As I covered in my recent Talk To Action story, Marjoe, The World's Littlest Child Evangelist! , in the late 1940's little four-year old Marjoe Gortner became a media spectacle, as the world's youngest evangelist who had been told by God to bring the good word to the peoples of the world. Or so the story went.

The reality, according to Gortner, was somewhat different; he recalls long training sessions in which his parents forced him to memorize what to say and, when his attention strayed, as Gortner told a film crew which in the early 1970's produced a video documentary of his life as a traveling preacher, his mother would "smother him a little" with a pillow or hold him under a water faucet. He was in front of the press a lot those days, observed Gortner, and such methods did not leave marks or bruises.

What's more astonishing even than the Colton Burpo story is the New York Times treatment of the book, which positively defenestrates skepticism, chucks it out the window, by giving such wide-eyed credence to the tale, especially given that 1) the story has come out seven years after the alleged incident, and 2) Colton Burpo's father is an evangelical pastor who co-authored the book with Lynn Vincent, who in turn 'collaborated' according to the Times (one could use other words here) with Sarah Palin on her book Going Rogue.

In other words, "Heaven is For Real" has many of the distinct hallmarks of an engineered media spectacle, finely tailored to the needs of evangelical readers who, in these trying times, deeply want to believe.

So, is heaven real? Well who knows. But what we do know for sure is that whole swaths of this NYT book review are based on what Colton Burpo's parents claim he told them, on his alleged trip to the fluffy place in the sky. It's like a faith-based game of "telephone" with the purported source experience floating far out in an ethereal realm that might as be called creative fiction. But not to worry. As the Times' Julie Bosman writes,

"At first, he and his wife, Sonja, were not sure if they could believe their son's story, which came out slowly, months and years after his sudden illness and operation in 2003. The details persuaded them, Mr. Burpo said. Colton told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos questioned him, he asked his mother, "You had a baby die in your tummy, didn't you?" While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said, they had not told Colton about it. "There's just no way he could have known," Mr. Burpo said. "

And by the same token, there's no way we, potential readers, can possibly know whether the book is a hoax or not, but that doesn't stop Bosman from cluing us in that the book is on sale for a hefty discount at Amazon.com.

With any luck (for the Burpo family, at any rate), such boosterism will loft the book up the NYT besteller list. Maybe it will be the next Purpose Driven Life. But consider the saga of Marjoe: