Underaged Fundamentalists

Patricio Amerena

Independent Study Final Project

Professor: Kristie Hamilton They say we are of evolution, they say we are relatives of the monkey, they say

we are nothing! [...] a few men, liars, know-it-alls, creators of fallacies! [long

applause] I want to tell all those persons who are thinking like this, or who are

speaking like this... that the male monkey and the female monkey produce little

monkeys to this day! [...] I was not brought here by the stork, I am not from

evolution! [...] I was created by God in my mother’s womb!

Nezareth Casti Rey Castillo Valderrama

His slicked black hair glistens as his finger points towards the heavens and his business coat droops, noticeably large for him as he pounces about the stage à la

Freddy Mercury, delivering his penetrating speech in a voice that is as self-assured as it is shrill. The megachurch is located in San Juan, Puerto Rico, yet this Peruvian six-year- old’s career had, as family legend maintained, already occupied half of his life. I stared into the computer screen and translated for my amused college roommates what this

YouTube sensation was screeching, yet I grimaced internally upon recollecting that I had once regurgitated a variation of Nezareth’s arguments to refute evolutionary theory

(or rather a childish misunderstanding of it) when I was about that age.

Exposure to this viral phenomenon was my earliest glimpse into the grotesque world of child evangelism. Originally a euphemism for “fundamentalists”, the Evangelists or

Evangelical Christians eventually adopted “Born-Again” as their moniker, and among their ranks are counted a staggering number of U.S. politicians. Research into this particular thread of history was prompted by my discovery of Gortner, the infamous young minister who abandoned his church and exposed the tricks of the trade to liberal-minded secularists. His confessions led to the filming of Marjoe (1972), an Academy Award winning documentary that follows his return to the gospel circuit. This jaw-dropping tour de force inspired me to start writing a play loosely based on Marjoe’s life, which is why I began researching the topic more seriously. I discovered many surprises along the way: first with the convoluted history of Protestantism, followed by the fascinating events in Marjoe’s life, and culminating with the pandemic of tiny evangelists that has spread like wildfire across the American continent.

This essay will describe the historical context surrounding evangelical movements, specifically the Pentecostal groups which gave rise to the Marjoe case. Following this will be a discussion of the narrative of Marjoe’s life springboarding from his biography by

Stephen S. Gaines and the documentary by and .

Finally, we shall inspect a sample of contemporary child proselytizers from the United

States and Latin America in order to gain a larger understanding of this cultural phenomenon.

Historical Background

Colorful flow charts tracing the Christian family tree for the past two millennia (fig. 1) are notably reminiscent of the cladograms biologists use to describe the evolution of living species (fig. 2). If religious affiliation evolved from a state-church prerequisite to a free-thinking personal decision after the Renaissance (Scharpff 4), then what we might imagine as a spiritual menu in reality looks more like a partisan’s encyclopedia.

Protestant denominations exceed thirty-three thousand in number (“How Many Protestant Denominations Are There?” N.p.), and that is just a conservative estimate.

Needless to say, awareness of this biodiversity seems to have no effect on each faith’s claiming exclusive access to the proper way of worshipping the person of Jesus Christ.

This perplexing topic is a daunting challenge for any outsider to undertake. The devotional tone pervading the literature and cautious circumvention of the darker histories of these religions (sectarian warfare and the burning of witches, to name a few) tend to obscure how these factions proliferated in the first place. The horrifying bloodshed (and blood boiling that resulted from a doctrine against the former practice,

Sagan f120), is often explained away by devout historians as having been politically motivated, if it is addressed at all:

Unfortunately, this pious monk mixed politics with his evangelistic work. He opposed the

Medicis and wanted to make Florence a city of God with Jesus Christ as its King. For

this he was subjected to inquisition and burned at the stake in 1498 (Scharpff 9).

Some scholars trace the origins of the Pentecostal movement to a 1906 revival in

Azusa Street, (Patterson 1), others to 1901 meetings in Topeka, Kansas

(Synan 93-94), but they all seem to agree that the movement was born some time around the early 1900’s, the earliest recorded meeting having been presided over by R.

