Kathie Lee Gifford Has Always ‘Had a Boldness’ About Her Faith

Published: June 24, 2026

By Movieguide® Staff

Kathie Lee Gifford has spent more than five decades in the entertainment industry, and she has never once left her faith at the door.

“I’ve always had a boldness about my faith,” Gifford said while appearing on ERIC METAXAS ON TBN. “I’ve always had an awareness, even as a 12-year-old girl when I first asked Jesus to be in my heart, that ‘to whom much is given, much is required.’”

That awareness traces back to a movie theater in Annapolis, Maryland. Gifford was 12 years old when she went to see THE RESTLESS ONES, a movie produced by the Billy Graham Association. Sitting in the dark, watching a young woman choose between a bad-boy boyfriend and a walk with the Lord, she heard something she’s never forgotten.

“I heard the voice of Jesus sitting there say to me, ‘Kathie, I love you, and if you’ll trust me, I’ll make something beautiful out of your life,’” she shared.

She took Him up on it. From the moment she entered the industry full time at 17, Gifford said the Lord made one thing clear. “Never separate the secular from the spiritual. You live in my world, you live in my world,” she recalled on Sadie Robertson Huff’s “WHOA That’s Good” podcast. “People will try to say Hollywood is secular. But God is everywhere.”

Movieguide® honored that conviction when it presented Gifford with the Visionary Award at the 28th Annual Movieguide® Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry in 2020. In a reunion that surprised even Gifford, her longtime LIVE! WITH REGIS AND KATHIE LEE co-host Regis Philbin stepped out to present the award. She had known she was the recipient. She had no idea he was coming.

In her acceptance speech, Gifford did not hedge. “In Him I live, move, and have my being every nanosecond of my life,” she said. “I don’t split it up. That’s not the way God wants us to live our lives. I’ll never believe it, ever. There’s no joy in that. My joy is not negotiable.”

That joy has fueled a remarkable body of work beyond television. Gifford co-authored two New York Times bestsellers with Messianic Rabbi Jason Sobel: The Rock, the Road, and the Rabbi, which takes readers into the Hebrew and Greek roots of Scripture through the land of Israel, and The God of the Way: A Journey into the Stories, People, and Faith That Changed the World Forever. A companion Bible study, The God of the How and When, followed. Her most recent book, co-written with Dr. Bryan Litfin, is Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior.

Each project reflects a woman who wants the marrow, not the surface. Gifford has said she craves Scripture that “grows us down to the marrow,” and her collaborations with Rabbi Sobel — studying biblical texts in their original Hebrew and Greek, hiking the ancient paths of Israel — put that hunger on full display.

She brought that same hunger to her movie THEN CAME YOU, in which she stars as a widow — a role that mirrored her own life after the 2015 death of her husband, Frank. She “felt the Lord’s calling” to write a movie for people who don’t yet know that God loves them, she told The Christian Post. Her larger concern was pointed. “I think the Church has failed nonbelievers in many, many ways through the years and one of the biggest ones is that we haven’t loved them into the Kingdom,” she said. “We have created an atmosphere of self-righteousness at times and an attitude of condemnation towards them. I don’t think that’s what Jesus ever planned.”

As for slowing down — don’t expect it. Gifford has a ready answer for anyone who floats the word “retirement.” “Nobody in the Bible ever retired,” she explained to The Christian Post. “Moses didn’t say, ‘I think I’ll play golf now.’ Mary Magdalene didn’t take up bridge. When you are on fire for the Kingdom of God, that will stay with you until the moment the Lord takes the breath from your body and takes you into His arms. And that’s the way I want to spend the rest of my life: refired, not retired.”

Movieguide® has covered Gifford’s work for years, recognizing in her something rarer than talent: a woman who genuinely cannot separate what she does from who she belongs to. The Visionary Award put a name to what audiences have always sensed. Faith is not one lane among many for Kathie Lee Gifford. It’s the whole road.

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