic National Guardsman, and in the television movie Pray for the Wildcats. Oui magazine hired Gortner to cover Millennium ‘73, a November 1973 festival headlined by Guru Maharaj Ji who was sometimes called a “boy guru”.^[1]

During the late 1970s, Marjoe attempted to self-finance another film, this time a pseudo-fictional drama about an evangelist con-man and based in part on his real-life experiences. The film began shooting in New Orleans, Louisiana, but went bankrupt less than six weeks into production. The film was never completed.

Gortner was married briefly to Candy Clark, from 1978 to December 14, 1979.^[2]

Gortner’s most memorable film performance was as the psychopathic, hostage-taking drug dealer in Milton Katselas’s 1979 screen adaptation of Mark Medoff’s play When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, also starring Peter Firth, Lee Grant, and Hal Linden. He also starred in several B-movies such as the television film The Gun and The Pulpit (1974) {also released onto home video as The Gun and the Cross}, The Food Of The Gods (1976), and Starcrash (1978). He appeared frequently on the 1980s Circus of the Stars specials. He hosted an early-1980s reality TV series called Speak Up, America and appeared on Falcon Crest as corrupt psychic-medium “Vince Karlotti” (1986-87) before ending his movie career in 1995 with an appearance in the western Wild Bill in which he played a preacher.

Today he sponsors charity golf tournaments and other events, as well as working as a public speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe_Gortner

So I watched Marjoe last night. It’s got me thinking about a lot of things. Predators, for one, but that’s for another post. Right now, I’m thinking…well, I’m thinking of this:

Mostly, I admit, because that song gets stuck in my head like crazy. But it illustrates a point I want to make: we all need to let loose, let go, go crazy.

Marjoe, for those as don’t know, is a 1972 documentary in which Marjoe Goetner, who got his start as a child preacher and returned to it as an adult, outed himself as a fraud. He didn’t believe what he preached, never had even as a child, and was deliberately bilking people of their cash. The documentary came about when he decided to leave the biz, after first exposing himself and the whole travellin’ preacher con game. It’s a deeply troubling movie, to say the least.

There’s a lot there about fraud, about predators, about the dangers that the very idea of priests or pastors or preacheres presents us. There’s the troubling ethics of the making of the movie itself. But mostly I was struck by a confluence of an idea and the images:  the idea was one Marjoe himself explains, the connection between what he does and what rock stars do. He deliberately models himself after rock stars, even going so far as to copy stage moves of Mick Jagger, and notes that in another life, he probably would have been a rock star. The other part is the imagery — these different revivals, filled with straight-laced, Sunday Best people…busting loose. Part of them, apparently, wants to riot.

You have grammas dressed to the nines flopping around like kids at a Killers concert. You have men in suits hootin’ and hollerin’ and gibberin’ and dancin’.  It’s the Church Lady meets Spring Break. I kept expecting a Girls Gone Wild mosh pit to form.

Here is the sacred space of a repressive culture, a place where the rules up end. The quiet become loud, the rigid become flexible, the self-controlled spasm about the floor in complete abandon. It’s hard not to notice, too, that some of the most “in to it” folk are women and minorities. Even in modern culture, women still feel rigid cultural controls impact them more than men. In the more repressive world of Pentecostal Christianity, they have to be tightly self-controlled, subsuming themselves to the male authority in their lives. And African-Americans? Control, taught by  several hundred years of oppression — stay beneath the whites’ radar.

But here, at the revival — dance, baby, like a wild person.

In a weird way,  it’s beautiful (a point Marjoe himself makes). This seems to be the human response to too much control — we find ways to let loose anyway. Many repressive cultures even have built in safety valves like this to let it out in a controlled fashion. Carnival, anyone?

Of course, then you realize the huge price for that control. This is the way they can let go — in a place where they are preyed upon, sheep surrounded by wolves looking to buy Cadillacs (yes, one preacher in the movie actually preaches about how God gave him a Cadillac, basically tells the audience to their faces that he’s living the high life off their asses, and they love it). A moment of giddy dancing in the prison yard before you’re shoved back in the cage…

As an atheist, of course, I’d like to put forth the idea that what we need is less control — that a rational society will decide where control is really needed, and where we can do without and revel in individuality and diversity. We can go crazy tonight — without the preachers stalking the herd.

original - unretouched

Republican Donors – Your Dollars at Work

This photo was provided by McCain/Palin campaign for press use… and presumably for any and all uses.  Oh, all right then I don’t have to be told twice.  I have a few uses in mind.  Let’s just say that this one doesn’t leave much to the imagination, as the worst of Sarah Palin keeps showing up every time I open a newspaper.  This one photograph comes close to resembling the rabble-rousing Sarah in the stories that are emerging.

