I have the day off today, and I’m having a pretty relaxing day to make up for the most busy week I’ve had in a while. I decided today would be good for watching a few movies, and while I was watching Marjoe, it seemed like a good thing to share with all of you.

What’s a Marjoe? Well, I’m glad you asked. If you take the names Mary and Joseph and you cram them together and drop some letters, you get the first name of the little boy pictured to the left. Marjoe Gortner was a four year old evangelical preacher, the product of a sick family that paraded him around performing marriages and healings and what have you in that grand old Southern tent revival tradition of fleecing the people.

His story is stunning to me. A young preacher who never believed, but did as he was told and ran around the country parroting what his mother told him to say eventually has a crisis of conscience. He knew it was wrong to do what he did, so he hired a film crew to show the world the truth of the life and people he was working with.

The documentary won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary, but it got blackballed from showing in loads of theaters because of the power of the people he exposed. I heard that they thought the film had been lost, but then some guy was cleaning out a storage room and found this locked box that had the master copy of the movie in perfectly preserved celluloid.

At any rate, the movie got released and finally saw the light of day. I highly recommend checking it out, it’s an interesting view into  the life and times of the faithful.

Jim