G. Spurling on the Tennessee/North Carolina border in 1886 (Patterson 139).

Regardless of its multifarious geneses, distinguishes itself from similar traditions by its emphasis on Spirit-baptism, faith healing, and spiritual “gifts” such as glossolalia, a sophisticated theologian’s term for speaking or singing in heavenly tongues.1

Other fundamentalists condescend to Pentecostal flamboyance, and the latter’s apologists have conversely made self-conscious attempts to disassociate their churches from fundamentalist connotations, neatly dispensing with the fire-and-brimstone messages that the youngest Pentecostal ministers are required to preach (Gaines 231).

This is evidenced by tortuous passages such as this one:

On balance, the Pentecostals turn out to be more restorationist, less aware of the course

of Christian tradition, less polemic, collectively less antimodernist, more oriented toward

personal charismatic experience, less politically involved [...] more ecumenical and less

separatist, considerably less rationalistic and more inclined toward religious emotion,

increasingly less dispensational, and perennially less theologically sophisticated (qtd. in

Griffith 66).

The early Pentecostals bifurcated into Church Of God (COG), Church of God in

Christ (COGIC), and Pentecostal Holiness Church (PHC)2. These creeds incorporated folk songs into their services (Patterson 49-70) and emphasized healing, charismata, and the access to “tongues” that Evangelical scholars are also careful to place inside quotation marks. Thus it is not surprising that Pentecostal theatrics are defensively explained by their most faithful apologists:

1 This is not to be confused with xenolalia, the ability to vocalize in an identifiably human language that the speaker has never learned before. There is an element of wishful thinking behind this myth: an interruption of the barriers erected in Babel would have been very useful to Christian missionaries, who instead had to painstakingly learn the local languages wherever they went.

2 Catchy acronyms such as these foreshadowed an age of the secular religions of self-help and positive thinking (Ehrenreich), and possess a distinctly corporate feel. This is also present in Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s financial and sexual scandals, otherwise known as Gospelgate. Their PTL Club empire has been jokingly described as standing for “Pass the Loot” and “Pay the Lady” instead of “Praise the Lord” and “People that Love” (Martz 5-6). Critics of early Pentecostals, from both fundamentalist and mainline denominations,

argued that the experiential component of traditional Pentecostalism was immature,

hysterical, psychotic, and perhaps demonic [...] It is true that a minority of Pentecostal

events were shallow pep rallies or even rigged media circuses. However, this view of

Pentecostal experience fails to appreciate the profounder experiential nature of

Pentecostalism. When classical Pentecostals were baptized in the Holy Spirit, it was a

life-altering event [...] Such a spiritual experience was simply supernatural (Patterson

198).

With the advent of radio and the rise of televangelism, Pentecostals have become less marginal since the 1940s, and one theorist declares that Christianity at large has slowly become more “Pentecostalized,” by embracing an “a-rational means of knowing” (Rybarczyk 3) and eschewing the elitist and racist forms of worship that characterized more traditional branches of Christendom. It was during this period that

America was ripe to welcome to its pulpits.

“World’s Youngest Ordained Minister”

I think religion is a drug. It’s addicting. Can God deliver a religion addict?

-Marjoe Gortner

Rather than a series of miracles guided by the hand of God, Marjoe’s story seems to have been orchestrated by the comedians responsible for Monty Python’s The Life of

Brian (1979), and one has to wonder if the former had any influence on the latter. The similarities between both stories abound: exasperated reactions of our reluctant protagonists to their fanatical surroundings, irreverent punchlines delivered at the emotional heights of mob lynchings, and a parochial society providing a seemingly endless supply of gullibility to meet the demands of its rapacious elite. The 1973 biography Marjoe: The Life of Marjoe Gortner is a page-turning polemic: it recounts

Marjoe’s early training and life on the road; his rebellion against his tyrannical mother

Marge and survival in the secular world; his return to the gospel circuit to make some money and his moral conflict upon fully appreciating the power he wielded; ending abruptly as he drives toward in pursuit of a new life. There are no endnotes, references, or bibliography. All we have to go on are anecdotes, which

Steven S. Gaines presumably wove together after interviews with key players, but who they were is not made clear. This might be to preserve their anonymity, but that seems unlikely since all the names and pictures in the book seem to correlate to actual people.

Gaines relies heavily on the techniques of fiction to make his narrative more compelling; however, this can at times call into question his credibility and the historical accuracy of scenes which could only be reconstructed by consulting the very people who were least interested in having the story come to light.