Out there is a part of America-loving America (Henderson, Nevada, I believe) where it’s apparently also easy to think of herself as smarter than a lot of people – she has gone full tilt boogie beehive in front of a lot of cheering, hooting folks driven by fear and uneasiness.  Their lives are falling apart.  They need someone to pick on, someone to unload their frustration upon, someone who has “chosen to be unsaved.”

Their fear of job loss and their misplaced anger at people only slightly different than themselves make them easy marks for being manipulated by demagogues. There are restless youth out there, looking for people to hate.  Just like in times past… times I would dearly love to not see repeated.

So – Lowest Common Denominator Sarah.  Pretending to be our “Everywoman” laundramat confidante, folding overalls next to the coin machine.  Ranting about “those people” who will supposedly bring down the neighborhood, or the country, if we let “them” take control.  Offering up fired-off little pumped up exaggerations and half-lies that feed on the very worst instincts in people – instincts to blame others, instincts to hurt, instincts to banish and isolate and attack that which is “foreign” and unfamiliar.

Hey, but we all do know you’re not one of us.  We know how much those clothes, those shoes, those eyeglasses, that makeup, that couture hair-streaking cost.  Your $26,000-plus monthly hairstylist bill exceeds all my annual household expenses.  You are not “Everywoman.”

Love America?  Is that what this hyperventilated dissing of half your fellow citizens is all about?  Feels like tear America apart to me.  

—–

Shrieking harpies egging on fights, and petty grudges, and wholesale wars pop up throughout history – pushing men who crave the temporary approval handed out by such pampered beauty queens.  She’s picking for a fight – but it’s always a fight that someone else will fight for her… hoping for a flash of that glistening barracuda smile.

In Nevada, Sarah Palin signs Campaign Brochure (retouching by MCB) Click to download full sized version.

Hand America to her, you’ll be handing your future and your children to Missus Fixit – whose personal witnessed exorcism and 1/10 of a million dollar wardrobe and hairdo are all supposed to propel her into the White House cockpit, where her new VP Michael Chertoff and she will run your life in whatever way makes sense to them, guided by their prayers, not yours and mine. 

John McCain is just engineered obsolescence (sorry Senator McCain… but I think you’ve been set up).  

Look out, everyone.

Das hier ist ein update zu meinem Post “Bad but not evil – Marjoe Gortner“.

Marjoe Gortner ist eine Person mit der man sich beschäftigen sollte, wenn man sich, aus welchen Gründen auch immer, für die großen Fernsehprediger, Wunderprediger oder der boomenden Evangeliumsindustrie interessiert.

Marjoe Gortner war der erste große Erweckungsprediger, der sich selbst als Betrüger geoutet hat. Seit dem vierten Lebensjahr ist er als predigendes Wunderkind durch die USA getourt. mit ca. 27 Jahren beendet der Prediger, der nach eigenen Angaben nie an Gott geglaubt hat, seine Karriere mit einem Dokumentarfilm über sein lukratives Schaffen. Danach ist er in mittelmäßigen Spielfilmen zu sehen und 1995 geht er in den Ruhestand

Da sich bereits andere die Mühe gemacht haben, über Ihn und seine Geschicht zu schreiben, findet Ihr hier ein paar Links zum Thema.

Lesen:

• Marjoe Gortner bei der englischsprachigen Wikipedia
• Marjoe Gortner – Wunderkind, Erweckungsprediger, Atheist Artikel auf Tino Lingenbergs Blog
• Marjoe-Interview auf positiveatheism.com (“It’s the same at a rock-and-roll concert,” he asserted. “You have an opening number with a strong entrance; then you go through a lot of the old standards, building up to your hit song at the end.”)
• Evangelism as Entertainment

Hören:

• WFMU MP3’s von diversen Kinderpredigten

Sehen:

• Youtube Marjoe über sein Leben als Kinderprediger
• Youtube Szenen aus seinen Veranstaltungen

(Hier wäre noch zu sagen, das weitere Videos bei Youtube auf Initiative von “Pastor Benny Hinn and the World Healing Church d/b/a Benny Hinn Ministries” entfernt wurden.)