{"id":118110,"date":"2026-10-06T02:09:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=118110"},"modified":"2026-10-06T02:09:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:09:20","slug":"marjoe-gortner-dies-child-preacher-who-confessed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/movies\/marjoe-gortner-dies-child-preacher-who-confessed\/","title":{"rendered":"Marjoe Gortner Dies at 82: The Child Preacher Who Confessed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>11 Minute, 35 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

Marjoe Gortner died on October 2 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 82. His wife, Susan Magestro, told Variety<\/a> the cause was complications from congestive heart failure.<\/p>\n\n

Most of the headlines call him an actor, and he was one. He played a grocery manager turned National Guardsman who comes unhinged in the 1974 disaster film Earthquake<\/em>, and he had a run on Falcon Crest<\/em> in the late 1980s. But the thing people will remember him for happened before any of that. In 1971, Marjoe Gortner let a film crew follow him through a year of revival meetings. On stage, he preached, prayed over the sick, and took up the offering. Backstage, with the cameras still running, he explained how every bit of it worked. He said he had never believed a word.<\/p>\n\n

The film was called simply Marjoe<\/em>. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. And it still raises a question that is uncomfortable more than fifty years later: what do you do with a man who performed faith for money, and then told the truth about it on camera?<\/p>\n\n

Marjoe Gortner, the World’s Youngest Minister<\/h2>\n\n

His name is a blend of Mary and Joseph. His father was a third-generation evangelist, and his parents put him in the pulpit before he could read. He was ordained at four. In January 1948, with photographers from Life<\/em> magazine in the room, a small boy in short pants and white cowboy boots performed a wedding. Ripley’s Believe It or Not featured him. He was billed as the World’s Youngest Minister.<\/p>\n\n

Later, as a grown man, he described how the act was built. His mother coached his gestures and his voice. His parents gave him code words to listen for. In a 1972 Time magazine profile<\/a> that followed the film, he said a shouted “Praise God!” from the side of the stage meant the crowd was ready to give. He also said that when he forgot his lines, the punishment was not a spanking. He described being held under water, or under a pillow, until he got it right. His father, he said, called him a preaching machine.<\/p>\n\n

By his own account, the family took in about three million dollars during his childhood years on the circuit. When he was sixteen, he said, his father left with the money. Marjoe left too. He spent his late teens drifting through the California counterculture, as far from a tent as he could get.<\/p>\n\n