The documentary picks up the narrative where the book leaves off, taking us through a brief recap of Marjoe’s life so far. The young man describes how at age 18 he became bitter and seriously considered suing his parents, but as the narrative progresses we learn that he believes in Karma and no longer harbors resentment toward his family.

After witnessing many revealing interviews we find ourselves on the road with him and his film crew as we experience firsthand what a Pentecostal tent meeting looks like up close and personal. The film ends on an upbeat note as Marjoe and his girlfriend enjoy the outdoors. The recovering miracle boy sets a black Labrador on the ground: “This dog wasn’t walking like this before, notice the way he staggers now [...] Miracle, miracle!

[...] Look at this little dog, he came in in a wheelchair, now he’s delivered!”

Marjoe garnered Sarah Kernochan a place in history as the first female director to win an academy award3 with co-director Howard Smith. Kernochan’s blog post regarding the recent DVD release of Marjoe fills in some gaps between film and book

(none of which delve into Marjoe’s Hollywood and musical careers), and deserves a lengthy quotation when her narrative comes to a skin-crawling close:

I am hoping that the DVD will reach those parts of the country in which the film was

never released. The Belt especially. I hope people of other faiths will

understand where the power of the evangelical movement has come from,

understand the lure of the music and the promise of a life-altering spiritual

experience. I hope they will see, too, that this ecstatic union with Christ is also…

sometimes… commandeered by ruthless and greed-fueled “servants of God”— the

ministers who have, since the year Marjoe was made, erected a formidable

enterprise sprawling over the media, corporate America, and the Beltway, with no

notion of stopping until the United States becomes one big mega-church. One

preacher not profiting from this success will be Marjoe Gortner. Instead, he came

clean. Will anyone listen again?

The book, rather than reiterating what the movie has shown us, actually focuses on what is not disclosed in the footage, making the biography an enlightening companion to the film. In it we learn not only that Marjoe had two younger siblings (Vernoe and

3 Kernochan would go on to win a second Oscar with a kinder depiction of idiosyncratic spirituality as a source of creativity in her short masterpiece Thoth (2001). Starloe) but also that he was married and fathered a little girl, Ginny, before getting divorced.

Even though the Gornters consulted qualified physicians4, Marjoe had a brief career as a faith healer:

A woman arrived at the tent meeting in Iowa with an enormous oozing ulcer on her

left cheek. Marjoe was about to touch the sore, as was his usual practice, when

Marge sped to the front of the platform. “Don’t touch it,” she whispered. “It may be

infectious.” Marjoe waved his hand lightly over the woman’s face, chanting his spell,

and then turned to the next believer. Two days later the entire Gortner family was

astounded when the woman returned with her face completely healed, only a pinkish

layer of new skin showing where the ulcer had been (Gaines 69).

Marjoe recounts this anecdote almost verbatim to a spellbound congregation in the

film. This time, however, Marjoe has callously replaced the word “ulcer” with “cancer.”

Moments like these underline two sides of Marjoe’s personality: the self-interested fraud versus the altruistic whistleblower. This conflict is expressed in the title of his country rock album: Bad But Not Evil (1973).

There are too many fascinating anecdotes that the biography masterfully sets forth, which is why I urge readers to get the full experience by exposing themselves to both movie and book. Other than that, there are very few published materials on the subject, which is why I resorted to People magazine. It reports that actress Candy Clark first recognized the star of the Oscar-winning knockout when he was sitting in a purple Rolls

Royce with GREED written across its license plates. After their wedding in 1978, Marjoe

4 Marge ended up cheating on her husband and becoming engaged to George Miller, her bedside doctor. The Gortners never lived together as “family” again. was asked if he considered returning to evangelism: “I could be more successful than ever. I could say I had seen Hollywood and now I knew that God was real. They would love to hear me tell them I had sinned" (qtd. in “In ”).

Child Preachers in the United States

'Cause then there was this boy whose

Parents made him come directly home right after school

And when they went to their church

They shook and lurched all over the church floor

He couldn't quite explain it

They'd always just gone there

Crash Test Dummies, Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.

