Marvin Gay Sr. was not just a member of this church. For a significant portion of his adult life, he was a bishop, a leader, a man around whom congregants gathered to receive healing and guidance and the word of God. He had moved from rural Kentucky to Washington, D.C., specifically to pursue this ministry. His identity was organized around his status within this institution.
And then the institution passed him over.
Gay Sr. had wanted, by the accounts of those who knew him during this period, to be named Chief Apostle of the House of God—the top leadership position in the denomination. He was not appointed. The position went to someone else.
By some accounts, this was the pivotal crisis of Gay Sr.’s interior life—more damaging, in its way, than anything that came before or after. He had organized his self-understanding around his religious authority. The removal of that authority—or rather, the failure to advance to the authority he believed himself entitled to—left a void that he never filled with anything constructive.
He left the House of God in the mid-1950s. His son Marvin, then a teenager, later said this was when his father “lost his healing powers.” What the younger Gaye meant by this is open to interpretation, but the metaphor is telling: his father had been defined by a kind of spiritual power, and its loss had diminished him in ways that affected everyone around him.
What replaced the church’s structure in Gay Sr.’s life was, according to those who knew the family, drinking and anger. Alberta said the heavy drinking began in the 1950s. The beatings of the children continued through this period. The employment instability—the post office job, the Western Union work, the inability to hold any position for more than three years—continued.