I tried watching Marjoe, lo these many years ago, but when it began with this icky kid, with his mother by his side, talking about the Lord, I turned it off.  I should have given it more of a chance.

Recently, I was reading Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell:  Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, in which the author posed the question as to how much religious leaders completely believe what they are saying, to what extent they are mere charlatans, and to what extent they are a little bit of both, which Dennett thinks is most likely, that genuine belief needs to be accompanied by tricks and gimmicks:

Every religious leader, including priests, ministers, imams, and rabbis, experiences a spectrum from knowledge to innocence, similar to the revival preachers depicted in the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary Marjoe, which chronicles Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young preacher who, after losing his faith, returned to preaching to expose the industry’s manipulations.

At that point, I put down the book and watched the movie.  It didn’t take long to see that what Dennett said was true, that Marjoe Gortner, or simply, Marjoe, so named as a combination of Mary and Joseph, made this movie as an exposé of revivalism.

He talks about what his mother did to him, starting when he was four years old.  He wanted to go outside and play, but his mother would make him spend hours and hours memorizing sermons or the words in wedding ceremonies, which he would then perform. When his memory would slip, she would hold a pillow over his face or hold his head under a water faucet so that he could not breathe.  The only thing that prevented this torture from being any worse was that she knew she could not beat him, leaving marks on his body, since he would have to appear in front of the press, where he would claim that none of his sermons were memorized, but all would come directly from God.

This in turn reminded me of another book I had recently been reading, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who devotes an entire section of his book to the idea that in many cases, a religious upbringing can be a form a child abuse.  He even goes so far as to say that what priests of have done to children by molesting them sexually is not as bad as what they do to them mentally, although he does make a distinction between fondling (not so bad) and sodomy (very bad).

While I was mulling that over, I recalled something Patty Hearst said, several years after she had been released from prison, that while she did not like being repeatedly raped after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, what they did to her mind was much worse.

Anyway, Marjoe explains that while everyone thought it was a miracle that such a young child could be a preacher, he says he never believed that stuff.  In fact, he says, “I can’t think of a time that I ever believed in God….”

In a scene where Marjoe is talking to the film crew that he has enlisted to make this documentary, he tells one of them that his long hair, his “lovely locks,” will have to go, otherwise those in the Pentecostal movement, of which Marjoe is a part, will want to save and convert him.  In order to be left alone, the crew member will need to cut his hair and play it straight.  Marjoe also tells the film crew that they can’t smoke, not even if they step outside the tent or auditorium, or someone will try to save them.  And they must leave the girls alone, the revival groupies.  They would pose a distinctly different danger.

In fact, Marjoe continues, if anyone asks them if they have been saved, it is not enough merely to say, “Yes, I’m saved.”  Instead, they need to say, “Yes, brother, I’m washed in the same blood as you.”  Marjoe goes on to say that it is important to use the word “blood,” for it’s a “bloody, gory religion.”

While we are watching one of the revival meetings, Marjoe says he likes the part about the singing and dancing.  In fact, at one point in the movie, where there is a black choir doing the singing, with a black female preacher singing and dancing up front, it all reminded me of that scene in The Blues Brothers (1980), when the title characters go to a Baptist church where James Brown is giving a sermon.  As opposed to that, the fun part, Marjoe goes on to say that all that stuff about sin and burning in Hell is a drag.  However, he admits that he needs to put sin and damnation in his sermons to make money.  Presumably, people are willing to pay more for the promise of salvation than they would just to sing and dance.

At one point during a sermon, Marjoe asks people to pick the largest bill they have in their wallet and drop it in the bucket.  That doesn’t seem too bad.  But later, a woman that is preaching tells people that if they want an extra-special blessing, they must really make a sacrifice, such as giving money that they were going to use to pay some bills.  She says she doesn’t want just an ordinary contribution, but a real sacrifice, one that hurts, for which God will give that special blessing.

It is a lucrative business, and Marjoe goes into great detail about all the ways of fleecing people.  He figures his parents made about three million dollars off him, which they spent, leaving him with nothing.  He thought about suing them, presumably under the Jackie Coogan Law, since they didn’t set up a trust fund for him.  But then he decided just to let it go, that in holding on to his hatred for his parents, he would only end up hurting himself.  That is probably for the best, even from a purely secular point of view.  However, Marjoe adds that he believes in karma, saying, “All those things that you do bad will eventually, someday, come back on your head.”

Of course, there is no such thing.  The world is full of wicked men and women who live quite comfortably and will never be punished for the evil that they do.  Along with belief in God, belief in an immortal soul, and the belief that all suffering has a meaning or a purpose, belief in karma, that we live in a just world, is a feature of religion.  And so it is that Marjoe has not completely freed himself from all religious belief.

Apparently, Marjoe decided that sometimes karma needs a little help, so he included his father in this movie, where it would be revealed that his father used Marjoe as a child to swindle the gullible and then absconded with all the money.  Aside from the film crew, none of the people in this movie knew that Marjoe was going to portray the evangelical movement in such a bad light.

To cap it all off, at the end of the movie, Marjoe is blatantly blasphemous.  In the backyard with his girlfriend, he makes fun of salvation by playing with his dog, saying that this dog was in a wheelchair, but now he is walking around, a miracle from God.  He pretends to be asking people to give money to help kill a Commie for Jesus, to fight communism so that little dogs like this can be free.

Early in the movie, when Marjoe is talking to the film crew, one of them asks the question we have been wondering about, given that this documentary is going to show how revivalism is a fraud.  “Are we going to film Marjoe’s crucifixion when they find out about all this?”

As noted by Christopher Hitchens in his god is not Great, however, there was no such “crucifixion” since the movie had no effect on the people it was about:

The film Marjoe won an Academy Award in 1972 and has made absolutely no difference at all.  The mills of the TV preachers continue to grind, and the poor continue to finance the rich, just as if the glittering temples and palaces of Las Vegas had been built by the money of those who won rather than those who lost.