Today I'd like to talk about a documentary I always enjoy watching, called "Marjoe". In the current world of mega-churches and faith healers, it's nice to have an inside look at the latter - of faith healing. This is an award-winning documentary made in 1972 that shows some of the stunts and tricks that faith healers perform. Even though this movie (documentary) is 40 years old, modern-day faith healers still practice these same tricks, and I'm sure future ones will too.
In short, this documentary is about the early life of Marjoe Gortner (Marjoe is short for Mary and Joseph), raised by his parents and at a very early age was taught by them on how to deceive believers, and make huge amounts of money doing so. He went from town to town doing tent revivals, preaching, healing, then collecting the people's money. Several years later Marjoe felt bad about what he was doing and quit. And then later in life he did one last revival tour, this time bringing a documentary crew with him. During this last tour we get behind-the-scene looks at how faith healers perform their tricks.
There's not enough good things to be said about this documentary. I'm sure that there are other documentaries that exposes faith healers, but this one is the original. This is the one that first shed light on this subject, and started bringing people out of the darkness.
One of the things I loved about this movie is a look at how powerful psychology plays a factor in people's minds. The psychological impact of a skilled preacher, combined with stirring worship music, surrounded by a crowd of other believers, the preaching and/or music gradually increasing in volume and tempo, is very overpowering to a lot of people. This is the state when people are most vulnerable and susceptible to power of suggestion and other forms of trickery. This is also the state where people will believe anything, even with any form of trickery being absent.
In fact, I remember one clip where Marjoe was touching people, who were all lined-up, on the forehead and then they would fall down. Now this one lady was next in line, and wanted so badly to fall down that she was literally shaking, her whole body was just shaking, waiting for Marjoe to touch her head. Once he finally did, that gave her all the excuse she needed to flop to the ground and start shaking. (Now I'm just shaking my head remembering that little clip.) The picture to the left is not that lady I just described, but just another lady.
In addition to exposing faith healers, Marjoe also briefly explains another phenomenon, speaking in tongues, and how that is done. I just can't stress enough the importance of seeing this documentary, regardless if you're a believer or not. Just watch it!
Here's a link for a little more info - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe
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