Marjoe was far from the first. He would not be the last. Cordelia Hebblethwaite reports:

The 1920s and 1930s were the heyday for child preachers [...] we are "in a bit of

a lull" right now, says Ted Lavigne, a retired minister, who is writing a book on the

subject [...] “We are an incurably religious people,” says Randall Balmer, chair of

the religion department at Dartmouth College (BBC n.pag).

It’s hard to argue with Balmer there. The article begins with the story of Ezekiel

Stoddard, age 11, whose mother and stepdad are pastors. His four brothers and sisters also preach the gospel, and had they existed in more innocent times they might have been tempted to call themselves the Gospel 5ive. But why does this article focus on

Ezekiel and not his sisters? Is child preaching primarily a male profession? Hardly.

Uldine Utley was a girl preacher from the 1920’s who saw the end of her days inside a mental institution. I have just placed an order for a book called Out of the Mouths of

Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era, and cannot wait to learn more about that side of the story. The BBC article continues:

Both women and children were often seen as "empty vessels" through which the

word of God would be transmitted in a direct, unfiltered way, says [Edith]

Blumhofer. "In these contexts, there is a certain purity associated with

childhood... when she grew up, she was less interesting."

Some writers think the practice of forcing minors to preach is a fad that only occurs in marginal or fringe religions, yet that hypothesis is at odds with the cross- denominational reach of megachurches in this country and their virulent spread across

Latin America. The word “corporate” comes from “corpus”, Latin for “body”. Which religion could be better suited to use physicality as a way of moving the spirit than

Pentecostalism, the ultimate experiential faith (Peck 62)? Watching the Easter play The

Circus of Jesus Christ, which a friend of mine directed, was an eerie reminder of the scale of this racket. The Faith Builders megachurch where this lavish production took place looks a lot like Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of another fruit of

“pastorpreneurship”, the ecclesial equivalent of Burger King:

Hard pews were replaced with comfortable theater seats, sermons were interspersed

with music, organs were replaced with guitars. And in a remarkable concession to

the tastes of the unchurched–or, as they are also called, “seekers”–the

megachurches by and large scuttled all the icons and symbols of conventional churches–crosses, steeples, and images of Jesus [...] Inspiring it’s not. It’s the

architectural equivalent of the three-piece business suit that most nondenominational

pastors favor (Ehrenreich. 138).

This secularization was absurdly voiced by one of my Puerto Rican friends (who once generously gave me a hefty Nueva Versión Internacional Bible with gilded page edges) when he claimed with a straight face that he was not religious.5 Both he and my thespian friend pointed to the laying on of hands as personal evidence for the power of the Holy Spirit. Experiencing the Hand of God in this way has been described as

“feeling saturated, melted and made soft as willing clay in the hands of a potter” (qtd. in

Orr 4). Such emotional outpours are petrifying when we see them systematically elicited from children, as is shown in the frightful documentary (2006). After a meeting, the gay-bashing homosexual Ted Haggard is interviewed inside a massive church similar to the ones described above:

Kids are everything. They love the evangelical message: “God loves them, the Bible

is the Word of God, they are gifts from God.” [...] There’s a new church like this every

two days in America. It’s got enough growth to essentially sway every election. If the

Evangelicals vote, they determine the election [...] It’s a fabulous life! [emphasis

added].

South America

5 After a lengthy conversation over coffee, I got him to admit that he is in fact religious. Small victories such as this one make my life more meaningful. Dailyn and Kevin Patiño are child preachers in Panama. Evangelical churches in

Ecuador claim to have produced ninety-eight children of the cloth. Brazil has produced

Ana Carolina Dias, Marcos Ferreira do Santos, Matheus Moraes, and Alex Silva (Kix n.p; Corredor n.p). The list goes on, and some even claim to have been preaching since they were two. A YouTube video of one of these toddlers shows an obvious example of mimicry by a babbling rug rat, yet the suckling’s discharges are met with fanatical applause by a drooling congregation. I hereby nominate the date this video was uploaded as the day in which the Internet officially hit rock bottom.

When Andrés Castillo was seventeen years old, God came to him in his dreams and told him that he would father a powerful child who would travel the world preaching the

Gospel. His wife Marisela had similar revelations: “Her child was going to be an instrument in her hands. Nezareth Casti Rey grew up listening to these stories about his grandeur, and was created6 in their own image.” (Trans. from Titinger n. pag.).

“Peace and grace, good night brothers, in the name of Jesus.” These were the first prophetic words Marisela and thirty-five churchgoers heard the wunderkind utter after he had stood from his bench. “Even his voice was different. Everyone was crying, mute and crying. When suddenly it was over, he prayed, said goodbye, and gave the microphone back to me. He did everything I did” (ibid).

I don’t want to seem redundant by reiterating the point on mimicry, but I had to include the quotation because it might indicate a degree of self-delusion at work that would, in its own miserable way, mitigate Maricela’s complicity in the affair. Consider

Orson Welles’ peerless insight into clairvoyance:

6 Titinger’s clever punning gets lost in translation: The Spanish word for “created” (creado) is very similar to the word for “raised” (criado). Well, if it exists, I sure as hell have it; if it doesn’t exist, I have the thing that’s

mistaken for it [...] Please understand that I hate fortunetelling. It’s meddlesome,

dangerous and a mockery of free will–the most important doctrine man has

invented [...] As a part-time magician, I’d met a lot of semi-magician racketeers

and learned the tricks of the professional seers. [...] So I was well on the way to

contracting the fortune-teller’s occupational disease, which is to start believing in

yourself; to become what they call a ‘shut-eye.’ And that’s dangerous (“I Was a

Fortuneteller Once...” n. pag).

Marjoe Gortner’s parents seem to have known exactly what they were doing.7

Maricela’s words on the other hand seem to lack the calculation and polished cynicism that plagues other parents of child preachers... they sound sincere. The terrifying possibility here is that she, along with possibly the rest of her family, is being fooled along with the flock.

Nezareth is in his teens now. El País did not publish any information about his whereabouts because someone has already tried to kidnap him. When confronted about his wealth, he explains the added costs of being a preacher: “For every sermon I do in public I get a new suit. [...] We live in a materialistic and pessimistic world” (ibid). It must be hard, bearing that cross.

His Youtube hit has more dislikes than likes, probably because his performance tends to make believers and nonbelievers set their differences aside to experience a shared revulsion. He has been spoofed and bullied online, and in school he is shunned

7 When Marjoe asked his narcissistic mother if she ever loved him, old Marge is reported as having icily replied: “I sacrificed my life for you” (Gaines 136). Further, they had constructed elaborate lies to tell the devout both on and off-stage in order to protect Marjoe’s angelic status and avoid getting caught. They had caravans of worshippers who followed and helped the family on the road for years without ever getting paid for their troubles. They were never allowed to park near the Gortner’s mobile home, where Marjoe’s allegedly extemporaneous sermons were painstakingly memorized. as a freak. Columnist Daniel Titinger followed the youth an entire day to research his article, so they went to his school where the whiz kid mingled with other boys following his father’s instructions, “so that he may play with those who do not have his belief” (ibid). Nezareth, who considers himself a normal boy, was asked if he had any aspirations outside religion. He said he has toyed with the idea of playing soccer;

Titinger bitingly reports that the Lord has not helped his aim on this front. Yet Casti Rey is still not unlike an athlete. He studies videos of other preachers the same way boxers study their opponents, striving to learn their moves and be one step ahead of them. He wants to be the best. The irony is that as he ages, no amount of knowledge or improvement will save him; the careers of child preachers are necessarily short-lived.

In the preface to his book, Eric Patterson describes what happened when he and his co-author sent an electronic questionnaire to over 500 reverent thinkers urging them to forecast the future of Pentecostalism in the United States: “The response was silence.

Deafening silence” (Patterson xiii). I find this reluctance to prognosticate by the very people who usually jump on any opportunity to divine the unknowable somewhat uplifting. Deep within the heart of one of the most pernicious intoxicants of the body politic, rather than silence, there is a whisper of doubt. This gives me a bit of hope that someday we will look back and split our sides reminiscing about the days in which we squandered our wits in exchange for the promise of eternal life. Will this happen within my lifetime? To answer in the positive feels unforgivably naïve. Works Consulted

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. Images:

Fig. 1:

Fig. 2: Marjoe Gortner

Ezekiel Stoddard Nezareth Casti Rey The first thing you’ll see if you google Ted Haggard