Who was the controversial boy preacher from the 1990s?

April 26, 2011 7:51 PM

For a brief period in the early 1990s there was a young boy, perhaps 10 or so, who seemed to be featured in a different story on CNN Headline News every other day. Each had the same underlying theme: Boy Preacher Causes Controversy. Eventually, there was a climax: Outside his school he told his principal, "You go to Hell.;" However, Boy Preacher was steadfast in his suspension of reality, "I said, 'You will go to Hell.' I never said, 'You go to Hell.'" Then he entered in into a religious refractory period, and there has been no excitement for about 20 years. What was his name? What is he doing today? What was the big deal, anyway?

(Via a not-so-tech savvy colleague in Dallas.)

posted by scottso17 to Religion & Philosophy (3 answers total)

Best answer: His name was Duffey Strode.

A poster on the Straight Dope forums said last month that the family is mostly broken apart right now and only the father seems to be a bible thumper. The daughter Pepper and youngest son Matthew seem to have been involved in boxing for a time, but have since left that. According to this poster, they still live in North Carolina and are mostly off the radar.
posted by inturnaround at 8:10 PM on April 26, 2011

There is a person with that name (as his middle and last name, with a different first name) on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Flickr -- all four accounts seem to be the same person (they have the same person contacted in common). If it's the same guy, he is married with two grade-school-age kids now and lists interests like football, UFC, hiking, mainstream movies and rock bands.

I'm not linking, because there's no way to know if it's the same guy.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:23 PM on April 26, 2011

I'm not linking, because there's no way to know if it's the same guy.

I'm pretty sure it's the same guy. He lives in the same town of under 8,000 people that Duffey Strode lived in, and he's married to a woman with the same name as Duffey Strode's wife, as reported by this 1998 story. The story says that they married in November, 1997, and the guy's Facebook page says that his anniversary is November 29, 1997. So yeah, same guy.

And he follows Louis CK, Kim Kardashian, and Penn Jillette on Twitter, posts non-ranty status updates on Facebook, and other than maybe not paying enough attention to privacy settings on social networking sites, he generally seems pretty normal.
posted by craichead at 11:00 PM on April 26, 2011 [1 favorite]